- Reading time: 3 mins
- Topics:
- Social Media
Reaching people interested in your product or service must be done in steps – the first of which is determining your target audience. Once you’ve discovered who is most interested in what you offer, connecting with them comes next. To reach potential customers, you don’t have to search high and low. Instead, you can turn to a tool billions of people use every day: Facebook.
This popular social media platform, has plenty of tools for businesses hoping to reach their target audience. With Facebook advertising tools you can be as broad or as specific as you’d like so you can engage potential customers.
The trick to using this platform to successfully target your audience is knowing how to access the various Facebook advertising tools available to you. Facebook’s “ads create” tool can help you get started. Whether your marketing objective is to reach people near your business, increase brand awareness, collect leads, or drive traffic to your website, this tool can help.
We’ll use brand awareness as an example. If you want to spread the word about your business and get people to recognize who you are and what you do, Facebook is a great place to start.
Is your target audience 40 to 50-year-old men in Presque Isle, Maine? No problem! Facebook lets you choose an age range, gender, location, and more. You can even target people depending on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Are the 40 to 50-year-old men in your target audience generally married and interested in fishing? Facebook can help you target an audience that specific.
If you’re an advertiser on Facebook, you can narrow your ad’s target audience based on various factors, such as age, gender, relationship status, education and even their job. You can also use interest targeting, which helps you narrow your audience further based on their interests, hobbies, and the pages they like on Facebook. Facebook gathers these interests from information users have already added to their account, such as the posts they share on their timeline, keywords from the pages they follow or the apps they used, and more.
Additionally, audiences can be targeted based on their behaviors – activities on Facebook and offline activity provided by third-party sources. After you’ve narrowed the audience for your ad, you can choose a budget, a schedule, and a format, then let Facebook do the rest.
Facebook also offers you the option to create a “lookalike audience” based on people who are already interested in your business. The platform uses traits, such as location, age and interests, to find similar people in a custom audience, upgraded Facebook pixel, or a Facebook page. For instance, you can upload an email list of your current clients and create a lookalike audience that has similar traits to those who have already purchased from you. Or, you can use remarketing to show your ads to people who have visited your site, but haven’t made a purchase yet.
These sophisticated Facebook advertising tools will allow you to target people who will be interested in your product or service. The only step left is to try it out yourself!