If your ads aren’t being seen by the right people at the right time in the right place, it’s time to brush up on your target audience building skills!

How to Build A Target Audience Like A Pro

Thanks to the rise of social media, there’s been a massive shift in the marketing world. Brick-and-mortars are on the decline, brands are moving online to generate sales, and traditional forms of marketing just aren’t working like they used to. It’s essential for businesses to adapt, and there are plenty of reasons why your team should have a finger on the pulse of social media.

One of the biggest pros of social media advertising is the power to target consumers with more personalized ads, resulting in more conversions. A brand’s Facebook audiences are one of its biggest assets, and luckily, there are tools like the Facebook Ads Manager to make targeting and retargeting a breeze. 

Brands can create custom audience segments with key demographics like location, age, and gender and optimize and even extend their ad delivery with Custom and Lookalike Audiences. Keep on scrolling if you’re ready to learn all the ins and outs of how to build a target audience.

Explore Purchasing Behavior

Identifying what motivates your audience to purchase is critical for any brand. Purchasing or buyer behavior is the actions that your consumers take before they buy your product or service, like engaging with social media posts or reading reviews. 

Since Facebook uses its data tracking system (like the Meta Pixel and Conversions API), advertisers can deploy that to target audience segments by various buyer behaviors. You'll be able to know what your audience likes and doesn’t like in order to produce better content that drives engagement and sales. 

Begin With Custom Audiences 

If you want to learn how to build a target audience the right way, start with familiarizing yourself with Custom Audiences in Facebook Business Manager. 

It’s a solid place to discover your existing audience which includes prior customers, visitors to your site, and people who have engaged with your content in the past. Starting with this wealth of already-existing intel, you can build out and refine detailed demographics and target the right people with laser-like precision.

Refine With Audience Insights 

Insights will be one of those most important tools when learning how to build a target audience. Facebook Audience Insights offers you a collection of information about people connected to your Page and general users on Facebook. 

This means you’ll be able to create better content and ads that will resonate with your audience and help you find people similar to your current audience. Some ways to put all this valuable data into effect include:

• Scoping Out the Competition – There’s a Pages to Watch section of Facebook Insights that lets you add any competitor pages and observe some of their impressions stats. You can also see info like the number of posts they share per week and use that to better determine your own cadence.
• Examining Page Likes – This tab on Audience Insights shows you the most relevant pages and categories based on the Pages your selected audience liked. So, for example, you might try targeting with those brands that your cold audiences already like to introduce them to your company.
• Analyzing Device Usage – In the Activity tab, you can see which devices your audiences use most. This can help you optimize ads for those devices to ensure your audience gets the best ad and shopping experience.

Leverage Lookalike Audiences

The Facebook Ads Manager offers a feature that creates Lookalike Audiences, which is an audience of new people who share similar characteristics to your existing consumers and are likely to be interested in your brand. 

Facebook does this by looking at things like demographics and interests from current audiences you’ve already created in the ads manager to find similar people. This is a very effective tool for reaching out to warm customers, which are people who are aware of your brand or interested in similar products or services but may not be motivated to buy just yet. 

You can use the tool to:

• Create Prospects in Other Locations – Your team can use the filters of a Lookalike Audience to target warm leads in different countries.
• Save Money on Ad Spending – Targeting Lookalike Audiences means you can be sure you’re spending money on the best audiences, optimizing your ad spend, and generating a bigger return for it.

Make the Most of Life Events

Understanding how to build a target audience means getting to know the tools available to you, and the Life Events feature of Facebook is one of our favorites. Plenty of effective ads are related to major life events, which can encourage a customer to make a certain purchase. 

For example, people who are recently engaged will be more likely to purchase wedding-related items like toasting glasses, dress shoes, or even honeymoon travel packages. Or if you sell home decor and furniture, you could target people who have recently moved to a new city. 

Facebook even tracks weather-based events and the people experiencing them, so if a brand offers snow plow services, they can search and target users who recently experienced heavy snowfall. 

Keep Ads Relevant 

Ad Relevance is determined by using the positive and negative feedback Facebook expects an ad to receive from its target audience. The more positive interactions that are expected, the higher the ad’s relevance score will be. 

This helps to make sure that people see ads that matter to them, creating a better experience overall for the Facebook user and allowing advertisers to better evaluate their ad performance. 

Some ways to boost relevance include:

Stellar Creative 

In such a competitive space, you can’t afford to skimp on the visual elements of your social ads. Your ad creative should be eye-catching, on-brand, original, and easily recognizable to deliver the highest impact.

A/B Testing 

If you’re not sure what works best for your audiences, consider using multivariate A/B tests and analyzing the detailed results. 

Get Strategic with Timing 

While there will be many resources that suggest specific timeframes to run Facebook ads, it’s best to use your own data to find the right time to target your audience. One timeslot simply won’t work for every brand.

Reach A Wider Audiences With Impressive Ads 

Learning how to build a target audience may seem tricky at first, but with these tips, you’ll be on the right track. If you’re looking for additional insights or need an extra hand in your digital marketing efforts, Social Ktchn can help! 

As the mom-and-pop shop of paid social media ads, Social Ktchn gives you the tools and guidance to grow your business through successful social media campaigns. 

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