Targeting Buyer Personas on Facebook

In terms of targeting, Facebook gives marketers an unprecedented ability to hyper-target a buyer persona based on data as personal as relationship status. This makes Facebook Ads an easy way for marketers to make their ad buys more efficient and make it easier for them to show clients that their ads are truly reaching and converting their target audience.

For any type of targeting on Facebook there are two aspects, the targeting method and the content that you’re using to drive clicks and conversions. Creating and selecting relevant content is the only thing that will truly make the targeting tools your advantage.

For example, a Facebook Ad that asks users to “Like” a brand’s Facebook Page that they don’t know is not going to drive any clicks or Likes. You need to actually offer a piece of relevant content or promotion to utilize the targeting you’re paying for and get that high conversion rate.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads open the full power of Facebook’s Open Graph to marketers. The Open Graph is Facebook’s database of all of it’s users’ demographic, psychological and behavioural information. Facebook Ads allow you to target ads to groups by 15 different data points:

  • Location (Country, State, City and Zipcode)
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Precise Interests: These are pulled from users Facebook profile activities, interests, job titles, education, pages they have liked and groups they belong to.
  • Broad Categories: These are pre-organized audiences that Facebook creates by examining basically anything a Facebook user does, clicks on, or writes anywhere on Facebook.
  • Connections: Users who like specific Facebook Pages.
  • Friends of Connections: Users whose friends like specific Facebook Pages.
  • Interested In: This allows a business to target Facebook users according to the gender they are interested in for a friendship, dating, a relationship or networking.
  • Relationship Status: This allows a business to target Facebook users that are married, single, engaged, or in a relationship.
  • Languages: This targeting option is best used when targeting an audience that speaks a language that is different from most of the people in the targeted geography.
  • Education: This option enables the targeting of Facebook users that are in high school, college, or a college graduate. Businesses can also target Facebook users that went to a specific school, study a specific topic, or for current college students, their expected graduation date.
  • Workplaces: Targeting Facebook users by where they work can be useful in various B2B, job search, and industry specific scenarios.

Once you have created your Buyer Persona, it’s easy to use Facebook Ads to target almost 100% to just that persona.

Facebook Ads are much different than Google Ads. Google Ads are targeted directly to user intent – they appear when a users searches for a related keyword. This means users are more likely to purchase at that moment, as they are actively searching for a solution to a problem, so you can target ads to users to sell something to them immediately.

Facebook Ads are not related to intent though, so you need to use them to promote your products and services in a way that will get them interested and clicking without having to be actively interested in buying. The best kinds of Facebook Ads promote content that targeted buyers are interested in at all times, such as free recipes, free guides to boosting a business’ marketing, etc., that are related to your products. These will drive clicks to your site or Facebook Page and allow you to add new leads into your sales funnel and nurture them to become customers.

Facebook ad campaigns can be very cost-effective. You set the amount you wish to pay based on cost per thousand impressions or cost per click, whichever you decide. The minimum amount per day is only a dollar. You have complete control over your advertising budget. In addition you have complete control over your ad campaign, you decide when to start, pause, or delete ads entirely using Facebook’s ad manager. Since Facebook ads can be so inexpensive, it is easy to test market campaigns cheaply.

Targeted Posts

Using Targeted Posts allows you to target your Facebook posts by a wider range of options including:

  • Gender: male or female
  • Relationship status: single, in a relationship, engaged or married
  • Educational status: in high school, in college, college grad
  • Interested in: men or women
  • Age: select a range between 13 and 65
  • Location: country, region or state, city
  • Language: type in the language

So far, Facebook has not added precise interests or other types of targeting that are available in Facebook Ads.

Using this feature you can create posts that only target certain buyer personas at once, making sure that all content seen by each buyer persona is 100% relevant to them. This will not only boost your conversion rate, but decrease unlikes and complaints from users not interested in certain types of content.

Currently only certain Facebook Pages have access to Targeted Posts, normally if you have 5,000+ Likes. If you have targeting available on your posts, you’ll see the crosshairs icon in your status area. To start narrowing your target, just click on it and then click Add Targeting as shown below:

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One thing to keep in mind is that Targeted Posts will still show on your timeline to all users. Previously the posts would be invisible to users who did not fit the targeting. That can be problematic for pages that use the targeting often. Facebook’s solution is to hide the posts you don’t want to show on your timeline. Users will still see the post in their newsfeed, but if people visit your page, they will not see irrelevant content.

Tip: If you want to see how many people in your audience fit a certain demographic profile, you can quickly see the number when you apply different targeting parameters:

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