The Most Powerful Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies

With a daily average of 890 million users, and a new user profile being created every second, Facebook is a perpetual ocean of potential customers. Many Facebook users divulge just about everything about themselves, from likes and dislikes to major life events such as marriage and childbirth. Fortunately for marketers, Facebook makes it easy for page administrators to find and target specific audiences. Facebook’s understanding of a customer on such a granular level offers marketers the opportunity to target these users’ interests directly. Success and failure will be determined by how well you are able to segment your target audience and how well they respond to your message. Here are a few of the most powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies available for marketers.

Life Events Targeting Life events targeting is a great way to reach Facebook users at key transition points in their lives. For example, wedding venues want to connect with people who have recently become engaged. Similarly, home security companies want to reach new home buyers. If done tastefully, focusing your ads on life events is a great tactic for connecting your business or service with a pivotal moment in your customer’s life.

Purchasing Behavior Understanding the link between Facebook ads and consumer behavior can help marketers determine the value of promotions and create effective campaigns. Behavioral data is constructed from both an individual user’s Facebook activity as well as offline activity, which can be provided by companies such as Datalogix, an offline purchasing data service.  This partnership gives advertisers the ability to expand their reach beyond their current CRM databases and tap into shopping habits and other valuable data points.  For example, if your company sold a canned coffee beverage, you can utilize the “Food and Drink” behavior targeting within Facebook.  Within this sub-category, you can segment your ad targeting further by only selecting people who have made “Beverage” purchases. This type of highly targeted marketing can increase the overall effectiveness and relevance of your campaign.

Customized Audience Segments Identifying the appropriate audience segments that are applicable to your product or service, will enable your ads to appear in front of a specific audience base.  Facebook Custom Audiences give you 3 big advantages in social media advertising:

• Custom Audience: This Facebook advertising feature allows you to upload a customer list or leads into Facebook to target any users who have user profiles created with the same email address. The custom audience feature is a great opportunity for companies to target existing customers with special offers or reengage inactive customers with a second chance offer.
• Remarketing: Remarketing displays your ads to users who have previously visited your website or clicked on your ad.  This feature also runs “cross-platform”, for example if a user clicks on an ad on their desktop computer, your remarketing ad can also show up on their mobile device.
• Lookalike Audiences: This option allows you to combine all of Facebook’s data to target your ideal customer. Once you have created a “Custom Audience”, you can add additional targeting to create a “Lookalike Audience” using Facebook’s algorithm.  In essence, Facebook will search its audience for qualities or traits that are similar to your “Custom Audience” and then expand the overall audience to a much larger segment that has similar characteristics as your initial audience.

Facebook may be a vast sea of users, but that doesn’t mean marketers need to search the waters blindly. According to a poll by Nielsen OCR in August 2013, compared to the average online reach of 38% for narrowly targeted display campaigns, Facebook is 89% accurate in reaching highly engaged people. Using these powerful tools for targeting audiences, makes it possible to get your ads in front of the right people. When the targeted user sees a relevant ad at the right time, advertising  becomes very effective. You don’t need to pick one of these strategies above; test them all and see what works best for your business, then optimize based on results.

If you’re looking to improve your overall marketing strategy, Facebook Ad Targeting may be something to consider. For more information on Ad Targeting and marketing strategy, contact Kona Company today.