Key Facebook Audiences You Can Target to Maximize Your Ad Spend

Your Dream Business

English - July 28, 2018 23:49 - 20 minutes - 20.1 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratings
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KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTA lead magnet allows you to put out valuable content in exchange for your audience’s email addresses.Detailed targeting on Facebook offers so many options for you, including demographics, interests and behaviors.Common interests to pursue include which publications they might read, who they might follow and websites they might be interested in.Install your Facebook pixel to be able to target people who visit your website, sales page or landing page.Using a pixel on a landing page can get real granular. You can identify the people who landed on your landing page BUT NOT on the following thank you page. This allows you to target anyone who visited your landing page while excluding those who visited the thank you page.You can create a custom engagement audience, which allows you to target individuals on Facebook who have viewed a video on your Facebook page.Facebook will match your own audience database to who they have on the platform. This is helpful for you to reach your list in a couple of ways and market to additional audiences who look like those on your existing list.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…There are so many variables that can impact the effectiveness of your ad spend. This is where using targeted audiences on your ads can truly help; the narrower your audience gets, the higher your conversion rates will be. The opportunity that Facebook is affording you here is phenomenal! Spend time looking into creating audiences in Facebook and seeing how they can work for you. All these things are trial and error. If they aren’t working, stop, rework and try again.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSHow Teresa’s ads are working right now – 02:08#1: Picking your audience using Facebook’s options – 04:38A deep-dive into detailed targeting options on Facebook – 05:56#2: Remarketing to known website visitors using Facebook’s pixel –08:43#3: Remarketing to video views using custom audiences – 14:37#4: Uploading your own audience database to Facebook – 17:20How to use look-alike audiences based on existing data – 18:38
Transcript below

Hello and a super warm welcome to this week's podcast episode. I hope you've had a fabulous week and you're still enjoying this lovely sunshine if you're in the UK. I know it's causing havoc in other places, but I have to say I do enjoy the sun. So I quite like this warm weather.

Anyway, I have had a really good week. I have been super busy actually doing some work for me, which kind of sounds strange, but when you have an agency like I do, and you have a team and you work with clients, you often find that your time is taken up doing work for them. And rightly so, they're paying the bills, they're obviously giving everybody a job. And therefore, when I have a list of things to do, theirs always tends to come first. Although I am also a big believer of, you need to work on your business, not in your business, and I don't probably spend enough time doing that.

However this week and the end of last week, I've managed to do it. So that's really cool. And one of the things I've done this week is I have advertised a lead magnet. Now obviously I've talked about lead magnets before in the podcast, and it's basically when you're putting out some content, some really good, valuable content that my audience are gonna want to have, and in exchange for that content, they give me their email address. And this week, I have been advertising that via social media, both on Facebook and Instagram. And it's reminded me again about how wonderful the advertising tool is that Facebook have.

How Teresa’s ads are working right now

And I obviously do ads all the time for clients, but I think when...

How Teresa’s ads are working right now

And I obviously do ads all the time for clients, but I think when it's your own, you pay more particular interest to it and I've been desperately watching the leads come in and I've had a really good result. My average lead is costing me about 70 P at the moment, which for me and my business, this is really, really good. And actually, just while I'm on this subject, one thing that is really interesting is that I often get asked, "What should it be? What amount should it be? How many leads should I get?" And you know what, there's no hard and fast rule. It really does depend. The interesting thing about doing any type of advertising is that there are so many variables that take place that could affect the advert one way or the other.

I have a great example of this. So we were doing the adverts, we were running them across Facebook and Instagram, and I always thought that Instagram ads weren't ever as good as, say, the Facebook ads in terms of engagement, because of the fact that on Instagram, it's much more about liking pictures than going to visit a website, which is what my advert is doing. I'm trying to get people to leave the platform they're in and go to a landing page where they give me their details.

So anyway, I put this advert on Instagram, and I just used the same image as I used for Facebook and it was a landscape image, really nice image of the checklist that I was giving away. And anyway, Steve, who works with me, he does the tech side and helps me with advertising, he said to me, "Could we recreate the image so it's square for Instagram?" And I was like, "Yeah, great idea," obviously with all the other things we were doing, I just hadn't thought about it.

And we saw our advert conversion cost go from one pound 50 per conversion, IE, each person that gave me their email address cost me one pound 50, once I changed the image to a square image, it went right down to 58 P. And it blew my mind. I couldn't actually believe that having the square image would make such a difference. But anyway, it did and it was fabulous.

So, doing this advertising spurred me on to talk about Facebook ads in this week's podcast. So today, I am going to talk you through why Facebook audiences are amazing and some of the different things that you can do with them. So I am gonna go through four different types of audience that you can do and how you can use them to better target and to really maximise your spend on Facebook.

#1: Picking your audience using Facebook’s options

Okay, let's get started. So, I'm going to start with the one that probably most people use when they're setting up an advert. And this is through picking your target audience by creating an audience using Facebook options. So, when you're going through the advertising tool, the second screen you get to which is the advert set is where you pick your audience. And in here, you're going to be able to pick the types of audience you want to go for. So the most basic form is that you're going to be able to go for where are they in the world. You can choose by post code, you can choose by type of place, you can literally put a pin drop on a map and decide how far out you want that pin drop to cover.

Obviously you pick location, then you can pick your age of your audience. Obviously it goes from anything 13 right the way up to 65. Then you can pick your gender. Is it men or is it women or is it both? There is an option to enter a language in there, and you only really need to do that if you are advertising in a certain language that is not the normal spoken language in that area. So obviously, if you were advertising in the UK, you don't need to put English in there because that's the language that the majority of the people in that area speak.

A deep-dive into detailed targeting options on Facebook

Okay, and then we get down to the good bit, we get down to the detailed targeting. And I'm actually having to bring this up on my screen as I talk you through it because there are so many options that I'm never gonna be able to remember. So I'm just gonna click through a few just to give you an idea. The main kind of targeting areas you have are demographics, interests and behaviours. Under demographics, you've got things like education, life events, parenting, politics, US only, relationships, and work.

So let's just dive into education. And you can look at the level of education someone went to, the field of study, what universities or schools they went to, or what undergraduate years they're in. If I go to parents, for instance, I can pick the age of the children that these parents are. So, let me explain that because that doesn't make much sense. But basically, you can pick parents with preschool children, parents with adult children, parents with preteens and so on and so forth. Relationships, obviously you can look at relationship status, so things like, are they divorced, are they engaged, are they single? The work section is another great one because you can look at things like, are they employees, what industry are they in, who employs them and job title. So if you're going after a particular type of person in a particular job role, then this can be really useful.

And then, under the next section, interests, you've basically got a huge section. And it's every possible interest that you could imagine. So I would suggest to you that if you're gonna use interest, you literally just type in the thing that you're thinking about. So normally, when i look at this, I think about what publications might they actually purchase or read, who would they follow, and what websites might they visit? So for instance, if I was searching social media people, I might pick things like social media examiner, Amy Porterfield, Kim Garst, all those types of people. What I'm trying to do when I pick an audience is think about who my potential customers might follow or be interested in. So like I said, that interest section is huge. They literally sort of put everything down there.

And then you've got the behaviours section which can be quite useful if you're looking at things like financial stuff, if you're looking at mobile data and those sort of things. But like I said, it tends to be those first two, demographics and interests are amazing.

And that's how you would create your target audience. If you're coming new to this and you're deciding to do some advertising, then that's probably the place you're going to start. You're going to try and find your audience by picking out some of the key characteristics that you can think of.

#2: Remarketing to known website visitors using Facebook’s pixel

Okay. Onto number two. One of the other really smart things that Facebook can do is they can give you something called a pixel. Now all a pixel is is a snippet of code. You might want to speak to the person who built your site or someone who's a bit more tech savvy if you're not, and personally, I have, I mentioned Steve earlier and I have Steve who would do this for me. So, he would put the pixel on a website or a landing page. And landing pages can be really useful to have that pixel on. And what that bit of code is doing is it's reporting back to Facebook every time it recognises someone.

So what happens is, let's say for instance I go onto a shop and look at some shoes. You know when you leave that shop, or leave the web shop, not the physical shop, when you leave that and you go and visit something else on the internet and those shoes keep reappearing around the internet? Well that's called, "Remarketing," and the pixel is how Facebook enables you to re market to people. And why this is so powerful is, when people come to your website, great if you've got a lead magnet on there trying to get their details, but if they don't leave their details, you don't know who those people are. Now if you have a pixel on your website, okay, granted you're still not going to know the exact people, however, you're gonna be able to target to people who've visited your website.

So although you might not know names and people and be able to contact them directly, what Facebook is able to do is store those people in a custom audience. So to find your custom audiences or to look at how you set one up, you go into your ads manager and you click top left, "Audience," and then you come to the audience pages and top left again is, "Create custom audience." And this is where you're gonna find all the audiences that I'm now going to be talking about.

Okay, so let's get back to that pixel. So it's basically tracking who has visited your site or your landing page, and it's putting them in a pot in custom audiences. And what you're able to do is you are then able to send an advert directly to those people. You can even do things like check out certain pages on your website. So if they visited a particular page that is focusing on a particular product or service, then you can re market back to them, you can send them an advert in Facebook that basically says, "Did you wanna look at this thing? Were you still interested?" Or whatever it might be.

And like I said, these are brilliant. And I have seen some great examples of this where I have visited a website, within 10, 15 minutes, I've gone into Instagram and suddenly, that website is advertising to me. And it's great because I know some people get a little bit freaked out about them being stalked around the internet, but for me, I don't see it like that. I see it as a opportunity to recapture that lead, to remind those people that you're still around, you still exist, and also, people could end up coming off your website for loads of reasons, that they got caught up in something, that the internet went down, that they got called into a meeting or whatever it might be. So don't presume that just because someone's gone to your site and left again that they're not gonna want to hear from you again.

And then the other really good example is where I've seen it on landing pages. So, this is where it can, again, get super clever. Let's say you have a pixel on your landing page which is selling something or promoting a lead magnet. And then you also have a pixel on your thank you page. What you're going to be able to do is identify the people that landed on that page but didn't then complete. So, they never reached the thank you page. Because obviously, you only reach the thank you page if you've bought the product. So basically, what you can do is you can set an audience that says, "Target everybody that hit that landing page but exclude the people who hit the thank you page." And therefore, you can give those people another opportunity to come back to that landing page and actually then complete the purchase or fill in the details for the lead magnet.

Again, not all of them are gonna want to do it, but you're potentially gonna capture some people who didn't get a chance to do it for whatever reason previously. And again, I saw a brilliant example of this.

Marie Forleo, she sells a programme called B School. And Amy Porterfield, who you know that I follow and think is wonderful, she promotes that really heavily. So, when I was watching Amy's stuff, she was talking about B School and I was thinking, "Do I need B School?" So anyway, as I do, I go along to the sales page and I have a look at what B School is and is it right for me? And then, within a day or two, I then get an advert served to be on Facebook and it's Marie Forleo. And she's done a live or she's definitely done a piece to camera video, and in that video, she says, "I saw you looking, I know you visited the sales page, what stopped you? Why didn't you sign up? Do you know that," and then she obviously went into more of a sales patter in terms of why I should be a B School member.

But how powerful is that, actually being able to identify what pages people went to and then be able to market back to them to try and then re convince them that it was the right thing to do or that they should've bought the product or whatever? But also, to capture the kind of people that were maybe a bit on the fence. And actually, if I was on the fence, which I wasn't, I didn't get B School in the end, but if I was on the fence and I was thinking about, "Should I have it or not?" Then maybe that advert might have swayed me. So, that is another great one.

#3: Remarketing to video views using custom audiences

Okay, onto number three, re marketing to video views. This one is a brilliant one too. So, within that audience that I talked about on Facebook advertising, there is custom audiences. That's what these audiences are called. That's just the group name for them. And one of the custom audiences that you can create is an engagement audience. And when you click on, "Engagement," you're going to be able to target people who have watched videos, who have done a full screen experience, who have visited your Facebook page, looked at your Instagram business profile. So this is a really, really good one.

And the way I use this is ... Now, if you've put a video on Facebook and someone sits and watches your video for, let's say, 30 seconds if it's a minute, and they've watched it for 30 seconds, 30 seconds on Facebook watching one video is actually quite a long time. I know it doesn't feel like it in the scheme of things, but actually, for a video on social media, for someone to engage for 30 seconds, it's quite a long time. And therefore, I would presume that because they sat and watched my video for a fair bit of time, that they're interested in what it is I'm talking about. Or otherwise, they would've gone straight on and ignored the video or they would've caught the first few seconds and thought, "This isn't for me."

They have sat and watched this video for any length of time and this can obviously depend on the length of the video, what points at which they might drop out. But basically, if you said 50 percent of the video, then you're thinking they're fairly interested. Which means, I can then target back to those people knowing that they are probably more interested than the original target audience that I was advertising to.

So let's say the first audience I talked about where you pick your target audience and you try and pick the people you think will be interested, if you then sent them a video ad, you could then only target the people who got halfway through your video in order to then send your lead magnet ad, for instance, and hopefully what you'll find is because you're narrowing down the people that you're targeting, that actually, your conversion is a much better price than if you'd just sent that to the whole audience initially.

I hope you're keeping up. I do get that this is a little bit confusing, not only for me to say, but maybe also for you to listen. So I really hope you understand. But basically, like I said, what I do is I advertise a video, I might choose a target audience to advertise that video to, and then I choose the people that have watched at least half of the video, depending on the length of time, and then I re advertise back to those people as well.

#4: Uploading your own audience database to Facebook

Okay, onto the final one. The last one is custom audiences that you can upload your data into Facebook. Now with recent GDPR changes, obviously everyone's data is looking a little bit thinner than it was. However, if you still have a sizeable database, that's really difficult, because saying it's sizeable means one thing to one person and one thing to another, I get it, I'm sorry, but all I can suggest is that you upload it and see. But if you have a database where you have your customers and prospects on there, this is obviously the best data that you