As you may know, Facebook possesses an extensive user data reservoir, which can be harnessed to reach users quickly and accurately through a feature known as Audiences.
1. Facebook Offers You Three Types of Audiences
The core principle of Facebook is to comprehend customers’ needs and provide relevant benefits to them. From this perspective, Facebook also provides businesses with valuable data to reach the right customers effectively.
1.1 Core Audiences
The first type is Core Audiences, which allows you to target customers based on:
- Demographics (e.g., age, gender, occupation, education, marital status).
- Location (geographical location; you can target a specific city or region).
- Interests (you can target people with specific interests or exclude interests you don’t want).
For instance, if you’re selling high-end sunscreens and premium cosmetics in Hanoi, you might target women aged 27-35, with interests in skincare, beauty products, cosmetics, and travel.
1.2 Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences allow you to target users who have interacted with your business in various ways, such as:
- Engagement with your page in the past 1 week, 15 days, 30 days, 90 days, 365 days, etc.
- Message interactions with your page.
- Video views on your page.
- Visits to your page.
- Form submissions.
- Website visits (if you’ve installed the Facebook pixel on your website).
You can create Custom Audiences based on the level of interaction with your business, such as people who messaged your page, watched videos, visited your page, or visited your website.
1.3 Lookalike Audience
This is a particularly intriguing type of audience. After you’ve built Custom Audiences, you can create Lookalike Audiences from those lists.
Lookalike Audiences are fantastic because they allow you to easily advertise to users with behaviors similar to those who have already interacted with your business. If users within this audience segment exhibit the same behaviors, the likelihood of them making a purchase from you is significantly higher.
With each type of audience, you can create specific campaigns tailored to their needs. For example, you might offer a 10% discount to customers within your Custom Audiences who make a repeat purchase or provide feedback.
2. Using Audience Insights for More Effective Targeting
If you have a basic idea of your target audience but are still unsure about specific preferences, such as age, relationship status, education level, or interests, Facebook’s Audience Insights tool can help. Keep in mind that no tool is perfect, so it’s beneficial to use multiple sources for the most accurate results.
Audience Insights helps you better understand your audience, specifically these three groups:
- People who like your page (if you bought likes without initially filtering your audience, this may not provide the best results).
- People within your Custom Audiences (those who have interacted with your business).
- People you are targeting on Facebook.
This tool provides an overview of the characteristics of your audience, helping you to make informed decisions about whom to target. It offers insights into age groups, gender distribution, relationship status, education, interests, and more.
For example, you can use Audience Insights to discover that 50% of your audience is aged 18-24, 40% is aged 25-34, and 92% are female. It can also reveal relationship status (46% single, 39% married) and educational background (77% have completed college education).
Which age group accounts for the majority?
Marital status and education
Interest
You can delve further into interests, such as pages liked by your audience. Additionally, Audience Insights can provide location data, behaviors, and other characteristics that can help refine your targeting.
By combining this information, you can refine your Facebook ad campaigns. For example, you might want to target new customers (those who haven’t liked, engaged, messaged your page, or are not in your Lookalike Audiences). In this case, you might choose to target women, aged 18-24, single, with a college degree, and interests in cosmetics, fashion, and skincare.
In addition to using Audience Insights, consider other methods to define your target audience, such as analyzing customer data, conducting surveys, etc. To reach the most effective results, it’s essential to use multiple sources and strategies.
