Have you ever thrown together a quick ad and got no results because you didn’t target the perfect audience with Facebook Ads?
We’ve been there, and after spending thousands on ads we finally figured out how to target our target audience!
While Facebook is smart and will target the right people if you use an open audience, it will spend more money than necessary unless you correctly target your ads to show in front of the right people.
So, how do you target the perfect audience? Using interest-based targeting. And luckily, Facebook makes it extremely easy to do!
What is interest-based targeting?
Facebook has over a billion users, and it has a tonne of information on every single one of these users. Probably more so than you can imagine!
Now, this information is extremely useful for advertisers. It allows us to make sure our ads are shown to people that care about what we are advertising. There is no use showing an ad for a new nightclub opening to people who like staying at home and reading books!
In short, interest-based targeting is a great way to stop Facebook from showing adverts to people who are unlikely to resonate with them. This, in turn, can save you a huge amount of time and money!
Our interest-based targeting strategy
We follow a simple multi-step approach to ensure our targeting is accurate and profitable. This tactic has proven to be a great way to narrow down a huge user base into a much smaller, more targeted audience that is far more likely to convert and take action.
Once you set up your Facebook ad campaign and are setting up audience settings in the Ad set, you need to go down to audience settings and into the detailed targeting section.
There, we can include people with specific interests, or exclude them. This is where we will be narrowing down our audience, and targeting the right people.
So let’s get into it, and talk through how we choose and narrow it down!
Step 1: Broad interests
Firstly, we want to take the broad initial audience and just narrow it down slightly. The best way to do it is by selecting the broadest possible interests of our target audience.
This allows us to get started and start digging deep into our potential clientele, but not narrowing down too much just yet.
For example, say you are a jewelry shop. A good broad interest to narrow down into is fashion.
Once you select your broad interests, time to narrow further!
Step 2: Middle ground
Here is where things get interesting. We are now going to target people who are interested in more of what you offer.
Coming back to our jewelry shop example, this is where you’d be targeting people who are interested in jewelry in general, or more detailed such as bracelets, necklaces, rings, etc.
Be careful not to go too in-depth here. We don’t want to start targeting too few people just now.
Let’s keep narrowing!
Step 3: Branding
This one might be a strange one for some of you and might think it feels out of place. However, it’s important in our strategy.
Let’s keep going with the jewelry example. If you are targeting people who are interested in jewelry, you might be targeting people who are interested in the general theme but not specific products.
So in this tier, we will target competitive or similar brands. With jewelry, it might be brands such as Pandora or Tiffany.
Not far to go, a couple more steps left!
Step 4: Interests
So now we have a group of people that have a general interest in what we might be offering. At this point, you are welcome to go ahead and try a campaign out to see how it goes!
However, we usually keep going further and narrowing down more. This is simply done to save us money as if we get to push away people we know won’t be interested, it makes it easier for Facebook to find the perfect matched clients for us.
In this step, we will be targeting our audience’s external interests; things that are not directly what we are offering.
With our jewelry shop example, we might be targeting things like their online publication interests such as cosmopolitan, or specific tv shows or movies they might be interested in.
Step 5: Platform of use
Nearly there! And this step is usually super quick, and easy to figure out.
Simply ask yourself; what platform is your target audience using? Are they on Instagram every day, or are they more of a LinkedIn crowd?
For jewelry shops, we’d say our target audience would be using Instagram and Netflix. Depending on the type of jewelry, we might also include TikTok. We think in general, those are the platforms our potential customers are using!
Step 6: Behaviours
And finally, let’s narrow it down based on behaviors. Facebook has such an enormous plethora of consumer behaviors, but the one we usually go for is “engaged shoppers”.
This step is completely optional, but we found an average of 5% better conversion rate when using this step. While not a massive improvement, it’s still something!
Conclusion: target the perfect audience with Facebook Ads
We hope this guide helped to introduce you to our Facebook ads strategy when it comes to targeting the perfect audience. There is so much more that we haven’t covered yet, but keep an eye out for our upcoming Facebook ads articles!
What do you think? Do you use Facebook ads for detailed targeting? Let us know in the comments below!