3 Facebook Targeting Hacks | Target Audiences GUARANTEED To Convert

Let's talk Facebook targeting! I'm gonna walk you through three of my favourite Facebook targeting hacks to ensure you're targeting the right people with every single campaign.

I'm going to be focusing on cold audiences - people that don't already know who you are.

Facebook targeting - Reaching the RIGHT people

Facebook targeting is what makes Facebook ads so powerful.

We've got the ability to pinpoint a message and serve an ad to a very, very specific group of people with the targeting options that we have available to us. We can target people based on demographics... where they live, how old they are, for example. We can target based on interests and online behaviours too. For example, are they keen shoppers? Are they shopping a lot?

Facebook has so much data about its users which, from a consumer point of view may be a little bit concerning, but from a business point of view it gives us a huge potential because regardless of the industry you're in, we have the ability to pinpoint an ad to our perfect customer.

Often people say to me, "Gav, I'm not sure if my audience is on Facebook." There are two billion monthly active users on Facebook at the time of writing this, so the answer is they are, you just have to be smart in finding out how to target them with an ad they're actually interested in.

If we target the wrong people, fundamentally, our campaign will never work. We might have the best ad, the best creative, the best copy and most beautiful landing page with the best offer in the world, but if we're sending that to the wrong people, our campaigns will never ever work. So it's vital that every single time we build a campaign, we're targeting the people that are most likely to convert.

So, here are three ways to find people that are most likely to convert.

Use Amazon Best Sellers

Amazon is one of my favourite ways to find really unique niches and interests to use in my Facebook targeting.

I'm going to use the example of business and finance here but this still relates to any industry you're operating in.

One of the things I always try and do when it comes to targeting on Facebook is ensure that I'm targeting an audience that my perfect customers would be interested in but no one else would be interested in. One of the best ways to do that is to target the likes of authors, thought leaders and big public speakers in a particular industry.

Go onto Amazon Best Sellers and look at the best selling books in the industry you're trying to target and find some names and book titles that might be relevant and of interest on Facebook.

Not all of the authors and book titles listed are necessarily going to be of interest on Facebook, but have a look at the review ratings... typically if someone has 16 or 33 reviews say, they're not going to be popular enough for Facebook to deem them an interest, so it's best to look for those with hundreds or thousands of reviews.

When I looked in the business and finance section on Amazon, I took a look at Simon Sinek, he's a big author in my space. He's got 393 reviews. Now, I thought there would maybe be more but when I typed in my detail targeting 'Simon Sinek', he came up as an interest!

Then I tried Leading From The Front, to see if that was an interest, it wasn't. The author's name, Ant Middleton, wasn't an interest either... Facebook doesn't deem him or his book big enough to be an interest.

Next, Elon Musk, he's obviously going to be classed an an 'interest' in this space.

Amazon is essentially doing the research for us because you might think yes, it's obvious, Elon Musk is a business person but what Amazon are doing - and remember they get thousands and thousands of purchases on their books every single day - is researching which books are performing the best.

So, if you have a business or finance product then you know that your customers are reading this book and so it makes sense to target the author of that book because chances are, people that aren't interested or involved in this industry aren't going to be reading it as much as our potential audience.

Once you've decided which authors and books you want to use in your targeting, let's look at the next Facebook targeting hack.

Audience Insights

You can access Audience Insights inside Facebook by going into your Ads Manager.

Hit the hamburger menu at the top left, then 'All Tools' and click on Audience Insights.

What you then see is the Audience Insights, a tool that's giving you data on every single person on Facebook aged 18 or over. That's more than one billion people.

When I look, I see that 56% are men, 44% are women, I see the age demographics, relationship status, education levels, job titles, etc. This allows us to dig into interests to see what we're actually targeting when it comes to an interest.

So, let's say that we have a fishing product and so we're trying to sell to a fishing audience. So, you'd enter 'fishing' in the Audience Insights...

When I did this it showed me that there were 200 to 250 million people on Facebook aged 18 or above with this interest and I could see the breakdown in the demographics showing relationship status and education level. Clicking on the Page Likes section, brought up a list of the pages or interests that I would be targeting if I were to target the interest of fishing.

So, to recap, we've got a fishing product, we're using the interest of fishing, and what we're actually doing is targeting people that like these fishing-related pages.

So, if you use fishing, you're targeting people that like Donald Trump, Tipsy Bartenders, Samsung, Monster Energy, Amazon, Walmart, Target, Subway, these aren't related to fishing at all and so, because this interest is so broad, 250 million people, all we're doing here is just targeting a very broad audience of people that aren't very specific to what we're actually trying to sell.

So, what we want to do here instead is try and find in the Amazon Bestsellers something that our audience is interested in that other people aren't, and one of the best things to look at are things like magazines.

So, I might type in 'fishing magazines' and Google will show all the fishing magazines.

I'll take Angling Timesas an example. | go back to Audience Insights, get rid of fishing, type in Angling Times, so I can see what comes up in the page likes.

It comes up with pages such as Carpfeed, Tommy Pickering, and Rob Wootton... I right click these and opening them to take a look at the pages on Facebook, to see what they are and if they're related to fishing then I know Angling Times is a good interest to target, because the pages that people like within that interest are related to fishing.

So, it's about thinking of your audience, coming up with different interests and putting them into Audience Insights to see if they're actually a good interest for you.

The third and final Facebook targeting hack that I want to talk about requires a little bit less research and more allowing Facebook to do the work for us...

Using Look-A-Like Audiences

Now I head over to Asset Library, go to Ads Manager, and on the Hamburger menu, select All Tools and then Audiences under assets.

A Look-A-Like Audience is essentially where we create a Custom Audience which you can read more about here. Custom Audiences are audiences of people that already know who you are, they've visited your website, watched your video, subscribed to your email list, for example.

A Look-A-Like Audience is where we ask Facebook to go and find more people like the people who are already in our Custom Audience.

Let's say I want to create a Look-A-Like Audience from a Custom Audience I already have. For example, I have one created from people on my email list.

I would select, 'email list from the 11th of March' and go to United Kingdom.

What Facebook is going to do there is take my email list and find more people that match the demographics, interests behaviours of the people on that list.

When you're creating a Look-A-Like Audience there's a slider which is based on the percentage of the population of the audience location that you enter. If I select 1% on the slider, Facebook will try find 1% of the population of the UK, based on my email list. If I went to 10% it would try find 4.2 million people.

In theory, the closer you are to 1%, the more specific and better targeted the audience is going to be. The higher the percentage, the broader it's going to be - that might be useful when you're scaling your campaigns but I would tend to stick to 1% when you first start.

So, there we have it, the three ways that I try and find audiences that are most likely to convert.

Let's recap...

We used Amazon to try and find books and authors and thought leaders in the space, we then used Audience Insights to dive into our audiences to find out which ones are actually worth targeting or not and then thirdly, we used Look-A-Like audiences to get Facebook to go and find cold audiences for us to target.

They're all great ways to find cold audiences, people that don't already know who you are and use them to bring people into your business, into the top of your funnel so you can provide them with content, a lead magnet or whatever you feel will be of value to them.