When running an ad campaign on Facebook there are a multitude of ways you can target potential customers. You should choose your audience with the ultimate goal of the campaign in mind. When running a cold traffic ad campaign, you want to drive new users to the site and promote brand awareness.
Related: Are My Target Customers on Social Media?
There are several different ways you can target new users, or even use two different methods together. Follow along for an overview of the different targeting you can use on Facebook and what objectives they work best for.
Location Targeting
Location targeting is a tool that helps you to target users based on locations they are currently in, this can be as broad a country or as narrow as a couple mile radius from a specific location. Location targeting can be useful when your product or company is only available in a specific area.
Another way it can be used is if you are trying to target a specific area for an event nearby or to promote people to shop your product in stores. We did this for our client, Health 2 Humanity, to promote their in-store event where they would be hosting product demos. Below you can see the ad we designed that was highly targeted towards driving people into the store and our location targeting that we’re set to a 15-mile radius of the stores’ specific address.
Demographic Targeting
Targeting users based on demographics can be incredibly valuable, especially if you know the age demographic of your brand or if you are developing an A/B test to gain deeper insight on who your brands audience truly is.
Related: How to Optimize Facebook Ads
You can segment your audience by demographic information such as gender and age. When trying to learn what audience is most engaged with your advertisements you can segment at the ad set level based on age group, while running the same advertisement to each in order to see which group engages best with your ad.
As you learn which audience is more interested in your advertisements you can tailor your content and messaging to appeal to them further!
Interest Targeting
Interest targeting is where you can target users based on their interests in different product categories, groups, and brands. For example, if you are advertising a natural beauty product you might try targeting you think your audience may also be interested in like, the non-GMO Project, natural skincare, etc.
Be creative in the interests you test out and consider all the different interests your target audience may have, even when it isn’t directly related to your product.
Behavior Targeting
Behavior targeting focuses on the things your audience likes to do or any behaviors they have off the site. This could be their hobbies, like yoga or hiking. This can also include their job title, their travel habits, purchase behavior and any life events that they are experiencing.
Related: 3 Things to Do Before You Start Running Your First Facebook Ad Campaigns
You can combine interest and behavior targeting to narrow your audience to a very specific group. For example, you could create an audience of people interested in natural skincare who ALSO returned from traveling one week ago.
Wrapping Up
There are infinite ways you can layer and combine the different kinds of targeting to create a unique audience that will engage with your brand. It is important to continually test new audiences and combinations in order to gain deeper insight into who is engaging with your brand and extend your brand awareness into new categories.
