Facebook Targeted Advertising for Your Business It’s not news to anyone that advertisements are running the show on Facebook these days. If you check Facebook on a fairly regular basis, you’ve surely come across ads that seem suspiciously directed at you. You might have an inclination about how these ads ended up on your news feed, but have you realized that businesses use Facebook targeted advertising to reach the people who are the most likely to give them their business? And if you do, do you know how it works? Facebook gives you the power to target specific groups of people who are highly engaged with what your business offers through a series of questions. Compared to the average online reach of 38% for narrowly targeted campaigns, Facebook is 89% accurate. When you target your ad, you’re choosing the exact audience who you want to see your ad. It can be as specific or as broad as you like.
The Facebook targeted advertising techniques to help your business grow: • Location You can reach customers in key locations by country, state/province, city and zip code. You can also target by radius from a city, or select to include cities within a selected mile radius. There’s even the option to exclude locations. This last option could be useful if you’re already targeting to that specific location in other ad sets so you won't put out redundant ads. • Demographics You can refine your ad’s target audience based on content people have shared about themselves in their Facebook profiles, such as: age, gender, relationship status, education and type of work they do. • Interests Interest targeting allows you to define your ideal audience by their interests, hobbies and the pages they like on Facebook. For example, if you’re in the business of selling vintage clothing online, you can target customers in the sub-category Vintage clothing of the category Shopping and fashion. • Behaviors These are activities that people do on or off Facebook that inform on which device they’re using, purchase behaviors or intents, travel preferences and more. Behaviors are constructed from both activity on Facebook and offline activity provided by data from Facebook’s third-party partners. • Advanced targeting This includes: 1. Custom Audiences - Targeting Facebook Ads to existing customers or prospects using information you already have. 2. Lookalike Audiences - Finding people who are similar to your customers or prospects to target to.