Finding a Niche With Facebook Audiences

At the core, the bunch of advertising tools on Facebook is there to help you find new customers. You want quality leads: actual people who will buy your products or services. This is where targeting comes in.

Targeting allows you to choose audiences for your ads. It lets you show your ads to those who are most interested in what you offer. It’s about reaching the right individuals out of the one billion Facebook users worldwide. When you do this, you are also defining your niche.

So, how do you create niche audiences? You will get there with another tutorial.

Introducing Facebook Audiences

There are three primary types of Facebook audiences: Saved, Custom, and Lookalike. Each category offers options that will help you refine your targeting strategy.

Again, you can set them up on Business Manager. Expand the menu and click Assets.

Saved Audiences

Here, you can save common targeting options such as demographics, interests, and behaviours for easy reuse later. You’ll see how this is done as a standalone process. Alternately, you can build this during campaign creation.

Location-based targeting is the first subcategory to work on. It lets you reach audiences from country down to specific address levels. These are the fields included in this range:

• Country

• Counties or regions

• DMAs or Designated Market Areas

• Towns/cities

• Postal codes

• Addresses

You can type the location you want to target. If you wish to select any of the items mentioned above, just click Add locations in bulk, as seen below.

To go one layer deeper, you can target only the people who satisfy the following definitions:

• Everyone in this location – People whose home or most recent location is within the selected area.

• People who live in this location – People whose home is within the selected area.

• People recently in this location – People whose most recent location is within the selected area.

• People traveling in this location – People whose most recent location is within the selected area but whose home is more than 125 mi/200 km away.

Demographics-based targeting is next. Like location, these are the usual pieces of information that users share online. Refer to your audience research to make sure you are reaching out to the demographics that matter most to your business:

• Age

• Gender

• Languages

Further, more choices can be found under Detailed targeting >> Demographics such as Education, Life events, Parents, and Politics.

With Detailed targetIng, you can include people who match at least one of these details. Aside from demographics, you can also set criteria based on interests and behaviours.

For interest-based targeting, you can cover individuals who are interested in the products/services as well as the industry you are serving. They can also be following your competitors or browsing content related to your business.

Behaviour-based targeting requires a more in-depth understanding of who you want to target and what you expect from them. For instance, you want to work with at least two clients on a certain fitness regimen. Your points of interest here are couples who are into fitness and whose anniversary is coming soon.

Through Behaviours, you can get access to the spending data of your target audience such as where they make a purchase (mobile or desktop). Consumer segments can also be found here.

You can find your Saved Audience on the Audiences display panel. The same goes for all the other audience types you will be creating from hereon.

Custom Audience

This audience can be composed of users who are most likely to convert. Meaning, they’ve already shown interest in your business. Your ads will now function as a re-marketing technique.

There are several ways to create a custom audience.

Customer file refers to existing customer data that you have on file. You can add their information manually or import data directly from MailChimp, or your third-party email service provider of choice. These shared details will be matched by Facebook with user profiles so you can tailor your ads to them.

You can only build a custom audience based on website traffic if you have installed Facebook Pixel on your website

Read about Facebook Pixels HERE

Based on your website data, you can create audiences according to the following conditions (AdEspresso, 2018):

• Target everyone who visited your website;

•Target people who visited specific web pages;

• Target people who visited specific web pages but not others;

• Target people who haven’t visited your website for a certain amount of time; and

• Other custom combinations.

The app activity option will let you target people who launched your app or made specific actions such as completing in-app purchases.

Meanwhile, offline activity is a new feature that enables you to target those who have interacted with you by phone, in-store, or through other offline channels.

An engagement-based list relies on the people who engaged with your content either on Facebook or Instagram.

See below which types of content you can choose to build lists from.

Lookalike Audience

Before you can create this list, you need to have a Custom Audience. From there, you can start building a list targeting people who are similar to your selected Custom Audience. This is based on the assumption that these users are highly likely to convert.

Type a country beside Location. Then determine how many percentages of users should be matched within your chosen country.

You can adjust the slider according to the estimated reach. A smaller, more precise reach is better than a general one. Also, Facebook will only accept a source that includes at least 100 people in the same country.

It would be better to have this chapter open while you create your lists. Because many factors are at play in this task, you are not expected to perfect it overnight. But think about these factors until you get a good grasp of the audience types and which ones will serve your objectives well.

You also encountered remarketing ads here. Check out our next article in this series where you will learn what they are and how they work.