As a small business owner, your overall Facebook ad strategy will fall into three key campaign objectives.
Traffic
Lead
Sales
Once you've chosen your Facebook ad strategy the next step is to develop your Facebook ad targeting.
If you are still creating your Facebook ad strategy feel free to read up on how to evaluate any Facebook ad strategy that comes your way.
Developing your Facebook ad targeting strategy is an essential factor in your Facebook ad campaign's success.
Without the proper target audience, your Facebook ad strategy could fall flat as you target the wrong audience for your Facebook ad strategy.
3 Benefits Of Using Facebook Ad Targeting
Here are three reasons you should be using Facebook advertising to grow your business.
Facebook provides free tools for managing your Facebook ads the most important of these is the business manager, for administrating your Facebook ad assets.
Outside of maybe Google Adwords, Facebook provides some of the most in-depth platform data and analytics on ads run from their platform.
Because of its size, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more, there have been many 3rd party tools ranging from eCom platforms, tracking tools, ad creative tools, and more, that have been built. These allow you to track and scale your ad spend more effectively.
Track Your Facebook Ads With The Meta Pixel
The final benefit to using Facebook ads is the Meta pixel.
The meta pixel is a small snippet of code that you add to your site to track website visitors' actions.
The meta pixel is important for tracking your ad performance and creating your custom audiences.
6 Facebook Ad Targeting Options To Grow Your Business
Below are six Facebook ad targeting strategies to help you create the perfect Facebook audience for your next Facebook ad campaign.
Detailed Targeting
Personalization
Custom Audiences
Lookalike Audiences
Retargeting Audiences
Remarketing Audiences
When creating your Facebook target audience using one of the ad targeting strategies mentioned above, you will have the ability to narrow your Facebook audiences by adding age, gender, and location-based targeting.
These targeting options can add another layer of specificity when selecting your Facebook ad targeting strategy.
Facebook Ad Targeting: Detailed Targeting
Detailed targeting allows you to target your ads to very specific groups of people based on interests, demographics, and behaviors.
This option is perfect for small businesses that know their target audience well and want to laser focus their ad campaigns.
When using detailed targeting it is important to keep two things in mind:
First, you may have a specific audience that you wish to target, but your ad copy and offer still need to appeal to a larger group of people.
Next, feel free to layer in as many detailed targeting options as needed.
Just be sure that the option you use is related to each other so that if your Facebook ad is successful or unsuccessful you can properly evaluate your ad targeting.
For example, I paired frequent travelers with frequent international travelers to expand my audience.
The more options you select the larger your potential target audience becomes. Broad targeting like this can be good as it expands your target audience, too narrow an audience can increase costs and tank your Facebook ad campaigns.
Facebook Ad Targeting: Personalization
Personalization is perfect for small businesses that have a lot of data on their target audiences or that have a specific target audience that they are targeting.
Personalization for Facebook ads refers to the ability to target Facebook users based on specific events.
One way to personalize your Facebook ads is through life events.
life events let you target people based on birthdays, the month of birth, anniversary, and more.
For example with life events, you can target users... men... reminding them of their anniversary and offering them gift ideas.
Another method for personalizing your Facebook ads is to target people based on their relationship status.
To do this go to your detailed targeting. Select browse, and open relationships within demographics.
One way this type of targeting could be used is to target people who are in a relationship and are looking for engagement rings.
You could narrow this down to just men in a certain age range, and if you are a small business owner with a single location, choose your city.
If you decide to do this be sure to keep an eye on your audience definition, shown above so that your audience is not too narrow.
In addition to the above two methods, there are many other ways to personalize your Facebook ads with personalization including Education, Financial, Parents, and Work.
Facebook Ad Targeting: Custom Audiences
Facebook custom audiences allow you to target your ads to people who have already interacted with your business.
These could be website visitors, subscribers to your newsletter, or existing customers.
There are two different Facebook custom audiences.
The first custom audience is based on your sources. These can be your customer list, your Meta pixel that we discussed earlier, and more.
The second custom audience comes from Meta Sources. These are custom audiences based on sources that Meta owns like your Facebook page and Instagram account.
The downside to custom audiences is that they can be very difficult to create if you don't have a lot of data on your target audience.
To learn more about creating custom audiences you can read our blog post on this.
Facebook Ad Targeting: Lookalike Audiences
Facebook lookalike audiences allow you to target your ads to people who share similar characteristics to your current customers.
This is a great option for small businesses that want to reach a wider audience but still want to target people who are likely to be interested in their products or services.
Lookalike audiences must be based on a custom audience. Whether this is your source like a custom list or a custom audience based on sources owned by Meta.
This means that similar to your custom audiences if you have a small audience and limited custom audiences to pull from it will be difficult to create your lookalike audience.
The smallest size your custom audience can be is 100 people. This is the bare minimum. Facebook recommends that you have a custom audience of between 1,000 and 50,000.
I'd recommend anywhere from 2-5k as a good custom audience to create a lookalike audience from. If you are getting close to 50k you may want to create additional custom audiences to narrow down your target.
To learn more about creating lookalike audiences you can read our blog post on this.
Facebook Ad Targeting: Retargeting
Retargeting allows you to target your ads to people who have already interacted with your business but have not purchased yet.
To execute this strategy you will need to have created a custom audience already.
These could be people who have visited your website, subscribed to your newsletter, or added to cart.
When using retargeting, it is important to keep two things in mind:
Your ads need to be time sensitive to the people you are targeting.
Retarget people who added to cart, but did not buy for the next 3-7 days, show the product they did not purchase, offer a discount, or free shipping.
Continuing to show this ad beyond 3-7 days could lead to audience fatigue where the potential customer becomes annoyed that they are seeing your ad repeatedly.
Each business is different so you may have a longer or shorter time frame than 3-7 days. Listen to customer feedback to help you determine how long you should keep these ads on.
Second, your ads need to be relevant to the people you are targeting.
Someone who abandons cart has different purchase intent than someone who visits your site once and bounces.
The abandon cart customer may need a remarketing ad offering a discount, free returns, or free shipping.
The website visitor on the other hand may need to see a carousel of additional products or have your mission explained in more detail with a remarketing video.
To learn more about setting up your retargeting you can read our blog post on this.
Facebook Ad Targeting: Remarketing Audiences
Remarketing audiences are similar to retargeting ads in that you target people who have interacted with your brand before.
The difference is that these are people who have already purchased from you and that we are marketing to again in order to reengage them with the brand.
To run remarketing ads you will need a Facebook custom audience based on your purchasers. This could be a complete list or a segment of your list depending on your objective.
Test Your Facebook AudiencesFacebook offers many targeting options for reaching your potential customers
Facebook offers many targeting options for reaching your potential customers.
As you test your Facebook audiences, be sure to track your results using the Facebook ad manager.
Four factors determine your Facebook ad's success. These are your creative, copy/offer, traffic, and product.
To learn more about how to scale your ad spend and increase your conversion rate read our blog post on this subject.
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