Despite what all the gurus and “experts” say, Facebook/Meta is still the king when it comes to being the goat for social media advertising targeting. By setting up customer, lookalike, and saved audiences, you can significantly boost brand awareness and customer engagement. This article will guide you through the process, offering straightforward, actionable steps for building these key audiences.
Understanding how to fine-tune your social media advertising targeting strategy can make all the difference in your campaigns. Whether you’re aiming to re-engage current customers or attract new ones, tailored audience sets will help you achieve your goals. Read on to learn how to use Facebook/Meta Business Manager effectively for your advertising needs.
Primary Audience: Building the Foundation
To kick off your social media advertising targeting, start with your primary audience. Begin by compiling all your leads, customers, and prospects into a single spreadsheet. It’s essential to include only the email addresses for each contact to maintain privacy and ensure the effectiveness of your targeted campaigns.
Once your list is ready, upload it as a custom audience in Facebook/Meta Business Manager. Targeting this custom audience allows you to keep your current customers informed about your business, new services, and updates. Use this audience for brand awareness campaigns designed to make sure your existing clients stay engaged and loyal.
Lookalike Audience: Expanding Your Reach
After setting up your primary audience, the next step in social media advertising targeting is to create a lookalike audience. This type of audience mirrors the characteristics of your existing customers, helping you reach people with similar interests and behaviors. Use your custom audience as the base to generate this lookalike audience.
Location targeting is crucial for your lookalike audience. By dropping a pin or entering zip codes of your desired service areas, you can narrow down your reach to specific geographic regions. This ensures that your ads are shown to potential customers who are more likely to convert, enhancing the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.
Saved Audience: Optimizing for Specific Needs
When it comes to saved audiences, the focus is on refining your social media advertising targeting even further. Start by selecting that lookalike audience, then dropping a pin for precise location targeting. Adjust the age demographics to match your target customer profile, making sure you reach the most relevant audience segments.
One of the advantages of using saved audiences is allowing Facebook to optimize other audience parameters. Besides location and age, Facebook can automatically adjust other factors to maximize your ad’s performance. Trusting Facebook’s optimization algorithm can lead to better results and a more efficient use of your advertising budget.
By creating your audiences into primary, lookalike, and saved segments, you can create highly effective social media advertising targeting strategies. A primary audience keeps existing customers engaged, a lookalike audience helps you reach new people similar to your customers, and a saved audience fine-tunes the parameters for optimal ad performance.
Taking the time to build and adjust these audiences can significantly improve your marketing efforts. Remember to experiment and analyze your audience performance regularly to continue optimizing your campaigns effectively.
Next Steps and Additional Resources
One of my secret weapons for building b2b targeted audiences is a tool called Metadata, they have a really awesome product that allows you to upload a list of company domain names, then build an audience of everyone that works there through their databases and integrations with Facebook/Meta and LinkedIn.
With these practical insights and steps, you are now equipped to use Facebook/Meta Business Manager to its fullest potential, bolstering your brand awareness and reaching your ideal audience more efficiently.
If you’re looking at all this and it’s just going right over your head, that’s okay. This stuff has taken me years of experimenting to learn and understand. And that’s why I created the Fractional CMO for agents just like you.