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In the era of digital advertising, Facebook offers unparalleled opportunities for small businesses to reach their target audience effectively and maximize their ad campaign's impact. Ad targeting on Facebook helps many small businesses achieve better social media and sales results while simultaneously ensuring they stick within their budget.
But where do you start? That's where we come in! Here are our keys tips for small businesses to master ad targeting:
Step 1: Understand Your Target Audience:
The first step is to identify who your target audience is. Do this by:
● Defining your target audience through demographics, interests, behaviours, and psychographics.
● Conduct market research and create buyer personas to gain insights into your ideal customers. For example, you might notice that your product is particularly popular amongst millennials. Dig deeper, what is their general income and lifestyle and how can you reach more of them?
● Identify their pain points, motivations, and preferences to align your ads with their needs effectively. For example: is it that your product is hard to source locally? Does your audience prefer physical or online shopping? Can they afford it regularly?
Step 2: Use Facebooks Ad Targeting Options
Explore Facebook's wide range of targeting options to narrow down your audience.
● Leverage demographic targetings, such as age, gender, location, language, and education, to refine your reach.
● Take advantage of interest-based targeting to reach people who have expressed interests relevant to your business or industry. For example, interest in (x product) or interest in (x industry).
● Utilize behaviour targeting to connect with individuals based on their past purchase behaviours, device usage, or travel habits. For example, if your audience uses mobile devices for most of their shopping you need to tailor your online purchase experience to be as seamless as possible.
Step 3: Try Look-A-Like Audiences
● Look-a-like audiences, which enable you to find new users who share similarities with your existing customer base.
● Facebook analyzes the characteristics of your source audience and identifies similar users who have a high chance of being interested in your business. This is often recommended in the ad targeting section but it may also come up after you have completed your first ad.
● Lookalike audiences expand your reach and acquire new customers it will help you reach people you may not be considering that the application has found for you.
● This is a feature that is only available via Facebook Ad Manager, which is what you must use to gain even more audience insights and features. Boosting via the front end of Facebook will NOT get you the desired results we are discussing in this blog.
Step 4: Test and Set Your Metrics
Now your audience is set up but how will you know if it's successful?
● Like any new project or campaign set your goals and metrics from the onset.
● Then add realistic numbers to these timelines.
● Think of objectives such as: increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales and add numbers to it so that you can measure its performance in your goals.
Step 5: Monitor and Maneuver
● Once your goals are set and your audience is created ensure that you monitor your ad occasionally to gauge how well it's performing and perhaps where it may have fallen short.
● Analyzing your metrics, identifying underperforming ads or targeting strategies, and making necessary adjustments are all part of creating an effective social media strategy for your business.
● Don’t be discouraged and always ensure to test new elements like ad creatives, headlines, CTAs, or targeting options to improve overall campaign performance.
Now that you have all the information, let's explore an example that demonstrates the implementation of these steps.
Consider a flower shop operating during the local wedding season, particularly in June and July. Firstly, they need to create an eye-catching and creative design or video that effectively showcases their products and special offers.
Moving on to the specific steps:
Step 1 & 2:
By conducting research and analyzing their own sales observations, the flower shop is likely to identify its target audience, which includes recently engaged couples and individuals in relationships, however, because the ad is on Facebook they also include those who are single (since some people may not disclose their relationship status initially). They also consider both male and female customers, although they may later find it more effective to focus on females if analytics indicate better performance. Additionally, they should include wedding and event planners and choose interests in weddings, events, wedding decor, wedding venues, flowers, and flower arrangements.
Steps 3, 4 & 5:
Note: If it's the shop's first advertisement, they may not have access to a look-a-like audience unless they have a database to input into the backend.
Next, they need to determine their advertising goal. For example, their objective will be to run the ad for four weeks to increase sales by 10% and attract new customers over the two months. They aid this by directing all their ads to their website, where customers can conveniently place orders or make queries. This will also help them numerically track how many customers they were able to convert through the ad.
Once the ad is published, they can then periodically check its performance. If the ad fails to gain necessary traction within a week, adjustments should be made to the audience targeting to either make it more specific or expand its reach by broadening the list. Facebook's Ads Manager also provide recommendations for optimizing the ad's potential, offering helpful features for making necessary changes.
Facebook ad targeting is an amazing tool for small businesses and unlike larger populations that have copious amounts of competition and online customers that are suspicious of ads due to bad experiences, the local customer base is very engaged and still has a level of trust and confidence in digital sales.
There is no better time so take these tips, attempt your first ad and see what it can do for you and your business today!
Oh and tell us how it goes ;)
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