A Funnel Hacker’s Guide To Facebook Ad Targeting

Of all the aspects involved in setting up a Facebook Ad, possibly one of them is the most deceptively simple.

Your audience segmenting portion is what sikes the most people out when trying to build a successful Facebook advertising funnel.

And of course, if you pull up the page in Facebook, you’ll see why that is.

On the page, you’ll see a bolded title that says “Audience” and then a basic set of boxes and options to choose a location, age, interests, and more.

It hardly takes up even a 3rd of the page.

Doesn’t seem like there’s much to it, right?

Well, don’t be fooled. Too many people, whether experienced marketing specialists or hopeful beginners, breeze through this step without a second thought.

And yet, it’s really not hard to see how it’s so indispensable to spend a few extra minutes on it (if not longer).

If our ads are going to people who only have a passing interest in our product or service, we’re not going to be making many sales.

And if other forms of marketing are any indication, you can really generate enormous results through narrowing in more on your audience.

It’s also true that social media gives marketers a laser beam like power to target highly specific audiences.

So for our next step in becoming Facebook Ad masters, we’re looking at how we can better understand Facebook targeting, step-by-step.

Defining Your Customers

First things first. Before you even click a single attribute, if you haven’t made an outline of your customers’ interests and demographics, stop!

While you can always experiment and adapt your targeting, having that information in a concrete form provides you with a physical reference point.

This way, you’ll be able to evolve that outline into some topnotch lead targeting confidently.

And with how complex targeting can get, keeping track of your efforts is paramount.

Some of the best ways to create this initial outline are to review your already existing customers as well as spying on your competition a little.

Then all you need to do is list the different values, psychological factors, and demographics that help define them.

Protip: In our case, don’t forget to factor in whether or not the customers you’re considering use Facebook. Even though the social media titan has billions of users, it’s always a question worth considering as the social media landscape matures.

Going Beyond Local

Once upon a time, you could really only target people by geographic location without further consideration.

But now, you have additional contexts when it comes to location, but also some further factors to take account of.

In addition to targeting audiences that are in a current location, you can also choose between people who live in, have recently visited, or are traveling to that area.

Now that’s getting down to some specifics!

Although you might have to use your creative thinking cap for a moment on how these can apply, they open up an entirely new world of possibilities.

At the same time, you can target locations like never before.

Maybe your product or service would hit particularly well for people at your local airport who are about to fly?

Punch it in and add it! This is truly the power of social media at its finest.

Protip: At first glance, you might think that going as broad as possible here is the way to go. But as we’ve seen in our previous articles and with strong research behind it, local-level marketing can improve the quality of a lead greatly.

Pay Attention to Age, Gender

These two category selections are probably the easiest to overlook.

And you can imagine why: they’re set up as a basic set of dropdowns and a series of 3 buttons.

What would be easier than that?

Not so fast!

We’ve seen before how men and women don’t just differ in how they view different types of marketing, we’ve also seen how they differ on consuming that information.

Having a firm idea of what message you’ll be using for each gender and age group you’re targeting is a big necessity.

For example, perhaps your sales funnel is built around a masculine niche like beard oils.

Men between the ages of 25 to 35 might be your prime demographic.

But what about their mothers, women between the age of 55 to 65, who are looking for holiday gifts for their sons?

A new message targeting this group might be equally or even more effective.

Protip: A brief note on the languages option. While it might seem pretty straightforward, don’t forget under-served markets for your sales funnel. For example, hiring a Spanish-language writer to help you craft an ad could represent an unparalleled opportunity in the waiting.

Cracking into Detailed Targeting

Okay, so far, so good. Now we’re going to look at the most complex aspects of targeting.

We’re going to go point-by-point to see how these factors can be used to magnify your conversion.

Even though we’ll touch on many of the options, don’t feel like you must use every single one.

Go with what makes sense for your brand, and your sales funnel.

But at the end of the day, this section is the bread and butter of what makes social media marketing an extremely powerful tool for our funnel efforts.

• Drilling Down on Finer Demographics

From generation marketing to the role that income plays in spending, this section gives us the ability to harness all the data that people put on their profiles. In reality, none of these should be overlooked when it comes to your sales funnel.

However, the few that many Funnel Hackers will find helpful are education, including fields of study; income level under financial data, and generation. Some of the more interesting ones that offer novel opportunities are relationship status, life events, and political affiliation.

Mixing and matching these can help you to see that, for example, your market isn’t just women between the ages of 19 to 30, but those women who are in a relationship and thinking about getting married (which represents a huge marketing segment in and of itself).

• Dominating the Interests Category

Here’s another often overlooked area of Facebook Ads. You might think it’s best to open up the Interests section of Detailed Targeting and start clicking away. You probably have a good idea of whether or not your audience is into fitness and health or shopping and fashion. In many cases, your sales funnel will fall under one or a few of these. But I’m going to give you two tips here that will send your conversion through the roof. The first is super simple: click that checkbox under the Detailed Targeting section near the bottom that says “Expand interests…” This little checkmark allows Facebook to use the power of their networks to find connections we might never see.

The second trick is to type in some specific interests into our Add demographic option. Think about it this way: instead of targeting people who are just interested in luxury watches, why can’t we target people who exclusively read the popular watch site Hodinkee? We know these Facebook users are on fire about watches, so much so that they belong to the watch enthusiast community. Those are some quality leads! And now, Facebook is going to suggest to us, even more, websites, blogs, and venues that similar people are interested in.

• Using Behavior to Getting, Even More, Granular Control

This is probably one of my favorite sections. It gets us thinking about not just who our audience is, but how they act. And since we also want them to take action, doesn’t it make sense that their most common actions are important to the picture? You can hone in on everyone from avid photo takers to small business owners.

There’s even a spending habits method section, where you can target people with the high-end dept. Store credit cards. Or even those people with gym memberships or who are likely to move soon. Having access to this level of marketing data, not to mention being able to target based off of it directly, would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago. Take advantage of it here!

• Ensure You’ve Considered Excluding Certain Leads

Although combining all these categories together can give you an audience profile that rocks, don’t skip the exclude people feature. By clicking this choice, you can then work backward to prune out leads that make less sense for your funnel. Let me give you some examples. Say we’re selling a brand-new type of computer software to early tech adopters.

But we know that avid console gamers have less of interest in this offering. Why would we want to serve these leads an ad? Instead, let’s exclude them and focus in on our early tech adopters who also aren’t avid console gamers. This isn’t a part of the tool that you’ll use every single time, but it’s one not to leave off as you shape your strategy.

Protip: If you haven’t guessed yet, we can create some very targeted audience profiles for every one of our ads. With this type of power, we can also construct ever more robust sales funnels. However, don’t feel obligated to jam your targeting full of parameters if you don’t have to. Do what makes the most sense for every funnel you launch.

What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced in your targeting efforts?

Which ones have you overcome and found the biggest returns from?