Facebook Advertising: Target and Reach Your Ideal Buyers

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Episode 31 of Landscape Digital Show reveals how to use advanced Facebook advertising tactics to find and reach your ideal buyers.

In episode 29 we discussed why it is becoming increasingly difficult to attract the attention of of ideal buyers. If you are not using social media advertising to reach that audience, it’s time to make this a regular practice.

You can advertise on LinkedIn and Twitter to extend your reach, but for really targeting your ideal buyers, the platform of choice is without question Facebook.

Facebook is the one platform where most people regularly hang out. To be clear, I’m talking about people, not businesses. And it doesn’t matter if your business is commercial or residential, a person, not a company, is making the buying decision.

And it doesn’t matter if you are Facebook friends with your customers or potential buyers, or even if you want to be. You can still target them if they have a Facebook account

5 Facebook Audiences to Target

Here are the 5 types of audiences you can create and target with Facebook advertising, in order of which is most likely to convert.

1. Website Custom Audience

This audience is created with the new Facebook Pixel, which is just a little code that you take from your Facebook ads manager account and put on your website. You want to do this now because it takes a while for Facebook to gather the intelligence that you will use to target your website visitors with ads.

If you don’t know how to work with code, you will have to get some help from your webmaster. I’m not a coder by any stretch of the imagination but my website hosting service pointed me to where to insert the code. And it takes just a few seconds.

You can have the code gather information from specific pages, like a checkout or thank you page. This will allow you to target people that made a purchase. But my preference for companies that do not sell online is to have it available on every page so you can target visitors and buyers alike.

Here’s what happens. When someone visits a website page that code fires and tracks their behavior. You can then retarget that visitor or people like them with Facebook ads. Surely you’ve experienced this. You check out a retailer’s website and then get on Facebook to discover their ads magically appearing in your newsfeed. It’s pretty slick.

Once you get that code installed Facebook tracks and holds that data for a period of 180 days. So, basically, you are targeting recent website visitors, people that already know something about your business because they found your website. If they have a Facebook account, you will reach every single one of them.

Even if you do not run ads, you can log into your FB ads manager and see the count of your website visitors and if its growing and by how much.

2. Email Custom Audience

This audience is created by importing your email subscriber list into your Facebook am manager account. Facebook will then try to match those email addresses with Facebook user accounts.

To the extent that the email address used to join your list is the same one used for a personal Facebook account, you can target that person. I’m told they match up about 50% of the time.

3. Business Page Fans

You can and should use Facebook ads to target your page fans because only a fraction of them see the content you publish on your business page.

4. Lookalike Audiences

Here’s where things get interesting. If your audience is small (and even if it isn’t) you can have Facebook target people that are like your Website Custom Audience or your Email Custom Audiences.

These lookalike audiences will be far better targeted than you can do on your own by randomly picking interests.

The reason for this is that behavior is predictive of future behavior. People like your customer audiences are likely to have similar behaviors. And when you consider how much data we have all given Facebook over the years, good matches can be made.

To create a lookalike audience you need at least 100 people from the source audience. This can be a website custom audience of 100 people, or at least 200 email subscribers, because not all of them are going to match up.

5. Interests Audience

We’ve explained why this should be your last resort for Facebook advertising.

Show Notes

• How to use the Facebook Power Editor.
• Never miss an episode. Subscribe to Landscape Digital Show on iTunes.