Make Your Facebook Strategy Effective by Targeting the Ideal Audience

Jan 28, 2021 - 6 min read
What should I know about Facebook marketing?

If you are eager to know how to market your business on Facebook, we are ready to help you with that! Facebook is a very powerful marketing tool that you are probably already using to build your social presence , but have you ever thought of using Facebook Ads to target and reach more people?

Facebook Ads segmentation options are easy to use. We recommend trying a couple of different targeting options: target users based on their interests and target users similar to your current fans by creating Lookalike Audiences.

For both these options, we suggest limiting the geotargeting to your city or state, so with a limited budget you can have a better ad frequency (how many times a user sees your ad), instead of targeting a wider audience who might see your ad only one time (the ideal frequency for this channel is between 3 and 4). This will help you increase the effectiveness of the campaigns.

Find Your Facebook Target Audience

Did you know that about 40% of Facebook users don’t like to engage with brand pages? According to Brandwatch’s study on Facebook statistics, this means that the only way to reach a potential customer is by investing in paid advertising.

So, How do you get the best target audience on Facebook? First of all, just to be clear, an audience is the market you want to target with your ad campaigns. Facebook gives you three options: saved, custom, and lookalike audience.

If you are wondering ‘How do I create a good Facebook ad audience?’, below you can find the different types of audiences you can build on Facebook.

Based on the budget you are willing to invest in this kind of action, you can bid on a wider audience or you’ll have to narrow it down to the prospects that are most likely to convert.

Facebook audience insights are a great tool to explore and learn more about your target audience. What is the difference between custom audiences and lookalike audiences?

Custom audiences

A custom audience is made from a list of data about your customers. Once you provide Facebook with information about your existing gym members, it will match them with their Facebook profiles.

So if you have collected members’ email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses, you can use these identifiers to hash information with Facebook and to create well-performing segmentation.

  • Add your customer list

Follow these steps to add your CSV or TXT file.

Ads Manager > Audiences > Create audience > Custom Audience > Customer list

  • Prepare the list
  • Check that Facebook mapped your identifiers correctly and resolve all the errors
  • Upload your customer list

In order to upload the list go to Upload and Create and wait for a notification to know when your audience is ready to use.

Lookalike audiences

Lookalike audiences are an easy way to reach customers that are similar to your existing community. But how does Facebook create lookalike audiences? Starting to create your lookalike audience is a very simple 5 step process:

  • 1. Go to your audiences page: https://www.facebook.com/adsmanager/audiences
  • 2. Select “Create Audience” on the left, and then “Lookalike Audience.”
  • 3. Select your lookalike source (this will be page likes.)
  • 4. Select your audience location (think statewide or even national, if you choose something too local you may be limiting yourself too much.)
  • 5. Select the size of your audience (leave this at the default, 0% - 1%.)

Saved audiences

In order to use this segmentation, you have to save an audience first. Everything will be saved except for the location, so be aware that you’ll have to select your locations each time you want to use a saved audience on Facebook.

You can always click the Edit button if you want to change your ad. This type of audiences allows you to set up location-based campaigns and target your customers based on:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Interests
  • Gender

How to create a Facebook ad campaign

Now that you have created the audience you can set up the campaign, targeting based on interests or targeting the Lookalike Audience recently created:

  • 1. Start by creating a new campaign here
  • 2. Define your marketing objectives (we recommend traffic, so you would only pay when a user clicks on your ads)
  • 3. Define the name of your campaign, the daily budget, and the bid strategy, which we suggest setting to the lowest cost.
  • 4. Now you need to define the targeting. You can select the audience if you have already created a Lookalike Audience, the location (we suggest limiting this to your city or state), the age, the gender, and the language of your audience. Another option that we recommend instead of only using Lookalike targeting is targeting based on a users’ interests and behaviors.
  • 5.The next step is selecting where you want the ad to appear; you can use the automatic option, but if you wish you can also select specific placements like only Instagram stories or Facebook newsfeed.
  • 6. Finally, you will select how you want your campaign to be optimized (we suggest link clicks) and also when you get charged, which should be set to CPC so you only pay when users click on your ad.

Be Creative With Your Ads

With these simple steps, you now have an audience to market to as well as a campaign structure. Excellent, now what exactly do we show them? You need some adverts.

The easiest way to create an advert is to simply reach out to your best customers and ask them to record a 20-30 second clip talking about their experiences with your business. A structure might look like this:

  • Who are they? (Age, job, where they live, interests, etc.)
  • Why did they first join your gym/studio?
  • What was their experience like (how much fun did they have? What are the staff like? Other members? Etc.)?
  • What did they achieve with you?
  • How has their life improved as a result?
  • What would they recommend other people like them do (i.e. sign up for your service)?
  • With a simple recording like this from your most successful customers, you’ll quickly have 5, 10, or even 20 powerful adverts!

NOTE: Facebook doesn’t permit before/after pictures or videos/pictures that show too much skin. Keep that in mind when building ads.

If you are interested in boosting your fitness business with a killer strategy to survive 2020, download this e-book now.

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Melania Armento

Melania is a SEO specialist at Virtuagym, one of the leading innovators in the digital health and fitness industry. With 6+ years experience in marketing, she loves fitness, ranking keywords with high monthly search volume, as well as taking advantages of long summer days and warm weather.