Facebook Advertisers: How To Research Your Audience The Right Way

Most Facebook marketers do this...

• Poor audience research
• Last minute copy preparation
• Almost no time thinking about strategy

The results?

• Complaints about Facebook not working
• A ton of money wasted on ads
• Frustrations, no sales and almost no leads

If this is you, we`ve got some work to do.

Yes, it`s gonna take some work but it will pay off!

If you don`t know what you′re doing, it becomes a mystery and we don`t want that. We want certainty.

I`m going to show you exactly how to break out of this mystery cycle and teach you how to do audience research the right way so you can make your campaigns work once and for all.

Every battle is won before it’s ever fought. Sun Tzu

Understand The Audience

Here`s the reality...

80% of your success when it comes to Facebook advertising is knowing your market... better than they know themselves.

So, how do we do this?

Simple! ??

Using a 3 step process to find everything you need to know about your customer profile and craft a killer message that will get you leads and sales.

This is a process I use to generate consistent results and position the right marketing message in front of the right person.

Let`s dive straight into it.

The Three Step Process

1. Use Facebook`s Suggested Search

First of all, create a campaign just to do your detailed targeting research. Don`t need to publish it, the goal is to find those first few interests.

Let`s say you`re selling a dog training program.

Start typing in stuff that could be related to people that like dogs and write the ones you feel are most relevant on a piece of paper or in a spreadsheet, whatever works for you.

Also, take note of the audience size for that particular interests or behavior. This will help you later when putting together your ad sets.

Depending on the daily budget, the right audience size is between 500 000 up to 20 million, for massive scale.

I found the sweet spot to be between 500 000 and 1 million to start out, on a small budget.

You don`t want to make the audience too narrow, instead, make it a little bit broader to give Facebook`s algorithm space to optimize your campaigns.

2. Leverage Audience Insights

Take those interests that you came up with, in your initial research and put them into the audience insights tool.

Insert them one by one and look for page likes. ??

Sometimes, you can end up going down a rabbit hole, here.

The key is to find pages related to the interests you`ve already collected. Go through the list of pages, open them, see what people are saying there and what is being posted.

This could spark some ideas to incorporate in your ad copy. ??

Write down the names of these pages and put them back into the detailed targeting to see if they show up there.

If they do, you`ve got an interest to choose from later.

If they don`t show up, move on to other page names and repeat that process for every one of them until you feel like you`ve exhausted all the possibilities.

3. Google For Ideas

The last step is gathering all the information you have collected from Facebook and search on Google for books, magazines, events, organizations or things related to your target audience that you think might be missing.

The goal here is to find that extra piece of data so you can have a deeper understanding of your market.

It will also give you ideas of potential new interests you can later select on Facebook.

In your Google research, you might even find possible “hooks” (i.e. dogs respond better to you when you do X) you can use in your ad copy.

Let`s say that in your search you found “Canine Good Citizen”, a program that promotes responsible dog ownership and encourages the training of well-mannered dogs.

Go back to your Ads Manager and see if that interest shows up. Again, if it does, write it down and use it for your next campaign.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Benjamin Franklin

Research Before Launching

Once you have the interests written down or in a spreadsheet with the respective audience size, you`re ready to create your new campaign.

Then, start adding interests until you reach an audience size between 500 000 and 1 million, per ad set.

Knowing your audience better than they know themselves will give you a tremendous advantage in the marketplace.

And like I said in the beginning, you have to put in the work.

Do the research, don`t play the guessing game!

Often times, campaigns fail because marketers and entrepreneurs assume too many things about their target market. I`ve been there!

Sometimes new agency clients say… “oh, can we run ads tomorrow?”

Wait a minute, pal!?

It`s not how it works.

Research takes time and effort and if you don`t pay attention to it, it`s gonna be really difficult to make Facebook campaigns work or any campaign for that matter.

Back to you… what new insights did you get from this article?

I`d love to hear your thoughts.