Know your target audience

When it comes to Facebook Ads, you must know who your audience and demographic are. This data includes the age of a customer, their generalised location, and also their interests and behaviours within the Facebook application.

Finding the right age range is a great way to start your target audience. This will narrow down the audience population that will be spending your budget on a ‘look-a-like’ age range of your chosen customer demographic.

Having the generalised location of your demographic is also very useful when it comes to Ads. For example, imagine if your local butcher is running Facebook ads to the whole of the UK; not everyone in the UK is going to be able to come to your local butcher, so this is where it is sensible to implement location targeting. If your local butcher is based in Bolton, for example, it would spend its Facebook budget more efficiently if the targeting location was set to Bolton and possibly the surrounding smaller areas. This will result in you lowering your customer acquisition cost as you are targeting more people who are closer to your business.

Arguably, the most important part of knowing your target audience is to know what their interests are. If you know what your target audience is interested in, then you know precisely who you need to target. Let’s say the butcher in Bolton sells Kangaroo sausages and this is their best-selling product/item; you would target people on Facebook who are interested in kangaroo sausages, kangaroo meat, etc. This is again going to narrow down your target audience but will give you the best results, being more precise. Similarly, different interests can be used for targeting (butchers, hog roasts, fresh meats) but bear in mind, you may have to change your Ad copy and creatives when doing so, to maintain the ‘Cost Per Acquisition - CPA’ ( i.e. how much of your budget you have to spend to secure a customer).

Once you have established a target audience to receive your ads, this will give you a good foundation upon which to expand in the future.

Testing Audiences

To build on the foundations of ‘Knowing your Target Audience’, we are going to go through testing new audiences to find new working interests that will achieve your Target CPA. Using the butcher example, let’s say your CPA for ‘Kangaroo sausages targeting’ is £7. As we know that this is the butcher ‘s best-selling product/item, we need to make sure that the target is achievable. If we set a target of £8.50 CPA, this will mean that if any of the new audiences/ interests that we test fall within or below that target, we can move to a larger campaign with bigger budgets to scale it. This is called the ‘Graduation Stage’.

What audiences do I test?

It is always sensible to test audiences related to your target audience. So, using the butcher example, we could test audiences that are interested in butchers, fresh meats, hog roasts, local small and/or family businesses, etc.

You should be testing new audiences every week to find your top-performing Ad sets. Testing 8-12 new audiences a week will be enough to start off with. You can then increase the size of your scaling campaign, bearing in mind that you won’t necessarily be graduating all 8-12 audiences. Typically, you will only be picking those audiences that fall within or below your target CPA and which have amalgamated over 5000 impressions.

Now you have the resources to start off your business’ targeting on Facebook!

For any other information please contact- jonesnewmanjacob@gmail.com

Jacob Jones, Cohort 30, Junior Content Producer apprentice at Monthly Tee Club