It was the audience. Instead, your audience targeting is the biggest problem because there’s a Catch 22: Tailored custom audiences offer the best bang for your buck, But you can’t start using those until you reach enough people. Let’s now find out what these people are interested in. What interests your audience? Then you can start listing the specific interests under “Detailed Targeting.” Bing, Google, Twitter, and Amazon should provide you with tons of brand and interest data. Depending on your budget, an audience of this size will allow you to comfortably reach a few thousand people each day. Engagement on Facebook: Recently, Facebook added the option to target people who interact with your Facebook business page or posts. That means you can start driving thousands of visits for $20 on each video. This approach allows you to go after brand new people with the interest targeting. Now you can start targeting this custom audience with your lead-generation campaigns.
I have a trick question for you.
What dictates your Facebook ad cost?
Obviously, there are several factors that affect pricing.
But what’s the most significant one?
One study from AdEspresso can help us figure this out.
They took the same exact ad, ran it to two different groups of people, using the same budget for each.
Here were the results:
- Group One: $0.142 cost per website click.
- Group Two: $0.03 cost per website click
The second ad campaign got 1,103 clicks vs. only 278 for the first. That’s 4X the results!
What was the trick?
It wasn’t the ad. It wasn’t the budget.
It was the audience.
92% of marketers advertise on Facebook. That’s almost every single marketer.
One reason is that the Facebook algorithm hates you. Your organic reach keeps declining.
Facebook ads offer the best alternative.
And yet the ads themselves are the last of your worries.
Instead, your audience targeting is the biggest problem because there’s a Catch 22:
- Tailored custom audiences offer the best bang for your buck,
- But you can’t start using those until you reach enough people.
“But, Neil, how the heck do I get to that point? What if I don’t have custom audiences built already to fill my funnel?”
All you have to do is read the rest of this article.
Dig up your audience demographics
Demographics are the most basic facts about your customers.
Where do they live? How old are they? What do they do for a living?
Figuring these out allows you to segment audiences into living, breathing customer personas.
That way, you can change the messaging on one ad vs. another.
I have good news for you.
There’s a ready-made solution that will give you all of this information. It only takes about five minutes.
Everything you need is already inside Facebook!
Log in and head over to your Business Page Insights. Look for the “People” link in the lower left-hand corner.
You’ll quickly get a breakdown of audience location, gender, and age ranges.
You can also go into your advertising account under the Business Manager to access more audience insights.
The “Lifestyle” section is especially helpful.
Age, location, and gender are only so helpful. You don’t get any actionable insight.
Lifestyle can start to piece together the clues. It will tell you how these people self-identify.
That means you’ll be able to start making educated guesses about their likes and dislikes.
Digging even further, you’ll be able to pull up job title information. This will give you an idea of their education and even household income.
The Page Like preferences section will start to provide information on what interests these people follow.
You need this information. It’s going to come in handy in the next step.
But before moving on, you can also review their Retail Spending and Online Purchases trends.
This information can also be helpful for B2B companies, believe it or not.
Your goal is to understand your customers. Looking at where people spend money tells you about their priorities in life.
Facebook Insights and the ad manager will give you a ton of useful data. But it’s not the only source out there.
Head on over to Google Analytics and take a look at the Demographic Report.
You’ll find it underneath “Audience” and the “Demographics Overview” on the left-hand side of your screen.
Now you should have some basic information to start with.
Then compile everything in a simple document, like so:
Have you made it this far? Perfect. Let’s now find out what these people are interested in.
What interests your audience?
Where do you go for information today?
There’s only one logical answer to that question.
Bing!
That was a joke, but Bing will work fine.
The quickest way to create an interest-based audience in Facebook is to target other page followers.
For example, what brands, influencers, or competitors does your audience like?
Fire up Google and start looking.
If I was doing this for Crazy Egg, I might type in “marketing tools.”
Then Google gives me a list of similar brands that fall under the same umbrella.
Why should you start here?
Starting with these paid tools means that someone is already spending money!
For example, a marketer spending money on MailChimp is more likely to spend money on Crazy Egg.
You might tweak the search depending on these results.
For example, Kissmetrics is a little more expensive. Maybe you’d look for other expensive marketing tools like HubSpot, then.
You should also look for big media properties in your space.
Ideally, try to find ‘lists of lists’ of the best blogs or bloggers.
Type in “women’s fashion bloggers” and take a look at what shows up immediately:
Awesome!
Now you can go back to Facebook and start adding each individual blog.
You can’t stop here just yet.
While ~20,000 might sound like a lot, it’s not. I’ll reveal the ideal audience size in the next section below.
But before we get there, let’s review a few more ways to get this interest-based data.
Head over to Followerwonk. Technically, this tool is like Google Analytics for Twitter.
It can provide deep audience insight behind who follows different Twitter accounts.
“Neil, we’re talking about Facebook here. Why are you bringing up Twitter?!” you ask.
Not everyone will have a large Facebook audience. You can use other social platforms, though, to find similar data to use.
For example, let’s type in a few software tools on Followerwonk.
You can even throw in an influencer for good measure, like Matt Cutts.
He’d be perfect if you’re trying to reach a hardcore SEO audience. You’re essentially qualifying this audience, weeding out all those that don’t fit.
Even people doing social media might not know who Matt Cutts is. Adding him will help rule out any ‘unqualified’ consumers.
Punch those names into Followerwonk and select “Compare users they follow.”
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