When it comes to Facebook ads it’s all about understanding your audience, why they are on Facebook and how you can reach them. In this episode of Quick Wins with COM, our Operations Manager and Facebook specialist, Evielyn Chapman, sits down and discusses the 4 essential audiences businesses should be utilising if they want better leads, better reach, and better traction through Facebook.
Facebook audiences have vastly improved over the years from simple interest audiences to being able to target people who watch your videos, visit your website, are in your database and more. Evielyn chats with Richard about the four essentials audiences that you should be using in your Facebook Advertising Campaigns in 2018.
Interest Audiences
First up, the simplest kind of audience to start off with is the interest audience. With this kind of audience, you’re essentially going onto Facebook and creating campaigns that show to people you select through interests and demographics. These audiences can be focused on age, income, where they live or even certain behaviours and particular interests. It’s important that you really understand who your avatar is that you’re trying to reach if you want interest audiences to work for you. Otherwise you’ll spend a lot of wasted money on people who will never buy from you. An interest audience is what we call a ‘cold’ audience. They have never heard of you before so the best types of ads to show to Cold Audiences are content ads either sending them to content on your website or showing them videos. Basically you want to make them aware of you or your company.
Custom Audiences
The second essential audience for Facebook ads has to be custom audiences. These are the audiences that are specific to your business because they’re comprised from your own database. Most people keep a list of emails and phone numbers of their current and past client and leads, some people even send regular emails to them. And now with Facebook you can go one step further and show ads directly to those people who are in your database. You do this by actually uploading these contacts into Facebook so you can market only to the contacts you already have, the ones that are already familiar with your business. Whether you have small database or a large one, having a customs audience enables you to pinpoint your ads and target them specifically to your contact list. Custom audiences work best when you combine them with campaigns you are already running through email or other means – adding more touch points for your customers or database.
Remarketing Audiences
The third audience Richard and Evielyn look at is the remarketing audience. Let’s say somebody comes to your website, takes a look, then clicks off taking no sort of action. They haven’t called you, put their contact details in, or taken any other action. Well instead of letting them go off into the abyss of the internet, you can actually collect these people into an audience and continue to show ads just to these people. This starts to increase the number of touchpoints and connections they have with your business. So, after initially looking through your site, but not acting on it, these people are now seeing your site on a separate occasion and on a separate platform. This can be your opportunity to provide them with and offer and call to action that they didn’t take up the first time. This can be something like a one week for free or a 10 percent off certificate. They’ve already seen your brand and know who you are, but they just needed a little push to take action.
To actually form this connection between your website and Facebook you need to make sure you have the Facebook Pixel installed. It’s a little piece of code that Facebook gives you that you have to install on your website. It’s a super easy, one time installation that will bridge your website and Facebook together.
Lookalike Audience
The fourth essential Facebook audience to market to is what’s called a lookalike audience. With lookalike audiences, you can take any of the audiences mentioned before – interest audience, custom audience, remarketing audiences – and tell Facebook to analyse the people within those audiences. For example, let’s say you have your email database, the custom audience – the people who already know and love you. You can tell Facebook to analyse them to see what those people have in common and can actually find another audience out there who look just like them and share the same commonalities, hence the name lookalike audience. With this, you can find the similar audiences that may possibly buy your product or service, because they’ve already purchased something like it before.
But which audience is best you’re asking? Unfortunately, there is no magic formula. Each of these audiences have a place within your Facebook marketing campaigns and when used in conjuction can help you to lower your cost and increase your reach.
There we have it. Those are 4 essential Facebook audiences your businesses should be marketing to if you want better leads, better traction, and overall success with your Facebook ads.
