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PankajOptimizing Facebook ad campaigns is second nature to every seasoned digital marketer. Only an optimized campaign receives the prime spot in today’s ultra-competitive news feed and provides a massive return on advertising spend (ROAS). But an ad campaign cannot deliver real-world results until it reaches the right audiences.
That is why digital marketers strategize to the extent that their campaign targets the right audiences. While analyzing audiences, a marketer uncovers game-changing insights into their demographics, device, locations, interests, preferences, budgets, and other metrics.
In short, marketers analyze audiences for gathering actionable consumer insights. And when marketers execute an insight-driven strategy, they create nearly accurate buyer personas and transform a campaign into a revenue-generating machine.
But the real deal is targeting the right audience on Facebook. How to do it? In this post, we’ll uncover the steps for finding mission-critical insights into Facebook audiences.
How Facebook Empowers Marketers To Target The Right Audiences
After the infamous Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Facebook has cut back on much of the functionalities of its Audience Insights and Facebook Analytics.
But Facebook is still a powerhouse of insights, which can still be used for collecting actionable insights into targeted audiences. It is just that a marketer should know where to look at.
First, let us figure out how to use Facebook Audience Insights and social media optimization strategies for targeting the right audiences. Then, let us dive deep into a gold mine of insights that Facebook Analytics provides.
Facebook Audience Insights
Audience Insights refines audiences based on a variety of data points including device, gender, location, demographics, and the time at which the user is active. That way, creating ads with more qualified engagement gets simpler. Audience Insights is especially beneficial when a marketer has fleshed out the buyer persona and just wants to fine-tune it.
Choose Audience Insights from the top toolbar.
After choosing Audience Insights, marketers will get two options.
- Everyone on Facebook
- People connected to your Page
In case marketers choose Everyone on Facebook, they will get audiences from all over Facebook. They can segment on the basis of age, interest, location, gender, etc.
That way, the marketers have access to the entire universe of Facebook audiences so that they can know which set of people is best suited for their ad campaign.
If, however, marketers choose People connected to your Page, they will be able to analyze the data based on the people who’ve liked their page.
What if the marketer has paid for cheap likes and is relying on this Audience Insights for understanding targeted audience? Then that kind of paid data will not help in doing a fair analysis.
Worst of all, in such situations, depending on this data can push marketers in making absolutely wrong decisions.
Audience Insights is best suited for doing three activities.
Getting To Know The Competition Better
Brands and advertisers know their competition inside out, and they’re used to dealing with such sort of competition. But when a brand is on social media, especially Facebook, the competition may even involve many upstart brands. So, it is always better to check whether the landscape is the same or not.
You Can Get To Know What Your Competition Is Doing
After knowing what all brands are competing on Facebook, a marketer can check what they are doing to improve their engagement rate. For example, Facebook gives markers the opportunity to analyze the engagement rate for each post of the competition. That is how a marketer can check what is working for the audiences of the competing brands.
Targeting The Competitor’s Followers
If there are a lot of followers on the competitor’s page, then experienced Facebook marketers target these followers based on their interest. These followers will be ready-to-engage audiences if your ad set is on point. A lot of brands have laid their hands on qualified targeted audiences by using this tactic.
Facebook Analytics
Facebook Analytics is a powerful tool that’s not used the way it should have been used. Anyway, let us focus on the top two tools in Facebook Analytics that can give result-driven insights into targeted audiences.
But before diving into understanding these tools, ensure that Event Source Group is set up. That way, ad data and page information will merge and show deep insights that we are about to discuss.
Funnels
Located under Activity, Funnels combine a series of actions for understanding how various audience segments react to various pieces of content.
For instance, with the help of Funnels, a marketer will notice whether the audiences who comment on posts end up visiting the site or not. With such insights, you can create result-oriented top-of-the-funnel strategies. With Facebook Analytics, marketers can gather deeper, sharper insights into what an audience does on their page. Now, this is something that Google Analytics cannot do.
Lifetime Value
Located in the Activity section, Lifetime Value helps gather insights into analyzing the behavior and buying patterns of targeted audiences.
In this section, the marketer can analyze different patterns of a customer journey. This analysis can eventually help the marketer answer any number of questions related to engagement points, channel attribution, churn rates, and process/product/price issue.
Down to the left, a marketer will be able to access the week when a user’s first interaction with the brand happened. From top to bottom, you will have the data from initial events of those users. This chart gives high-quality insights into the way targeted users interact with a brand. By following these two tools in Facebook Analytics, any marketer can mine insight-driven audience data the easy way. But there’s one big mistaken that marketers face when they are finding audiences through Audience Insights or Facebook Analytics. It’s known as audience overlap.
Audience Overlap
Ads overlap is a big mistake that has the immense potential for overthrowing the results of a whole campaign. Audience overlap is one tough marketing mistake where different ad sets are shown to the same audience.
If the overlap is larger, the campaign does not perform the way it should have been performing. So, it is important to not waste budget and time on targeting ad sets fighting for the attention of similar audiences.
When marketers begin an ad campaign on Facebook, they target a variety of ad sets. Each set contains individual ads, so it is natural that separate ads of the same campaign will be competing against each other.
And that is completely fine because a marketer creates the ads in an ad set for the same purpose, for knowing which one performs better than the others.
But the real problem starts when marketers create second or third ad sets. By that time, they must know different ads that are competing against one another. So that means after creating second or third ad set, a marketer must be in a better position to strategize their ads for avoiding any further competition among themselves.
In order to avoid creating this overlap, top digital marketing companies make sure they create Lookalike Audience. Marketers can find Lookalike Audience by going to the Audience section under the top tool bar named Assets.
With a Lookalike Audience, marketers find a brand-new way of reaching newer audiences who are likely to buy from a business as they are very similar to its existing customers. Once Lookalike Audience is formed, a marketer can compare it with the existing audiences. That way, the marketer will uncover the exact percentage of overlapped audience for an ad campaign.
Once marketers know the percentage overlapping, they can refine the ad campaign so that it targets the intended audiences better. All of this will eventually prevent audiences from facing any kind of ad fatigue and will avoid your brand to receive bad press on Facebook.
Putting This Together
While building audience on Facebook, it is quite obvious to get carried away by all the potential ways of reaching a set of targeted audiences. So marketers should be careful to pick their audience, to whom they would market in the future. Best of all, they need to do the targeting without overlapping and impacting the performance of their campaign.
Which is why, it makes complete sense to do upfront strategizing that can lead to better and more powerful performance down the line. In case there is any doubt about targeting the right set of audiences on Facebook, it comes down to hiring Facebook marketing experts. They will help businesses create powerful ad campaigns that engage the right set of people every time.
