Tips to become really good at Facebook targeting

Facebook targeting seems to be the ‘it’ tool these days. In order for your business to thrive, it’s important to show your product or a service to the right people at the right time. Some experienced marketers like to say that it’s not important what are you selling, but who you are selling to. Who is your ideal customer? Where do they live, what do they do, what are their habits or behaviours, what drives them? Facebook knows ‘everything,’ and as such, it’s a great tool for customer segmentation.

Here is a quick guide to Facebook targeting that will turn you from a frog to a marketing prince! Keep on reading to find out how to get to the people who matter the most to your business.

Wondering what you can target?

  • Location: You can pinpoint a radius on a map, target specific cities, countries, exclude them if need be, and even target people who have recently visited a location, or they are travelling to it. This is great for tour guides for example.
  • Age: Select the age group you wish to target.
  • Gender: Choose whether you want your ad to be shown to female or male audience, or both.
  • Relationship: You can target people based on who they are interested in, or target single people, married, engaged, divorced, and more – all based on their relationship status. Market a dating site to singles and recently divorced people, or jewellery like wedding rings for recently engaged couples.
  • Education: The education filter lets you target people who are attending high school, college, individuals who are college grads or who finished some sort of diploma or college degree. Also, you can choose to show your ad only to people who possess a certain education degree, like associate degree, master’s, doctorate, and more. You can even target people who went to a specific school, in a specific timeframe.
  • Finances: This filter lets you segment people based on their net worth and income range.
  • Home: This filter comes with a lot of segmentation options. You can choose to target people based on the type of home they have, whether they are owners or renters, and what’s the household like – newlyweds, veterans, young people, young adults, seniors, families, and more. People who are in the remodelling industry can target people whose home was built 20 years ago, and offer repairs. Real estate agencies can target first-time home buyers and renters.
  • Job: You can target people who are working for a certain employer, or have a specific job title, or just the general industry they work in.
  • Ethnicity: You can choose to target people based on their ethnicity.
  • Generation: You can target baby boomers, generation X and millennials.
  • Parenting: This filter comes with plenty of targeting options. There is a whole segment within that is dedicated to targeting Moms, and the segment targeting all parents. This way, you can choose to market diapers to parents with babies, new workout regime to fit Moms, a new fashion line to trendy Moms, and so forth.
  • Politics: Target people based on their political affinities.
  • Life events: This filter allows you target people who have already experienced a life event, or will in the future – anything form new relationships, anniversaries, new jobs, birthdays, to people who have recently moved in, who are newly engaged, or any friends to people who have experienced a life event. This is one of the easiest targeting options. For example, you can target a friend of a person who will be having a birthday soon, with an ad for a special gift. Another example: Let’s say you are selling expensive romantic vacations, you might want to target people who have been engaged for a couple of months, and less expensive options and field trips to people who are in a relationship or married and who are celebrating anniversaries.
  • Entertainment: Choose people who enjoy watching certain movies, playing games, listening to music, reading, watching TV… For example, target Game of Thrones fans with an article about the show, or target them and market a new fantasy book which might pique their interest.
  • Interests: There’s an array of interests you can target, activities, pages they liked, topics, and all sorts of related events.
  • Wellness: Target gym-goers, bodybuilders, people into healthy nutrition, meditation, yoga, physical activities like running, weight lifting, exercising, AND even Zumba! This way you can market a new class in a gym, A yoga group, A new app for fitness and more.
  • Hobbies: This segment allows you to target people based on their hobbies – home improvements, arts and crafts, travelling, music, etc.
  • Purchases: Choose to show your ad to people who have recently completed a purchase. Market a beauty product to makeup artists, young female adults, who like pages like Maybelline and Max Factor. Or market a toy to parents whose child whose birthday is coming up soon.
  • Seasonal events: Market to people who are following sports happenings, games, or seasonal activities like swimming and skiing.

Facebook can also help you retarget people who visited your website. If you want to learn more about retargeting, read this article about Facebook Pixel here.

Facebook is an all-powerful marketing tool that allows you to fine-tune your perfect audience and then market to them what you think they will like, and what they are interested in. Your marketing strategy could be so intricate that you can reach virtually anybody and show them your ad.

Selling pet products? Target people who have recently got a dog. The options are virtually limitless!

How design plays a role in your marketing efforts

Marketers and graphic designers often have the same goals, but look at them from a different perspective. Marketing creates interest in a brand, and design communicates a brand.

Dan Slagen, VP of Marketing at Crayon explains how involving marketers in your design process is essential to a successful product, or brand. He says that when you hear marketers talk, you’ll hear words like content or copy, conversions, funnel, and brand tone. Talk about the same project with designers, and they’re focusing on hierarchy, purpose, emotion, and experience.

There’s a disconnect between the two teams, and figuring out how to collaborate is key to selling your business. “Focusing on performance can align marketing and design teams to better solve problems together,” suggest Slagen. “You can have clever copy and the best targeting, but if it doesn’t perform, it’s not viewed as a success.”

Creative graphic design is one of the fastest ways to build brand recognition and a following on social media. This in turn, helps your marketing team. A beautiful design will help you stand out from the hundreds of other companies competing for the same audience, and can be the deciding factor in how successful your next campaign will be.

Not only is it important to have strong visual content, but consistency is an equal priority. You want people to come across an image and immediately think ‘isn’t that that one company?’ Your brand should always show similar fonts, photos, colors, etc. Use the same logo – don’t constantly change the color. Each and every single element in a design piece should portray the message you’re trying to send.

Design elements also help build trust with your clients. If a client can see that your website is done professionally, and your flyers, and postcards all look well done, this helps with your credibility. Clients are more likely to trust a brand with professional graphics versus a company that just has a couple images and some text printed out on normal paper.

The most important part about all of this is the conversion. If you aren’t getting conversions, then your campaign isn’t working. Maybe it’s the graphics, maybe it’s the marketing, or maybe it’s both. Conversions are key to propelling your brand forward. A clear, concise call-to-action will help draw people in. Tell them to do something. The mere suggestion to ‘register’ will get them thinking about it.

If you’re company doesn’t have a graphic designer employed, it may be time to look at outsourcing some of your work. Take a look at your past campaigns and evaluate if there are areas that could have been done better. Take the time and invest in your company with well-done graphics that will convert and produce your audience.

If you need help with your graphic design projects or your digital marketing strategy overall, get in touch with us.

Content marketing to become even more important in 2013

Over the last few weeks I’ve read a lot about content marketing, including the predictions regarding the direction of content marketing in 2013. The consensus seems to be that marketers are going to spend a bigger percentage of their marketing budgets on content marketing, and they are going to utilize more marketing tactics in order to reach their content marketing goals. Many brands have already seen the success of content marketing, and those are the brands that are already a step ahead of the rest.

For those that are not 100% sure what content marketing entails – here is a brief explanation. A content marketing strategy normally include all the platforms that you use to connect with customers and prospects (for instance your website, blog, newsletter, social media profiles, etc) as well as the editorial plan for these platforms. An editorial plan will detail what content will be posted when, and where. As part of the strategy, a business should also determine its “voice” and this voice should be consistent in all content. Your content strategy should aim to tell your brand’s story and connect with your target audience in an engaging way. To determine how to engage with your target audience, market research is needed. It’s also important to set content marketing goals and determine how you are going to measure the success of your content marketing strategy. Some of the marketing goals for a content marketing strategy can include:

  • Drive targeted traffic to your website
  • Lead generation
  • Engagement
  • Educating your market on your brand, products or services
  • Improve SEO results
  • Retain customers

It seems as if the biggest obstacles that marketers are facing include a lack or time and resources. Another obstacle is that marketers are not sure how to accurately measure the ROI of a content strategy, and others don’t measure ROI at all. In 2013 it is going to be important to make sure that your brand don’t get left behind. Competition in the online world is tough and brands with strong content marketing strategies will have a definite advantage.