Supercharge Your Facebook Ad Targeting With These 5 Strategies
Facebook gives you the ability to target audiences with a dozen different ad formats and thousands of audience targeting and segmenting parameters. By understanding the latest Facebook Ad Targeting has to offer, you can more precisely tune your Facebook advertising efforts, more efficiently reaching an interested and motivated audience. The audience is already there—Americans, on average, spend 40 minutes on Facebook per day—and with these 5 strategies you can place your product or service in front of this captive audience at just the right time.
Target Audiences Based on Recent Purchasing Behavior
Through partnerships with data brokers like Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix—firms who maintain profiles with thousands of data points per person—Facebook often knows more about consumers, their interests, and their buying habits than these individuals might realize about themselves. This insight allows advertisers on the platform to acutely target users whose interests parallel the product or service the advertiser is selling by tapping into information from shopper loyalty programs that are matched to individual user profiles.
Using purchasing information stored in these databases, advertisers using Facebook’s Advertising platform can now reach well beyond the information stored on their own CRM databases to place ads specifically in front of customers who’ve expressed interest in the product or service on offer through a recent, related purchase. The drill-downs the platform offers are incredibly specific, with each sub-category accompanied by a number showing how many related profiles can be reached in each category or sub-category!
Find Customers Through Life Events Targeting
Facebook Ad targeting allows you to deliver ads to consumers based on major life events they are experiencing, or soon to experience, like a move to a new home, the arrival of a firstborn, or an upcoming marriage. Like the Purchasing Behavior Targeting, this helps with the precision placing of your advertising, putting you in a position to drastically increase your conversion rate. Again, the options are exhaustive, with Facebook providing dropdowns for just about every possible life event target. (This information is pulled from individual profiles, where users are likely to share major life events.)
Unique to this targeting feature is the ability to adjust time targets, allowing you to prompt an ad in ranges of 3 months, 6 months, or a year so that you can have your ad in front of your target at precisely the right time. (Like an anniversary, yearly pool cleaning, tax season, etc.)
Build Community and Brand Loyalty with Custom Audiences
Using an existing customer list or CRM database you can create Custom Audiences on Facebook. By uploading your contacts from an email list, phone directory, or another customer database, you can create a custom-built community of existing customers on the app, that you can then deliver value to right on the Facebook platform. This ease of direct interaction allows you to increase lifetime customer value, as well as purchase frequency and overall brand loyalty.
Your customer database can also be used inversely, where you use the database to exclude existing customers from campaigns that do not apply to them like first-time buyer offers or other lead-generating campaigns. Again, building loyalty, communicating with your audience is valuable and not spammy or burdensome.
You can also create custom audiences based on other metrics, like specific actions taken on your site or on your Facebook page. You can save these audiences, and then choose to target or exclude them as you wish, even breaking each audience down into smaller subsets by zip code, annual income, marital status, living arrangements, and countless other factors for more exact targeting.
Expand Your Reach With Lookalike Audiences
Once you have established a target audience or multiple target audiences, you can use Facebook’s Ad platform to expand your reach to audiences that closely mirror the custom ones that you have built. This can be done without the use of even a phone or email list by mirroring your Facebook fan base and their interests, purchasing habits, and so on.
After you’ve identified which of your custom audiences you would like to mirror, you can choose to adjust this new audience in a couple of ways. You can adjust parameters for a smaller and more specific audience, targeting the top 1% of users with similar traits to your original custom audience. Or you can optimize for reach, choosing to go with a larger audience that includes the top 10% of users that correlate with your audience parameters. This is a great way to build upon your established audience with incredible efficiency.
Layered Targeting Allows For Pinpoint Precision
Layered targeting with Facebook ads is exactly what it sounds like: the ability to layer targeting options on top of one another, drilling down to a very specific audience. Like with the features outlined above, the Facebook Ad platform gives you the freedom to use a multitude of combinations in creating this layering, adjusting for behaviors, demographics, location, and a number of other variables. This feature is notably useful in pairing ad creative with smaller, optimally receptive audiences.
As you can see, Facebook Advertising offers incredibly powerful, and customizable, digital advertising solutions, all on a platform that the majority of Americans are already spending a lot of time on. With experts who specialize in Facebook ad targeting, Shoreline is uniquely equipped to help your business take advantage of the opportunities this platform provides. Give us a call today!
Categorised in: The Shoreline Blog
This post was written by Shoreline Content Team
