Advanced ways to reach your audience with Facebook or Instagram ads
As a digital media buyer with over 6 years experience, I can tell you that the landscape of audience targeting has changed quite a bit in the last few years (honorary mention to IOS14.5 and a general growth in competitiveness of the Facebook ad platform). So I wanted to provide you with an update on the best ways to reach your audience with Facebook and Instagram ads, so you can make sure you are running ads like pro.
As with everything in the land of paid media, I can give you inside knowledge that puts you at an advantage but it’s important to test things, as some things work for some companies and offers, and others dont.
What you want to be sure of when launching campaigns, is that you are using the methods that experts are, because as we know, the better your audience quality on the ad platform - the more results you will get, and at a cheaper price.
(Audience quality in this case is, whoever is up for subscribing to your service or buying your product!)
Ways to reach your audience with Facebook or Instagram ads
Use custom (or retargeting) audiences
Use your custom audience list in Google or Snapchat ads to discover new targeting options
Call out your target audience through creative with broad settings
Use your custom audience list to find similar audiences
Use data partners
In no particular order, here are some expert methods you can test for your project or business.
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1—Use custom (or retargeting) audiences
A custom audience is a list of people that you can create from your data. This is an example of one of those audiences that used to be very effective, and now is less. But nevertheless this can still work really powerfully for you and is worth testing. And for example, I still use or test them in my Facebook ad strategies.
You can create custom audiences in many ways, I’ll list them out for you:
From your website
A website custom audience is an audience of people who either visited your whole website or a certain landing page of your website, for a period of up to 180 days. You can get more granular with quality and target the top 10% of people who spent longest on your website and also those who scrolled at least half way down the page for example. (You need the Facebook pixel installed to do this).
From a video you shared
A video custom audience is an audience of people who either watched part of the whole of a video you shared on your Facebook or Instagram page either organically or through the use of paid ads. You can create this audience with people who took this action any time from 1-365 days ago. (You do not need the Facebook pixel installed to do this).
From your Instagram or Facebook page
Facebook and Instagram are treated separately when it comes to this option. But you can essentially take the same actions with both platforms.
You can build a custom audience from people who visited your Facebook/Instagram page or account, interacted with an organic post or a paid ad, people who saved posts and people who sent a message to your personal account.
Like with video, you can create this audience with people who took this action any time from 1-365 days ago.
(You do not need the Facebook pixel installed to do this).
One thing I want to flag to you is the value of building up your organic profiles. You can see now that you know how you can profit off these visitors to later get you sales, it’s something you can start right away.
2—Use your custom audience list in Google or Snapchat ads to discover new targeting options
If you have a custom audience list of emails, you can input this list into Google or Snapchat ads, and the platforms will produce a list of attributes and interests that relate to the audience. You can then take those insights and input it into Facebook or other platforms as ‘interest targeting’.
3—Calling out your target audience through creative with broad settings
This seems counter intuitive, but if you have a decent budget this can be one of the most high volume and sustainable audience strategies. Meaning that you can get a high volume of the things you want: sales, leads, sign ups and that these campaigns can last a very long time. Not simply a month or two where the campaigns start to get expensive.
What you do here is target broadly so: country, language, maybe age if you’re sure about the age range of people who are open to your product, service or content. Then in your ad creative and copy you directly address the people you are trying to reach. So if it’s ‘teachers’ or ‘students’, you write that in the copy or add it to the video or image.
The reason calling out the specific audience or pain point the audience has (e.g. students or broke students (😅)) is because people will quickly scroll past that feel that the ad is NOT for them, and it teaches the algorithm faster WHO is you actual audience as they will stop and engage with it.
4 — Using your custom audience list to find similar audiences
If you have a custom audience list of emails, you can input this list into Facebook (or whatever platform you are using), and the platforms will produce another audience that has the attributes of your core audience - so are more likely to convert. This is called a lookalike audience.
This used to be an extremely effective way of targeting that was used by every Facebook ad expert but since IOS14.5 this has reduced. In accounts I managed back in the day, lookalikes used to be responsible for the highest amount of spend and conversions. But now I have run tests comparing lookalikes with interests or a broad audience and it has often lost. However it’s always worth trying for your company or project, because ads are well and truly a testing game.
5 — Using data partners
There are companies that have highly relevant and high intent audiences that will share them with you (the ad platform you are using) for a fee. When it’s time to run your campaign you’ll find it in your audience library. These companies do claim to get this customer data in an ethical way and it is often segmented by interests (like travel) attributes (university student) or intent (they downloaded this app or bought this similar product). Some examples are Axciom, Zeotap and Shopify Audiences.
If you are considering this I recommend looking for a partner that has strength in your niche and country. For example they may have good data for the US but not France (and that’s where your target audience is). Or they may specialise in Travel, but your audience is Fintech. Not only can you use these audiences, you can also create ‘similar audiences’ or ‘lookalikes’ as we discussed so it can be a very good investment for your ads to thrive.
And that’s it! I’ve added everything I know. But hopefully I’ve given you some tools you can use to figure out how to get better audiences and so more results out of your Facebook or Instagram ads.
Did you find this useful? Let me know in the comments! And be sure to share it with people you know what to grow their business or project.
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