Powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies for 2022.

Show Notes

Transcript

[00:00:00] Running a Facebook and Instagram ad is somewhat simple, running a Facebook and Instagram ad that actually works not so simple. Maybe you’ve experienced this yourself, or maybe you’ve been too intimidated to even try. I’m not going to lie. There are many different things that can affect the success of your ad and the audience you target is definitely one of the top things that can make or break the success of your ad campaign.
[00:00:26] In this episode, we are uncovering the most powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies for 2022.
[00:00:37] welcome to the Liquis Digital Marketing podcast, where each week we’ll be breaking down complex marketing topics into bite sized steps. You can take now to grow a profitable. For your business, we’ll discuss organic reach, offer optimization, paid advertising, email marketing, content creation, promotion techniques, and so much more.
[00:00:56] I’m your host, Brad Ball, founder of Liquis Digital, a marketing agency that has helped hundreds of clients of every shape and size reach their business goals since 2008. Thanks for joining us today and be sure to subscribe because you won’t want to miss a beat. Now let’s grow.
[00:01:15] Hello. And welcome back to another episode of the Liquis Digital Marketing podcast. I am so glad you were here today because we are talking about the Facebook ad targeting strategies for 2022. Let’s just jump right into this. So let’s talk about what. You set your targeting in your Facebook ads. So if you haven’t already go back and watch our video on episode 45, where we talk about getting started with Facebook ads.
[00:01:43] So it really, we kind of go through the anatomy of Facebook business manager. And why that’s important is when you set your targeting, you want to be doing it in Facebook business manager. This is where you’re going to have all of these options available to you. And also when we talk about running Facebook ads, we also are talking about running Instagram ads as they are really the same thing.
[00:02:04] So when we go into Facebook business manager, we select where these ads are going to run, and we can say, run them on Facebook, run them on Instagram. Right? So really Facebook ads means Facebook and Instagram. So to set your targeting for your ads, you’re going to do this in the ad set. So in Facebook business manager, you have your campaign, your ad sets, and your ads for your ad sets are inside of your campaign.
[00:02:29] And your ads are inside of your ad sets. So at the ad set, this is where you set your targeting for your ads. And what that means is when you publish it, it’s basically telling Facebook, show this ad to these people and it’s going to use the algorithm to do so. So let’s talk about the algorithm real quick.
[00:02:49] We all know Facebook has a ton of information on us and all of its users. So it knows what we’re into, what we like, what actions we typically take, where we’re located, where we live, our relationship status. It knows all of this stuff. So the beauty of that from an advertising perspective, as we can really target people that we want to see these ads.
[00:03:14] And that’s the beauty of running Facebook ads is the ability to target our ads. That’s really what the algorithm is. And in the past years, so let’s say let’s go back maybe three to five years ago. It was where you, you really kind of wanted it to be more of like a tighter audience, a smaller audience.
[00:03:32] It’s more targeted audience. Now, I would say in the last three years, it’s more of like, we want a bigger, broader audience. The reason being is the power of the algorithm. The algorithm has gotten so smart, it can target and it can find, and it knows who is going to take the actions you want them to take.
[00:03:51] So my advice is to let the algorithm do what it does best. Like it’s really. Smarter than us. We actually can probably do it more harm than good. You’re better off just keeping your hands out of it and letting the algorithm do what it’s going to do. And now we do have to give it a little bit of direction, right?
[00:04:12] We can’t just say, okay, run it to everybody. So we have to give us some direction. One important aspect of your audience is the audience size. So if your audience size isn’t big enough, then it’s not going to give the Facebook algorithm enough data to work with. Or it’s not just going to show, it’s just not going to show it to enough people.
[00:04:29] However on the flip side, if it’s so big that now it’s got to show it to so many people, it’s going to take a lot longer for it to learn what it needs to do. So you want to try to find that sweet. Okay. So we’re going to kind of cover that right now. So really kind of it comes down to, are you advertising locally or are you advertising national or internationally?
[00:04:52] So let’s just start with like a national international audience. So if you’re, let’s just say advertising should just all of the United States, you want your low end, the smallest audience to be no less than 250 K. So 250,000. So nothing smaller than. Now, this is just obviously national or international, and that’s really any country for the most part, any bigger country on the high-end.
[00:05:18] What you want is you want to target no more or your size shouldn’t be any more than 5% of that. Country’s total Facebook users. So you’d have to go research that and you can find that information and then just do the math. You want it to be no more than 5%. Countries, total Facebook users. So for the U S that would be around 12 million.
[00:05:38] So you don’t want your audience size to be any larger than 12 million. Now I know that is a huge gap to 150 K to 12 million big. The point is these are just the ends, right. Anything in between is good. And you might have to play around with it a little bit. So let’s talk about local, right? So let’s say you’re just a local, dry, cleaner, right?
[00:05:56] Well, you’re not, you don’t want to run an ad for people that are probably outside of a, you know, maybe 10, 15, 30 mile radius of your location. You may not have an audience size of 250 K. And if that’s the case, then you’re better off just targeting your location and leaving everything else open. Like don’t do any other interest targeting or don’t try to tighten it up.
[00:06:22] Just run your ad to the whole audience. If it’s under 250. Now, let’s say you live in a large city and you have in a 10 to 15 mile radius, there’s, let’s say a million people. Well, then you do want to maybe narrow that down a little bit, but you do want it over that 250 K if you can, you know, if you’re small and it’s still like under 250 K that’s.
[00:06:45] Okay. That just means don’t further target. That’s enough for the algorithm to go out and hit those 250 K people and find them. So, I mean, let’s say it’s, it’s 50 K. That’s fine. Then we’ll just target those 50,000 people and let the algorithm do its thing. The point is, is that a larger audience is better than a smaller audience.
[00:07:05] You’re better off giving the algorithm it’s food and it’s food in this case is audience size is data. It likes that. Now that we have that figured out. So we kind of know how the algorithm works. We kind of know like the size of audiences we should be trying to stay in. So let’s talk about some targeting options that are available to you.
[00:07:26] Now, there is an infinite number of options and. Different combination of options, but we’re going to just kind of categorize the different things that you can select so you can target upon location, right? So you can say, I only want to run my ad to a specific country or a state or a zip code, or maybe a radius of a location, maybe people that are living in a certain location, or maybe people that are traveling.
[00:07:50] Two or in a certain location, or maybe it’s people that have recently traveled to a location. So you can kind of start thinking about your product and your service and how does it fit into that? Do I want to advertise to people that don’t live here? So let’s say I’m in Vegas and I have a Vegas show and I want to target.
[00:08:10] Probably not people that live there. I want to target people that have recently traveled or not recently, but that are traveling in that are visiting because I provide a service that a visitor takes part in. So I probably want to make sure my ad is running specifically to people visiting just as an example, right.
[00:08:29] How you can use your location. Also with location, you can set the radius and I don’t remember what the radius parameters are. I think it goes up to 50 miles, um, and down to, you know, a mile. So you can get a pretty tight, I will say when it comes to location. Also the next one is, is age, gender, and languages, depending on the type of business you are, uh, you might see some restrictions.
[00:08:52] So if you’re running like real estate ads or ads in financial or political ads, you have to specify that and it’s going to limit some of these. Due to the ability to segregate out who you’re showing your ads to. All right. So you can also target agent gender. It does make sense to adjust the age. Right?
[00:09:10] So if you know that there’s a certain age group that is only going to use or be able to use your service well, then obviously just select them. You know? So usually we don’t necessarily worry about the age too much, but if it’s a, you know, a service. An 18 year old would never use. Then we surely don’t want to show our ads to them.
[00:09:31] So maybe we move it up to like 25 and over, or maybe 30 years and over or something. The next one is detailed targeting. So this is where things really get interesting. And this is where you can start adding in intro. Interest targeting. This is really the power of the ads and you can select, you know, what people are interested in, you could select people’s behaviors.
[00:09:54] So we think about like people that are like certain, you know, TV shows or people that read certain magazines or are a part of certain groups, people that are interested in certain things, maybe you’re interested in WordPress or you’re interested in photography, or, you know, so it’s just interest broad.
[00:10:13] Right. There’s also like behaviors. So people that, or even demographics, so maybe it’s a household income and maybe it’s people that have, you know, one or two kids, people that have kids that are in ages one to five, you know, so there’s a ton, a ton, a ton, ton of different options. Right. We would never be able to cover them all.
[00:10:33] And it’s actually kind of fun to go in there and see what all you can select because there is a ton. So my advice is to select the selected. And then see what the, the size is. What I wouldn’t do is select 10 different interests in one ad set. No, just select one, maybe two, and then see what your ad size is and go from there.
[00:10:54] Now, the next thing, when it comes to detailed targeting is narrowing or layering your audience. So, what this means is you can select your main audience. I want to show this ad to this. Let’s say anyone who is interested in CrossFit. Well, that might be millions of people. And that’s great. I can leave it there, but let’s say I only want to show this ad to people that like CrossFit.
[00:11:18] And then let’s say, I want to narrow that down. So I don’t not everyone that likes CrossFit. Let’s say I want to show it to gym owners or people that are involved in some gym ownership. Well then maybe I then layer that or narrow that to people that like CrossFit and that are also Facebook page admins or.
[00:11:38] You know, maybe there’s one that’s gym owners, um, you know, or a magazine or a page that gym owners would typically like, like rogue or I can’t even wildlife or something, you know, where it like targets narrows it down. So. You can narrow down your audience and you can also exclude your audience. You know, so let’s say for me, I want to run ad to people that might be interested in a website.
[00:12:01] So I would people that are interested in, you know, like a Shopify, WordPress, Wix Squarespace. So these are people that are interested in building. But what I don’t want to do is run an ad to people that are like me, like web developers. So I can exclude web designers and web developers. So that way people that are labeling themselves as this individual, don’t see my ad because they aren’t going to buy a website from me.
[00:12:24] Right. So, okay. So that’s detailed targeting, running interest and narrowing the audience and layering. So the next thing is custom audiences. So this is where you can kind of take control and create your own audiences. So one powerful way is to upload a list of your customers. So if you’re having type of CRM, you can export all of those people and then import them into Facebook.
[00:12:50] And now you have a list of people that you can run ad to. So you can run an ad to everybody that’s on your own. And there’s another thing you can do a one step further, which I’ll get into in a second, but staying with custom audience. You can do lookalike audiences. So let’s say we upload this list of our customers that have bought from us.
[00:13:09] And let’s say it’s, you know, a thousand to 5,000 people. Well, okay. That’s great. If we want to target them and rerun another ad to them, but what we can do is actually create a lookalike audience based off of this list. So now what we’re telling Facebook is go find another, you know, two to 3 million people that have the same exact things.
[00:13:30] These people. So they’re most likely this look like audience, cause it looks like this other audience. So we’re creating, it’s going to go find people that have the same interest and the same demographics and the same things that the people on your list do. So it’s going to find people that are likely to buy from you.
[00:13:45] So that’s a look alike audience. Another custom audience is website traffic. So. Let’s say people are visiting your website. You can create an audience to say, okay, I only, I want to create an audience of anyone who’s visited my website in the last 180 days or 90 days. And then now you can run an ad specifically to them.
[00:14:02] You can also create an audience of people who have interacted with your social profiles. So if someone has liked shared, commented, clicked on any of your post or your profiles on Facebook or Instagram, then it’ll put them in an audience and you can run an ad to them. I’m going kind of fast because I’m trying to get through a lot of this information.
[00:14:23] I’m don’t want this video to get too long or this podcast to get too long. So let’s talk about some strategies, right? This is going to pretty much wrap us up with some strategies. I think one of the most powerful strategies that you can use in, and this is layering purchase behaviors. This works for people that are selling something online.
[00:14:45] What this is going to do is target engaged shoppers on Facebook. So you’re going to run an ad and I would recommend running a conversion ad. And if you’re not familiar with what that is, go back and watch episode 45, but run a conversion ad. You’re going to target a broad audience. So let’s say your ad is to sell mugs that have, um, some inspirational, let’s say it has a cats on it.
[00:15:09] I don’t know. All right. So some cat mug. So now you’re going to target maybe cat lovers, you know, or some broad. And then what you’re going to do is use the narrow audience option and select engaged shoppers it’s underneath behavior. If you start searching engaged shoppers, it’ll find it. What this audience is engaged.
[00:15:30] Shoppers is anyone who has clicked on a shop now call to action button in the last seven days. So this is telling you that Facebook knows these people see ads. And act on them and actually buy, or at least click on the link to buy it. Right. So they’re interested. They’re shoppers they’re online shoppers.
[00:15:50] So if you layer that with your niche of people, with your audience, Then you’re most likely are more likely to target people that are shoppers. That’s what you want. Okay. So that’s my first targeting strategy. Um, my next one is targeting life events. So this really kind of comes into play based off of your audience, right?
[00:16:13] Or your service. You can do people that have recently moved, uh, anniversary. People that are in relationships, new jobs, birthdays. I mean, really you can do all different types of life events. So you can, if you think about your services, you know, if you’re, maybe if you’re in Juul or. You can target people who have an upcoming, um, anniversary, or if you’re a flower shop, people that have upcoming anniversaries or, uh, people that are newly in relationships.
[00:16:45] Well guess what, when you’re in a new relationship, but what are you doing? You’re constantly buying things for every month. There’s a reason to buy something right. For your new relationship. Right. So you can target people that are new relationships and for a million different reasons. Maybe it’s a new relationship and there’s an anniversary and there’s a birthday coming up, whatever, right.
[00:17:07] There’s a zillion different ways that you could spend this, but it really kind of ties into what service you provide. Right? So as a web developer, maybe, or as a marketer, maybe, you know, an anniversary doesn’t really make sense for me, but it might make sense for you. Something to look at the next one is retargeting with these custom audiences.
[00:17:27] So just a little bit ago, we talked about these custom audiences. So people who have, I’m just going to say, visited your website or visit us a specific page on your website, running an ad to them. When we think about people on Facebook, when we’re running ad. There’s at some different levels of audiences and there’s a cold audience, people that have never seen or interacted with you.
[00:17:50] And then there’s a warmer audience. People who have seen or interacted with you. Well, if they visited your website, then they’ve seen and interacted with you. So they’re a warmer audience and they’re more likely to take action. On your ad because they’re familiar with you. This is called retargeting retargeting.
[00:18:06] Then I think every business should be running this ad, but retargeting an ad. So running an ad to anyone who has visited your website within the last 90 days, they’ve been to your website for some reason. So run an ad to them with whatever your call to action is. And that’s, that’s retarded. Another way to do it.
[00:18:23] If you run a shop and someone didn’t complete their checkout, well, now you probably want to run an ad to them with the item that they didn’t check out with. That’s retargeting. Okay. Here’s another ad strategy. If you’re trying to target small business owners, my recommendation is to use an audience of some type interested in, right.
[00:18:46] So you want to try to narrow it down a little. Because there’s a ton of different, small business owners, but then, and I think there’s even an interest of small business owners, which you can try that one. Yeah. But the trick here is you can select Facebook page admins. So this is going to select anyone who has a Facebook business page.
[00:19:05] If you think about your small business owners, most of them have created their own Facebook business page and you can target them. And the beauty is you can even go a little bit further now even categorize the different types of business pages. So a community page, a health page, a travel. Sports page a food page, you know, so there’s different page categories.
[00:19:24] You can select a page category that fits into your niche of people. The premise here is if someone has, or is an admin of a Facebook page, they are probably the business owner or connected or making the business decisions to some extent. So that’s targeting them. Another one is to target people who have viewed your video.
[00:19:45] So if you’re active on social, you should be using. Video in your social strategy, right? So reels and just videos. So what you can do is say, okay, I want to target anyone who has watched, let’s say 25 or maybe 50%, at least 50% of this video. If they’ve watched at least 50% of this video, then I know they’re at least interested in what I have to say.
[00:20:13] And it’s almost like them raising their hand. Like, hello. Yes, I am interested. So why not run an ad to them? So you can create an audience of people who have watched a specific video or videos and just run an ad to them. Again, that’s really just retargeting based off of video views. That’s the targeting strategies.
[00:20:33] And I’m going to leave you with one more thing in that is to always be testing your audience. You have to always test your audiences. And once you find the audience that works you’ll know, and it’ll, it all comes together. My recommendation is when you’re creating your ad sets is to not put a ton of different audiences in one ad set.
[00:20:54] If you’re trying to test different audiences, because then you will never know which audience is actually working best or not. So I would recommend creating multiple ad sets and only sold like one, maybe two. Of those interests or you know, that audience and having different audiences and your different ad sets.
[00:21:11] So you can see which ones perform better. And I would always recommend doing that test. So I’m going to leave you with that. That’s plenty of information for you to go out there and to start setting up your Facebook ads for. Targeting strategy. I love to hear your results and as always, thank you for joining me today.
[00:21:31] We’ll see you. And the next episode. Thanks for listening in today. I hope you enjoyed the show and Hey, if you did, please take a second to leave a review and share this episode with someone who you think might also benefit from it. I appreciate you so much. And as always, we’re here to help. If you have any questions about this episode, or want to talk strategy with us about your own project, just shoot us an email to [email protected] and we’ll catch you in the next episode.