Facebook ads are a key part of your marketing strategy. They’re affordable and quite effective, but there is one question that many marketers share; how do you get your ad seen by the right people???
Finding an audience isn’t a problem- more than a billion users log on to Facebook every day- but finding the right audience can be tricky. That’s why it’s so important to understand the intricacies of creating a targeted ad campaign on Facebook.
Organic reach on Facebook is essentially dead, so if you want to get your brand in front of the right eyes, you’re going to need solid targeted marketing skills.
Your campaign goals determine the techniques you want to use, so it’s always smart to start with your desired result. Do you want to expand your brand awareness and introduce your business to new audiences, or are you focused on increasing loyalty and building a bigger base of repeat customers?
Let’s break it down:
Increasing your reach
When your goal is expanding your brand’s reach, your target is what’s commonly called a “cold” audience. You’re introducing yourself to people who don’t know anything about you or your brand, so you have to choose your audience carefully.
You want to reach people who are likely to convert, and Facebook is ready to help!
Facebook offers countless options for building your ideal audience. You can choose audiences based on general factors like age, gender, and location, but you can also get WAY more specific by segmenting based on factors like behavior, job or industry, income level, education level, political leanings and more. You can even factor in life events or milestones like engagements, weddings, or new babies. The combinations are truly endless. In fact, with all those things to choose from, you have to be wary of creating audiences that are TOO targeted, and therefor too small.
When you’re reaching out to a cold audience, there are several things you can do to increase your ad’s success.
- Focus on clarity and descriptiveness when writing your ad. This is your introduction to your brand, and you want to showcase everything that makes it great.
- Highlight the benefits more than the features. Features are great, but remember, customers buy solutions.
- Save the hard sell. Your goal is to introduce your product and get people interested in it. Selling comes later.
Increasing brand loyalty
You’ve probably heard it before – it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than get a new one. That’s why loyalty campaigns are so important to your success. You want a strong base of loyal, happy customers, so you have to continually nurture relationships and keep engagement high.
When you’re targeting existing customers, that’s known as a “warm” audience. They already know and love your brand, and your goal is to get them to make repeat purchases. This type of marketing is easier, but you still have to make sure you’re putting the right ad in front of the right people.
If your product or service is aimed at people between the ages of 25 and 75, you’re not going to market it to the 25-year-old the same way you’d market to a 75-year-old. When you blast the same ad to every segment of your audience and hope for the best, that’s called the “spray and pray” approach, and it rarely works.
Instead, you need to focus on creating ads specifically for the different segments of your audience. They’ll look different, and have different messaging, but they’ll share a single goal- give existing customers a good reason to buy again. You do this by including:
- Sales or discount codes
- New product launches
- Testimonials or other user generated content (UGC)
- Limited editions or last chance offers
When you know how to select and target your audience based on your goals, your Facebook ads become far more effective. If you’d like to learn more about targeted advertising on social media, Resonetrics is here to help! Click HERE to share your questions.
