Ways To Quickly Tell If You're Targeting The Right Facebook Audience

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Social media has revolutionized how we conduct our social lives, and how we do business in general. The easiest way to market your products or services is through social media. Facebook is one of the most popular social media platforms. It has a huge following of over a billion people, and makes it very easy for a product or service to go viral - either for the right or wrong reasons.

You want to place your business on Facebook, but you need to know if you are targeting the right audience. There are several ways you can do this without breaking a sweat, or spending too much money. Facebook recognizes that it has an enormous capacity to help businesses grow while making a bit of cash in the process. This is how you can tell whether your Facebook page is getting you the right audience or not.

Design an Ad

The first step is to gear up for a campaign. This campaign always gets geared towards getting conversions. Determine how much the conversion will cost you, and keep it to $10 and below. An audience of 50,000 to 250,000 is a reasonable size. It is not too small, nor is it too large to be expensive to reach. For you to gather worthwhile data, you will need at least 1000 impressions. Once you get results, you need to make sense of them.

Analyze the results

It is important that you learn how to analyze the results of your campaign.

  • Cost per conversion: A conversion is the action people take on your site. It could be in the form of link clicks, purchases, or email sign ups. The total conversions divide the total cost here. A low conversion will be bad for your business!

  • Click through rate (CTR): Take the total number of clicks and divide it by the number of impressions. The result expressed in percentages will tell you how often people are getting to your landing or home page. If, for example, your ad received 20 link clicks and reached a total of 2000 people, CTR is 2%. Your CTR being below .5% is a strong indicator that people are not interested. A CTR of above 1.5 usually signifies an interested audience.

  • Cost Per Click (CPC): The total cost of the campaign, when divided by the number of link clicks, will give you the cost per click (CPC).This is how you calculate the cost for every website visitor. It should never cost too much as it signifies problems in the future.

  • Relevancy score: This is a calculation that is conducted by Facebook on how relevant your ad is to your targeted audience. Ad performances regarding clicks, engagements, costs, etc. are the signals used to build a score. If the score is under 6, your audience isn’t interested. To make it worse, Facebook has a penalty on ads that draw poor relevancy scores, which make your advertising costs higher.

  • Cost per Thousand Impressions (CPM): This gauges the cost of serving 1000 ad impressions and is the standard measure for all advertisements. If your CPM is high, it means your target audience is wrong, and no one is buying your products. It is an indicator you should change your audience.

Facebook Targeting options

When targeting your audience, there are four options you should consider, and understanding each one will give you an advantage when doing so.

  • Location: Location targeting is a useful tool. It allows you to place your focus on the particular geographical area that you are interested in. This is important in the event you have coupons to give to actual residents of an area, or its environs.

  • Demographics: There are filters that allow you to target people based on age, profession, relationship status, or other social and cultural criteria.

  • Behavior Score: Offline behavior judges behaviour targeting. This includes such behavior as travel patterns or mobile device usage. If they are travelers and that is your target audience, focus on that aspect.

Gather details and build an audience base

Facebook offers Audience Insight where you get details of your target audience. If you have a huge customer base, you can always import their details, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Add them to your Facebook page as a custom audience. Once you do, then it is possible to tell your audience’s gender, age, marital status, interests, etc.

Knowing what you know about your target audience, it is now easy to build an audience. Suppose you are a realtor. What type of audience would you target? You would target newly-weds, parents, couples expecting a child, etc. These are people who are looking to buy a home. They would be open to suggestions and are more likely to follow any page that has mention of homes.

If you sell automobiles, the same holds true. You would target a certain age group, say 18 -25 for certain models.You would not emphasize gender per se, but men are likely to prefer certain models over others, and likewise for women. Parents would prefer bigger cars with enough room for their children. All this information is available on Facebook. Make proper use of it to target each audience sector accordingly.

Connecting with your audience is as important as bringing them on board. It is important to make sure you have a link to your Facebook page on your website. It is also advisable to have a 'like' button on your website to allow them to ‘like’ without leaving the site. Talk about convenience!

Target an audience with similar likes           

An audience that has similar preferences is also known as a Lookalike audience. This is almost the same as creating a custom audience, except that instead of clicking on the custom audience section, you click on Lookalike audience.

You create a lookalike audience with:

  • Your Facebook Page

  • Your email list

  • Your website visitors

Engagement

Engaging with your audience is important. It allows you to gauge whether you are engaging the right people. The phrase ‘Content is King’ rings true when it comes to audience engagement. When you post interesting and catchy content that will grab the attention of the audience, you start to interact.

They will be inclined to follow you and definitely like your page. It ensures they see your posts every time you do. If you are engaging the wrong audience, no matter how many times you post, there will be no engagement as no one is interested. Following the above tips will help you know your audience, and engage them in the right manner. Once you have the right audience, the rest will be history. This will translate into sales and more traffic to your page.

Facebook is arguably the best social media platform to engage your target audience on. It provides you with tools that help you manage and analyze data properly. Data gathering by Facebook lets you know what criteria to use for targeting clients. You can tell their age, gender, marital status and lots more. How you engage them with this information is different than if you did not know such details.

Depending on what product or service you are offering, it gets so much easier as Facebook also suggests pages to the clients. How did Facebook know to suggest those pages? It has collected data over time on user preferences, and it is easy to predict according to online behavior.

How do you ensure you maximize the ROI on Facebook campaigns? Let us know in the comments below.

Posted 6 September, 2017

EdwardSuez

Sales & Marketing Guru

Edward is the Sales & Marketing Correspondent for Freelancer.com. He is currently based in Sydney, and is a self-confessed ice-cream fan.

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