You’re putting out great ads, but at some point or other, many independent or medium size business owners find themselves hitting our head against the wall with this question.
I can see they like my Facebook ads, but they’re not converting to buyers. Why is this happening?”
You see, you can have the BEST ads, the BEST copy, BEST website – but if you have the wrong audience, you are wasting your money. This is why:
Example 1: Bianca may love your quality dog beds that you sell as she is nuts about dogs, but she does not actually own a dog (right interest, wrong buyer)
Example 2: Shannon loves your imported, pink flamingo, Instagramable pool inflatables, but she lives in a flat (right aspiration, wrong buyer)
Example 3: Joe likes the idea of learning a new skill online, but he has never before bought an online course (right interest, but low converting chance)
Yes, perhaps they will buy – BUT you should hedge ad spend where the chances are higher (of purchase). Remember, Facebook takes money off your budget when your ads are served, and they consider themselves successful when someone engages with your ads (comments/likes/shares). So they send you more wrong people. Eg: people who like, but don\’t BUY. This means three things for your business:
- You are not seeing ROI on your media spend on Facebook
- You are training your Facebook pixel to \”fetch\” the wrong people (a pixel is a piece of code from Facebook that tracks your activity from Facebook )
- You are getting frustrated and feeling like your efforts are not working
So, how do I create the right target audience on Facebook?
For this post, I’m going to be using one of my own examples of how I create custom audiences. One of my online businesses is www.vintage-etc.com. It’s an online only (no physical store) that sells luxury furniture and lifestyle products. It is an inspirational brand (it is not often you replace your dining table or sofa). This means that there are many people who \”like\” our furniture posts, but are not placed to buy. Obviously if we are investing adspend, we would prefer those that like and then buy. This is how have learnt to solve this problem. There are 8 steps to take to create custom audiences for your business:
Step 1. Make sure you are working in Ads Manager
The first thing is to create the right target audiences for your business or brand on ads manager in Facebook. You have to work in Ads Manager, install the app on your phone or upgrade your Facebook pages to a business page. This offers you many targeting options. I also recommend watching Youtube tutorials on how to use ads manager, there are tons of helpful demos. Important point however, tempting as it is, avoid boosting your ads from your timeline until you have saved audiences that you have tested (see further down)
Step 2. Create your audiences according to lifestyle interests
By now you should know who your buyer personas are. My facebook stats tell me (on my page insights) that 84% of my customers on Facebook are married women, age 30- 55, with an education. I also know they buy home decor magazines and that they shop at up-market supermarkets, with the highest chance of this group of people buying, is if they are renovating or moving. My other target market is interior decorators who project manage hotel/restaurant refurbishments, game lodges and private residences. I create different ads, for my different personas. Copy and images speak to that particular buyer persona with key insights about their needs and our solution. Then I go about creating saved audiences with those insights.
Step 3. Define your audience by specific behaviour patterns
Once you’ve created your target audience, age, gender, city and lifestyles, behaviours and preferences, get a level deeper. For example, if your business is all about selling pet beds, you will define your audience by selecting interests like animal lovers, perhaps those who watch Dodo videos – but obviously if they are all these things AND looking at puppy training content, they are a great market for your product (these are indeed hot buyers, not just pet lovers). But if you bang all these criteria into one box, Facebook basically says go match some of those criteria. If you are a service-based business like selling digital skills content, create your target audience by choosing people who have an interest in Facebook ads, online marketing, digital marketing and who like online learning programmes. The challenge however, is to give Facebook some non-negotiable criteria as to who sees your content, beyond just the interests you specified.
Step 4. Narrow your audience
This is for me the most important step in defining my audiences – to further narrow and redinine my target audience. This is where you define any MUST have and MUST exclude behaviors and interests of your audience to narrow it to the exact people you want to target. For example: as I sell luxury items of furniture, I will include the following lifestyle interests for my target audience: eg, women age 30-55, interested in design and interiors, who love furniture and refurbishments, who watch home improvement programmes, interested in décor magazines and so forth. BUT, in order to further refine my target audience, I will take it a step further by including the following MUST HAVE criteria. This means ONLY show my ads to those interests plus that MUST have. This then allows Facebook to correctly identify and refine my target audience into hot buyers that will convert. For example:
- MUST have recently moved
- MUST have recently wed
This then allows Facebook to correctly identify my lifestyle interests, but to include absolute inclusions as well. Remember, can also then select absolute exclusions as well by choosing MUST EXCLUDE. If for example I was promoting a fertility clinic, I would say MUST exclude women who have a new baby
Step 5. Up the chances of having people who can afford to buy
Facebook does not allow you to discriminate on buyers – but they do allow you to choose other factors that determine if people can afford your product. Examples of actual choices on targeting on Facebook are:
- Must be engaged online shoppers
- Must buy luxury goods online
- Must travel overseas frequently
- Must own their own home
- Must own a facebook business page
- Must have transacted in the last 3 months
I recommend you only choose two MUST have options, or your audience will be too narrow. You also then select the next variable:
- Must exclude boxing or soccer
- Must exclude broadcast TV for example (Netflix lovers may be more your audience?)
- Must exclude people on holiday in my location
Step 6. Make sure your audience selection is not too big and not too small
Once you have made the audience selection, check the little barometer on top right of image. This will tell you if your audience is a good size (in the green zone) and how many your estimated reach will be per day.
Step 7: Define your target audience by means of location with a pin
When choosing the location to target with your Facebook ads, it will allow you to drop a pin, and then say only say plus 1 or 2 miles” and NOT “suburb plus 20 miles”, particularly if you are targeting a city with pockets of varied income groups. You can also select a suburb and say \”exclude this area\” . You can also say only show this to people who live here (ie not on holiday) . To select a radius, use the slider positioned next to your chosen location/suburb and move it to have the smallest possible radius for that specific suburb. That way you can accurately target specific areas combined with the desired interests of your target audience.
Step 8: Save your audience with a memorable name
Once you\’ve created your target audience save them as your custom audiences so that they are there ready to use whenever you want to run a Facebook ad or boost a post into a specific target audience. This also ensures that you never have to create an audience from scratch every time you want to run a Facebook ad or boost a post. You can simply select your custom audience and you\’re good to go! I find that when naming them, if 4 months down the line it really helps me to have been painfully clear in my name (which only I see). For example \”Women 34-55 -luxury goods- online shoppers in Cape Town – MUST HAVE recently moved home\” or another example is entrepreneurs who manage facebook business page – MUST HAVE – actively interested online marketing courses\”
Step 9: How do I know if I’m targeting the right audience on Facebook?
Finally – last golden thread to tie this all up… a great way to test whether you’ve created the right target audience for your Facebook ad is to create 5 different audiences (save them all with clear names) and then to promote the SAME post or ad creative via an adset, into all 5 audiences for 7 days for a small amount per ad (suggested amount is $10 per ad or equivalent currency). It is very important you have the same creative and same ad budget, so that you can see it is the audience that is the the difference. At the end of your Facebook ad campaign, you will then be able to see which audience worked on your budget (it will tell you a cost of x per click). Once you’ve identified your top-performing target audience, then only put spend behind that specific audience that worked the best – and then GO ! Increase your budget with confidence.
To summarise:
As you can see, there is no easy way out, no shortcut, no quick fix, it’s about investing the time and effort researching and testing in order to hit the tipping point and master the magic formula. Being specific and targeted instead of just promoting to the masses that will never actually end up converting to real sales. Clearly this takes time, patience and testing, but it will ABSOLUTELY be well worth it in the end! We\’ll be covering all of this and so much more in our upcoming Social & Digital Workshop, so be sure to book your seat online today and take your business to the next level by being in action
