Finding Your Audience

Did you know that you can target your audience a bazillion different ways? I’m no statistician so maybe my math is a little off, but it feels like the combinations are endless. I touch on the variety a little bit in a past blog about the difference between hitting boost and setting up advertising from scratch. But there are so many layers to this complex topic that I want to take a deeper dive.

Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising have a ton of great options for reaching people in and out of your network. Let’s break it down.

Known Audiences

This is a no-brainer for advertising (hello, no one is seeing your organic content anyhow, remember?) Yet few people know about it, and it’s a very powerful way to amplify your voice. You have a ton of options to explore here. Here are the main audiences I’ve helped my clients advertise to:

• People who have been to your website at all in the past week, the past month, the past 60, 90, 180, up to 365 days

• People who have visited your website but didn’t purchase something or went to page A but didn’t make it to page B

• People who have engaged with your app

• Past customers

• Engagers of your Facebook and Instagram accounts

• Facebook page fans

• People who have viewed a video you’ve put on your page previously

• People who have engaged with your online shop

• People who have filled out a lead form you’ve advertised previously

• People who have said they’re going to, or are interested in, your Facebook event

Unknown Audiences

This is generally who you think of when you’re just trying to get your name out there. They’re people who don’t know about you yet but are sure to love you, right? Of course. This is usually a start-from-scratch audience, but with 270 MILLION people on Facebook, what are the different ways you can get in front of the people you need to? Here are a few options:

• Location: you can target zip codes, a radius around a dropped pin or city, whole counties, DMAs, an entire state, the whole dang country if you want

• Age: you can advertise to those as young as 13 and the top end of the scale being 65+

• Gender: As of now, your options are all, men and women; I imagine that will open up to be more inclusionary

• Demographics: education level, financial status, marital status, workplace or job title, parental status (even broken down by age ranges!), newly engaged, just moved, and more

• Interests: literally anything you can think of. I’m serious.

• Behaviors: digital activities (like do they run their own Facebook page?), small business owners, expats, the types of politics they engage with, their purchase behavior, the type of device they use, and way, way more.

• Another option: uploading a list of potential customers

• Lookalikes (see below)

The Power of Lookalikes

One of the very best ways to find a new audience is to start with one you already have. Behold the power of Lookalikes. I could honestly write an entire blog about this, but I’ll keep it brief here. Lookalikes take your existing audience (web audience, page fans, current customers, just look 👆at that list of known audiences) and then finds Facebook/Instagram users who look like your known audiences. This means they’re matching everything from demographic information to their likes, to their purchasing behavior. The audience segments go anywhere from 1-10% of the entire Facebook Rolodex. This means the smallest audience size is 2.7 million people. Whew, better have a big budget to target them, right? Not necessarily.

After your lookalike audience is built, you can add layering in. A common thing I do is target specific locations after the lookalikes are built. While the location is one of the considerations for finding the lookalike audience, they don’t get as niche as I like. I don’t layer on things like interests or behaviors (that’s what Facebook is already doing by gathering this group of people).

The Caveat

If you’re in the business of anything that has to do with credit, housing or employment opportunities, your targeting options are much broader. For example, you can only target a minimum of a 15-mile radius of your location, and you can’t narrow demographic information like age or gender.

Likewise, there are categories (like plastic surgery, pharmaceuticals and alcohol) that are limited to a specific age range, understandably.

I’m booking training sessions right now if you want a personal tour through your options and tips on how to make the most of YOUR advertising.