Using Facebook Tools to Effectively Target Relevant Audiences

With 2.41 billion active monthly users, Facebook is an ideal place to natively showcase products and services to a wide range of potential consumers. Facebook’s large, easy-to-segment user-base offers pinpoint targeting to specific audiences, allowing brands to be highly relevant at scale with their paid social media.

In order to reach those audiences within the upper funnel stages of their consumer journey, Facebook offers two powerful tools – “Interest-Based Targeting” and “Lookalike Audiences” – to attract new users to your site.

Here is an overview of the two audience-targeting initiatives.

Interest-Based Targeting

This targeting helps businesses reach audiences that have purchased from a competitive brand or exhibited behavior relevant to the advertiser. Thanks to partnerships with brands like Epsilon, Acxiom and Datalogix, Facebook equips brands with the ability to mine recent purchasing behavior.

In addition, interest-based targeting allows brands to target users from an extensive list of demographics and behaviors. Facebook determines interests based on user activity including criteria such as:

• Pages or ads “liked”
• Device usage
• Hobbies or activities

If your audience falls in several categories, Facebook provides the ability to layer targeting options. This helps advertisers combine a variety of behaviors and demographics to make the audience as specific as you’d like.

The better you understand your audience, the better your advertising response rate will be as specific messaging and brand experiences can be built to support each highly-targeted segment.

Lookalike Audiences

These audience segments build audience pools from custom audiences an advertiser defines or from owned email lists.

With a good, structured seed list, preferably one comprised of current customer data, you can target potential prospects that “look like” or take the same actions as your converters. Going even further, advertisers can specifically segment and target high-value customers, which helps Facebook target prospects with a higher upside for lifetime value.

Determining the right seed list all depends on your business objectives. For example, if you want users to sign up for a free trial, you may want to targets users that have kept the product beyond the trial period as opposed to those who have cancelled immediately after the trial.

Once you have your seed list, you will choose a lookalike audience size between one to 10 percent of your population. The smaller your lookalike is, the more specific your match becomes.

Targeting on Facebook may seem overwhelming at first, but having deep understanding of your ideal buyer will fuel optimization techniques that drive real business results at a relatively low cost. Have a Facebook audience targeting strategy that works for you? Tell us about it in the comments below.