Let’s be honest. Facebook is by far the best social media platform for advertising your business.

With a user base of 1.4 billion and more ad types than you can shake a stick at, you’re mad if you don’t use Facebook Ads as a way to generate leads and sales for your business.

If you do use Facebook Ads as a way to leverage traffic, are you getting the results you want? If you just answered, “No,” you are probably targeting the wrong audiences with the wrong messages.

There are a number of ways to target your audience effectively. So let’s go over how you can get the right message to the right audience to help grow your business on and offline!

Funnel-level Targeting

Funnel-level targeting means serving ads to users at various stages in your sales funnel. Depending on the complexity of your business, there could be several layers. However, to keep things simple for this article, let’s assume there are three. These three layers are as follows:

• Upper-level – New prospects who have yet to interact with your business
• Mid-level – Prospects who have visited your website but have not converted
• Lower-level – Customers who have purchased from your business

These levels correspond to undefined leads (upper), warm leads (mid), and customers (lower).

You cannot serve all three audiences the same content (okay you can, but it isn’t profitable) because they all have different needs and wants and are at different stages of the buying journey.

People at the upper level of your sales funnel first need an introduction to your business. For instance, think blog posts or infographics as opposed to direct response or product ads.

Leads at the mid-level need convincing that your product or service is for them. They may have expressed interest in your brand, but they are not yet sold.

Finally, existing customers simply need to be made aware of the products you’re offering, since the introduction and convincing stages are already complete.

Using Facebook custom audiences (retargeting), you can create specific audiences to group users who have visited your website but not converted, and those who have converted.

Facebook can group together everyone who has visited your website and placed an order in the last 180 days using its custom audience feature:

You can then create a second audience of prospects who have visited your website but haven’t placed an order within 180 days:

The first image shows a clause that tells Facebook to capture everyone who lands on the order “Thank You” page, whereas the second tells Facebook to include everyone who lands on your website but doesn’t make it to the Thank You page.

In this way, you can create audiences for mid and lower-levels of your funnel. Next, you target the upper-levels and start drawing new audiences.

How to Target New Audiences on Facebook

Whereas Google focuses primarily on keywords to target new prospects, Facebook focuses on interests and behaviours.

When setting up your targeting parameters at the ad-set level, you are first asked to target users by location. You can target by country, state, city and even zip code:

If you’re a bricks and mortar store, it’s best to target prospects who live within a certain radius of your business. If you have customers in multiple cities or countries, you should create separate campaigns for each area instead of grouping everyone together in one campaign. Prospects in different regions often have different interests and behaviours, and this allows you to better personalize the advert copy.

Let’s assume you run a New York City fitness studio offering Kundalini yoga. Your target audience is women over 30, and it just so happens that most of your students are married with children.

In the targeting options you can choose to serve ads to women over 30 in NYC who have an interest in yoga.

In New York City, 860,000 women over age 30 are into yoga:

Unfortunately, that audience is too broad and too generic. We have to dig deeper, since serving an advert to that many people is prohibitively expensive and is likely to yield poor results.

Facebook recently introduced a cool feature called Detailed Targeting, which allows you to segment generic interests—like “yoga”—into smaller niches that are more relevant to your audience.

This time, I added another clause that targets users who are also interested in Kundalini yoga (a specialty form of yoga) and the number of users drops to 21,000 throughout the whole of NYC.

Because a large part of your customer base is women with children, you could further narrow your audience by targeting women who have children:

At the ad-set level, you can also exclude users based on certain interests. For example, it’s reasonable to assume that women who are into bodybuilding and powerlifting are not going to be interested in Kundalini yoga, given how the discipline requirements contrast.

Your Facebook ad targeting prospects at the upper-level of your funnel could take several forms, such as a blog post stating the benefits of visiting your studio, or an offer for a free trial to your yoga class.

Note that this type of content is ideal for cold audiences, but isn’t relevant to your current membership base. They don’t need convincing; nor do they need a free trial, since they are already members. Showing them this advert will only lower your Facebook relevance score, cost you money, and annoy your current customer base.

To avoid this, you can exclude custom audiences from seeing adverts aimed at audiences in the upper level of your funnel by excluding them in the custom audience option:

Now what you’re left with is a highly targeted audience, all within distance of your yoga studio, just waiting to enter your sales funnel.

Summary

With the cost of Facebook Ads on the rise, you have to segment your prospects and serve them personalized messages to get them through your sales funnel. In this article, I’ve only scraped the surface on how you can pinpoint your ideal customer using Facebook Ads and improve your chances of running a successful campaign.

If you would love to learn more tips and tricks regarding Facebook ads for your business, signup to our webinar Starting Your First Facebook Advertising Campaign.