Facebook ads are a love hate thing. I’m still on the fence, but I’m digging deeper to see if they can really work. I found a way to really nail your target audience with the Facebook ads manager, and of course, I have to share!
If you haven’t already, I suggest you first make a plan about WHAT you’re advertising. For me, I wanted to promote the One Page Marketing Plan template, and work towards building my community. (I recommend using that tool, if you need some guidance.)
So, I set three ads.
1 video of me talking about the marketing plan and how it might help.
1 link to blog content of the same nature, which has a sign up for
1 very basic ad leading to a landing page.
After 3 days, here’s the engagement and reach.
Let’s look at the engagement rate. (If you’re not into the numbers, you gotta get into the numbers! This is how you’ll find out how things are working or not, and where your dollars are going)
117 (link clicks) divided by 7111 (reach) x 100 = 1.6% (Average Facebook engagement is 3%)
So, it’s not huge, probably not getting a good return on $ so I’m wondering what I can tweak.
As I do often, I recently got sucked into an ad by a marketing expert. It explained to me the power of layering your Facebook audience, to better target your customers. And being the nerd that I am, I watched until the end, and almost bought this guy’s app.
However, I’m smart, so I did some googling about Facebook Ad layering.
Turns out, I don’t need his tool – although, I’m sure it’s very helpful – but I can actually do this myself, and you can too.
There are some key features in the Facebook ad console, that would often get overlooked if you’re in a rush to set up an ad. The options for creating a targeted audience, could work for you if you KNOW your target audience really well. And in fact, if you don’t know your audience that well, this is a great way to figure out what you need to know.
So, to be honest, I’m still working out details of my ‘target audience’ (geez I only launched the website last week!) but I know that my main interest is helping busy women in business, with simple tools for good communication.
So very simply, I think the women I want to connect with, are:
- running businesses that have an intention to help other people.
- interested in bettering themselves for the purpose of relationship and business
1. Audience layering
So first up, when you’ve figured that out, you want to create a sort of venn diagram of the people you want to reach. Identify your people’s Primary interests, and Secondary interests, and when you layer them, whoever is in the middle of the overlap, is your targeted audience for this ad. Mine are:
PRIMARY INTERESTS: business, entrepreneurship, small business,
SECONDARY INTERESTS: mindfulness, psychology, self awareness
2. Set up the ad in your Facebook Ad manager page
So you’ve got your offer, and ad and goal in mind, and we set up the ads as normal with demographics - Age, Location, Gender. Then include people who have these interests, but not all together. The trick is to include the secondary interests in the “MUST ALSO match at least one of the following” part.
OK. I hope that makes sense. I’m trying to explain thoroughly, and keep it simple.
3. EXCLUDE interests from the target audience
A good way to work out your target audience, or ideal client, is to know what they aren’t. So out of those people, you might like to exclude people who you know for sure are NOT your target audience. So, experimentally, here’s what I did.
For the purposes of this, I know that high school gamers, are probably not going to be into my content. I’m about marketing, communication and business. I also excluded people in labour type work, because right now my key target is people running service businesses, or at desk jobs, not necessarily hard labour. Maybe that’s a niche I can get into later.
So, there’s my secrets revealed, and who my target audience is. Now it will be interesting to see if engagement increases with getting this content in front of people more aligned with my business and values. Stay tuned!
PS I know that was a lot of info, feel free to email me if you have any questions. I personally think the hardest part is getting really nitty gritty with your audience interests, and creating the ad itself. What do you find the hardest?