Your business is dealing with Facebook Ads. You are quite disappointed for the poor results of the previous campaign and the ROI is very bad. Does this scenario sound familiar to you? If not, well, it sounds very familiar to many people who approached to Facebook Ads. But in the wrong way.
So, it is time for you to figure out what’s wrong and correct your mistakes.
Assuming that the ad was prepared by a professional team of graphic designers and copywriters and it looks good, the only chance to get better results is setting up a target, which is what we are going to do in this post.
But first, a few words about Facebook: we are talking about a social network, a platform that is supposed to connect people with people neither with brands, nor professionals. For that, there is LinkedIn, which is very effective in doing so. If you read the words of Mark Zuckerberg at the beginning of 2018, you know that a return to origins is happening, so there is going to be less and less space for brands on people’s news feeds.
Facebook is meant to entertain, not to sell things (even though there is a marketplace area).
When you promote your business on Facebook, just remember that they probably have the largest highly profiled people database in the world, so its potential is close to unlimited. But you have to reach the right people. You have to give Facebook the best indications possible to find people who might be interested in your activity. And that is entirely up to you.
How to identify your target? Simple: who benefits from using your product or service?
Yes, that’s it.
Now, let’s see what are the options that Facebook gives us and how to use them.
Location
Where is your target from? What language do they speak? Let’s say you want to find all English speakers: you will choose USA, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and so on. If you want to be more specific you can choose regions, counties and cities, with a radius of your choice.
Age
How old would your typical customer be? The minimum age you can choose is 13, the maximum is 65 and over. You understand it is a very wide range, with very different interests, so if you are promoting a new videogame, maybe it is the case you exclude people who are over 50 (or even over 40).
Gender
Facebook actually gives you only men and women as a choice, but gender is still an important parameter, as it can exclude a high percentage of people who may not like what you propose.
Broad categories
If you want to intercept a particular category of people whose number is very large and it would be too complicated with the traditional options, you can choose broad categories like millennials, baby boomers, people who have been engaged or married for a certain time, parents, expecting parents and even long distance relationships (and many others)!
Connections
You can choose to exclude people who already like the business page, but include their friends, as they usually share common interests.
Interests
Here is an open world: you can choose people for what they like, their studies, jobs, religion, political orientation, apps they use, groups they belong to and websites they visit. Alternatively, you can choose precise interests if you do not care about their age, gender, location, relationship, studies or whatever else.
Lookalike audiences
Once you defined (and refined) your original target, you can extend your chances to lookalike audiences, which are alternative audiences, a bit different from the original one, but still quite similar. In other terms, people who may still have an interest in your promotion.
Conclusion
As you can see, the options for target identification are a lot. If you can define a precise demographic profile for your audience, Facebook will be a very profitable marketing tool.
