Facebook Targeting

Everyone is on Facebook. We should all know that by now. If you are not taking advantage of Facebook as a platform for marketing, you are missing out on a huge opportunity for exposure, branding, and lead generation for your brand and business.

At Hyperchat Social, our process begins with an introductory consultation where we talk through your business, ideal customer, brand, and goals for social. After that conversation, we make recommendations for which mix of services makes the most sense for you and your goals and we create a marketing plan. A big factor that we take into consideration when we make this marketing plan is your ideal customer.

For those that we recommend our Facebook advertising service, we handle all of the targeting, creative, ad copy, and structure of the campaign. It truly is a turnkey system to leads sent right to your email inbox or traffic directly to your website or landing page - all for a fraction of the cost of more traditional marketing.

One of the most crucial elements to nail on Facebook's advertising platform is targeting. After all, Facebook boasts 2.7 BILLION users. If you are not using targeting to your advantage, you are wasting precious marketing dollars on showing ads to people who are not your IDEAL customer.

When first diving into the world of Facebook advertising and targeting, it can be overwhelming. There are so many different categories and subcategories to use to narrow your audience. In this blog, we are going to dive into each of these categories and give you the low down of the most useful categories to focus on. First, we are going to go over where to find targeting on Facebook's advertising platform.

Ad Structure

After setting your objective, whether it be lead generation, traffic, reach, or any of the 11 options on the campaign level, you will be brought to the ad set level. The budget, schedule, audience, placements, and delivery are all set on the ad set level, rather than the campaign level.

This gives the advertiser the ability to a/b test different budgets, schedules, placements, and most beneficially different audiences to see which mix produces the best results. We will dive into these strategies a little later, but let's dive into the different targeting options available on the ad set level.

Ad Targeting

There are several categories in which Facebook allows you to narrow your target audience, including:

Location
Age
Gender
Demographics

• Education
• Financial
• Life Events
• Parents
• Relationship
• Work

Interests

• Art and music
• Current events
• Home and garden
• Pets Politics and social issues
• Travel
• Vehicles
• Shopping and fashion
• Sports and outdoors
• Technology
  

Behaviors

• Anniversary
• Consumer classification
• Digital activities
• Expats
• Mobile device user
• Mobile device user/Device use time
• Multicultural Affinity
• Politics
• Purchase behavior
• Ramadan
• Soccer
• Travel
• Other
  

Languages
Connections

• People who like your Page
• Friends of people who like your Page
• Exclude people who like your Page
• People who use your App
• Friends of people who use your App
• Exclude people who used your App

Now that is a lot of options. Let's break it down further and go through the benefits of each category and some best practices.

Location-based Targeting

Facebook allows you to target based on people's specific location. This includes country, state, county, city, zip code and even the radius around a specific address. Facebook also allows you to get even more specific by picking which interaction you want the user to have with the location.

Pro-Tip: Facebook allows you to upload locations, whether it be zip codes, coordinates, or cities in bulk using a CSV format. Facebook will provide a properly-formatted table for use.

The default option is 'Everyone in this location' but you can easily change it to a different option that improves your results. Select 'people who live in this location' and Facebook bases the location of a user on the user's Facebook profile and it is confirmed by their IP address. You can also change it to 'people recently in this location' which is tracked using mobile usage in the area you selected. You can even target 'people traveling to this location' which targets users who had this geographic are as a recent location that is at least 100 miles from their actual home!

Think carefully about the geographic region that makes the most sense for your audience. Does your ideal client need to be local or do you have a little more wiggle room? Are they more of someone that lives in a city epicenter? Do they live in a more rural area? Near sporting arenas? These are all things to consider when picking your location-based targeting.

Demographics-based targeting

Demographic targeting efforts are pulled straight from the data Facebook has from the user, which differs from interest targeting which Facebook infers from the user's behaviors on the platform.

There are a couple of demographic categories that can be very useful when narrowing down your target audience. For example, if you were offering a free seminar on the best way to plan for college, you would want to target people that actually have kids. This can be found under the 'Parents' category and you can even select the age range of the kids they have.

If you are looking for higher-income people, you can use Facebook's financial demographic to target by household income percentage. In our experience, this data can be a little off. We find higher-income individuals by going after the higher income zip codes combined with the top income percentages Facebook provides.

Interest-based targeting

Interests are one of the best—and easiest—ways to ensure you are targeting individuals who are actually interested in a subject related to your product or service. You can target based on a user's likes and interests, apps they use, pages they have 'liked' on Facebook, hobbies, almost anything.

Pro-tip: Search words related to your product or service and click all that apply. Once you are done, you can click 'suggestions' and find even more!

Behavior-based targeting

Rather than precise interest targeting, behavior targeting allows you to target based on purchase behavior, events they have attended, what kind of phone they access Facebook on, political affiliation, travel habits, and many more.

This is where you can get very creative with your targeting. Explore the options and familiarize yourself with what is available.

Sample Audiences

At Hyperchat Social, we deal primarily with financial advisors as well as small business owners. Let's take a look at how we would go about targeting several different types of people that are common.

Small Business Owners

Whether you are a financial advisor going after small business owners to help them through everything happening with the pandemic, or you just need to get in front of the ultimate decision-maker, business owners are on Facebook.

To find these, we will need to focus on the digital activity side of Facebook targeting. Search 'Digital Activity: Small Business Owner' and combine that with your demographic targeting and you will be in the line of vision of small business owners in your area on Facebook.

High-Income Individuals

Your product or service caters to the elite. You need to get in front of the person that can afford your newest product or has some investible assets to their name and needs help with their portfolio. We love to target this kind of individual on Facebook. Here are some filters that would make sense to have when targeting high net worth individuals:

• Frequent Travel
• Facebook access: iPhone 11
• Luxury Goods
• Top 10% of household income

Pro-tip: Click 'suggestions' when setting up this search and more behaviors and interests will pop up! Just keep an eye on your estimated audience size to make sure your audience definition and keep it in the green portion.

Retirees Retirees are perhaps the easiest to locate on Facebook - as the main thing that qualifies a retiree is age. Crank your age up to 40-50 years old which is the age people start seriously thinking about retirement planning. Combine that with some high net worth targeting and you are sure to find a retirement account that needs management.

Follow these tips and you are sure to find success when targeting on Facebook. Want us to handle your ad campaigns for you? Let's set up an initial consultation. Click here to schedule to start Turning Social Into Sales.