How to Target the Right Audience for Your Facebook Campaigns

This post will teach you how to target the right audience on Facebook.

It is no news that Facebook is the social media platform with the second-highest population of users in Nigeria – 29 million Nigerians. With the consistent changes in the algorithm of Facebook, which always favour seeing individual posts on feeds rather than seeing posts from brands, companies and media, harnessing organic traffic on Facebook is difficult. One way to take advantage of organic traffic on Facebook is by paid ads. However, if you spend your hard-earned money on Facebook, you need to know what you are doing by targeting the right audience for your products. That is what you will be learning in the next few minutes.

Before diving deeper into this article, it is worthy to note that targeting the right audience enables you to spend less on ads, which will eventually increase your ROI on a campaign.

Target the Right Audience by Creating an Audience Persona

If you do not want to waste time engaging in trial and error, the very first step to targeting the right audience for your ads on Facebook is creating a persona. A persona is a fictional character representing a group of similar people in a target audience that will use your products or services, website, etc. It reflects detailed information like age, location, occupation, interests, pain points, goals, the kind of devices they use, where they can be found and all—taking your time to do this research will help you to save time, costs and create a working audience for your ad.

What is Facebook Audience?

The Facebook audience is a pool of people you target for your Facebook advertisement. Mastering them and the tools available will help you in creating an operational customer base. There are four types of audience:

• Saved audience
• Custom audience
• Lookalike audience
• Special ad audience

Facebook advertisers frequently use only the first three. The essence of creating an audience is to narrow down the population your ads will reach, which will subsequently increase your click-through rate.

How to Create Saved Audiences

A saved audience is a set of audiences created by excluding or including people on Facebook that share the same demographics, interests or behaviours.

On your Facebook ads Manager, click on the Create button. Choose the purpose of your campaign. Then click continue.

The next page will give you options to name your campaign, decide whether you want to test two different ads and optimise your campaign budget. There is nothing much to do here than to name your campaign and click continue.

On this page, you will be able to name your ads set, select the location where your campaign will be running, add basic demography and connections like those who have visited your page before and detailed targeting – where the juice lies.

Detailed targeting helps narrow down the number of your target audience because the broader the population, the higher the chance that your campaign will fail.

To do this, navigate to the Detailed Targeting menu, click on browse and start exploring all demographics, interests and behaviours you can include or exclude in your audience.

For example, to create a campaign for a spelling book, you could build an audience targeting parents with pre-teen children. [Screenshot]

Here, we target parents that have:

• Been actively shopping online
• Paid for a product through Facebook in the past 90 days
• With pre-teen children (9 to 12)
• Teachers
• Who are not using phones older than 25 months?

When using detailed targeting, you have varying options to choose from among the three categories (Demographics, Behaviour and Interest). Because there could be confusion while setting this up, it is crucial to have your persona handy before creating a campaign.

As we said earlier, the essence of setting your detailed targeting parameters is to narrow down the population. Check these pictures

The estimated audience was reduced by about 24,000,000. That is how effective detailed targeting works.

After setting your desired parameters, you can then go ahead and save your audience and proceed to where Facebook will place your ads.

At the placement session, you have two options: Automatic, which is recommended and Manual placement. If you choose Manual placement, you will have the option to show your ads on Instagram, Messenger and Network audience. If you uncheck the three, it means your ads will only be displayed on Facebook. Then you will choose where on Facebook you want your ads to appear. Unchecking Instagram, Messenger and Network audiences will further reduce your estimated audience.

How to Create Custom Audience

A custom audience is a list of people you collated offline, from your website or Facebook page. Unlike saved audiences with some traits in common, they are a set of people who have already interacted with your business, your website, app, or Facebook content. The purpose is to retarget them.

To create this set of audience, you click create new and select custom audience. [screenshot]. 

The next page will be where you will select the source of your list. If you want to retarget the audience from your website or app, you must create a Facebook Pixel (a code). This pixel is what you will embed in your website codes to track visitors interacting with your website for retargeting purposes. 

You might choose an event you hosted in the past to be able to re-target the participants.

Since these people have already attended your event, there is a greater chance that they will buy your new product or take your free promotion. In this example below, we are creating a custom audience of people who signalled interest in our last webinar and those that indicated that they would be attending. From the screenshot, you can see that there are other conditions you can set. It all depends on what you want.

How to create a lookalike audience

A lookalike audience is a set of people that are similar to your existing custom audience. These are people who have not interacted with your business before. But because you already have a loyal customer base, you want to expand your reach. After all, businesses thrive on more sales. The best way to create your lookalike audience is to base it on your already-defined and working custom audience.

Here, you tell Facebook to find people similar to your custom audience. You specify how similar you want them to look like your custom audience, and you target your ads towards them to bring them to you.

Click on create new, select look alike audience and then select the source of the data you will be basing your lookalike on. The source could be pixel data, a current custom audience or Facebook page data. You will also need to select the location and how similar you want the new lookalike audience to be to the source data.

Final note

As crucial as your detailed targeting, your ad’s tone, language, and content is crucial. You will not want to make the mistake of targeting the right audience with the wrong message or content. Using the wrong content for the right audience will result in a failed campaign, just as targeting a broader and wrong audience. Why don’t you contact us at Slvr Wlf for the right content for the right audience?