#54: 4 Steps to Successful Ad Audience Targeting

 

Alison Smith: [0:58]

Welcome to the UMAI Social Circle, where we talk consumer goods tips to help business owners and marketers grow. Alison here and I’m one of the co-founders of UMAI Marketing, and I will be wrapping up our three part series on all things Facebook and Instagram advertising. So welcome to today’s episode. I’ll be covering the steps in different ways you can find new people to target with your product or offer to ensure the best cost per acquisition possible. We call these audiences who are called prospects, prospecting audiences. Additionally, you can re-target people who have interacted with your brand before. We would call this retargeting audiences, and these are people who have maybe visited your website, engaged with you on Instagram or your Facebook profiles, or are on your email list engaged with a past ad, et cetera, et cetera. But today, we’re focused mainly on targeting new customers.So let’s get into the four steps for finding the best audiences that you can target for successful ad campaigns. 

 

[2:07]

So step one is to do your research. We’d like to research our competitors and we like to research our customer avatars. To do this, we will look through a client’s FAQs, we will look through their web copy, look for any highlights, benefits, pain points that this product or brand is working on solving. And we also go to Amazon, Reddit, and Instagram, and any other social channels. So with Amazon, we are looking at the reviews for this particular brand or we’re going to competitor reviews on their brands. And we’re looking at the most frequent complaints and the most frequent likes, what they like about the product. On Amazon reviews, they generally pull out, at the top, the most frequent terms used. So it’s really easy here if you’re selling on Amazon or if your competitors are to highlight how people speak and pull that into your ad copy and creative. We also go to Reddit and we’ll type in the product or the brand name or competitor of brand names and get some really amazing data from people about this product or about this type of product, their issues with it, what they like about it, and then again, how they speak on it is really important. 

 

[3:51]

And then finally going to Instagram, looking at your competitors on Instagram, see the posts and what they talk about on these posts. Generally, for the bigger brands, they’ve spent hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars testing what resonates with their customer. So it’s a really cheaper way to conduct research if you can pull out and highlight some of the things that people are talking about and some of the content that they’re sharing when they’re a bigger brand.

 

 

[4:23]

Now onto step two to help you better target people with your Facebook and Instagram ads is to create a customer avatar. So to do this, imagine who your core customer is, really try to visualize them in their head, what they look like, how old they are, what their… You can even name them. So what’s their name, what is their job, what’s their household income? And dive into even deeper questions that you can ask yourself about who this person is. You can even go and pull a stock photo off the web of what he or she or they look like just to help you really visualize this person. So anytime you’re writing ad copy or putting together creative, you’re thinking about what this person wants to see. 

 

[5:17]

Now, step three of finding the best people to target with Facebook and Instagram is after you lay out your customer avatar or avatars, it’s then time to define what motivates them and what barriers they have or what pain points they have.

 

[5:35]

So basically how we do this is, we’ll make two columns and we’ll ask ourselves why someone would want a product like yours, what motivates them to purchase your product? And then on the other side of the pain point or the barrier side, we’ll ask ourselves, what’s hindering this person? Why would they hesitate to not buy our product? So as an example, let’s say we were the cricket protein bar by EXO, and we are running through this practice. Our benefits that we know our customers like in our product is that it’s high in protein, it’s sustainable, and it’s a on-the-go meal. But when we move to barriers, we need to figure out why someone would have a barrier to actually buy this cricket protein bar by EXO. 

 

[6:33]

So one thing that’s obvious are, crickets can be a tough thing to swallow for a lot of people. So a lot of education may have to go into solving and changing people’s mindset about why cricket protein is normal and good. And then also, these bars are a bit more expensive than other protein bars. So we’ll also need to solve for that with our marketing as well. And then once it’s time to speak to our customer avatar, through our creative and our copy and through all of our marketing, we can pull these different benefits and barriers and work to solve for them or work to speak on them so that we can really identify and relate to our end user, our customer. Okay. 

 

[7:22]

Now on to step four. Now that you’ve identified who your customer avatar is, how you want to speak to them, what your competitors are doing online, what your potential avatars are saying online, let’s now speak about the different types of audiences that you can use to target these new prospects on Facebook and Instagram. The first one, we’ll talk about our lookalike audiences. So lookalikes are a way that you can reach new people who are most likely going to be interested in your business or your product because they share similar characteristics to your existing customer base. So to create a lookalike audience, you would use a source audience, you would upload that into Facebook and it would pull all the data points from that source audience. So say you uploaded a list of people who have purchased from you in the past, it would take data points, demographics, interests, behaviors online, and spit out a completely cold audience that has similar characteristics for you to go out and target. So these are people who have never heard of you before, but they share a lot of the same traits as your current customer base. The second type of audience that we’ll talk about is inside the Meta Business Manager backend.

 

[8:48]

You can also choose additional demographics, interests, and behaviors to target. So beyond just age and gender demographics, you can also target things like this person’s household income. Are they parents and are they parents of toddlers or of small children or babies, what have you? You can even target if they’re in a relationship or not, as well as other interests that you can pull in and target, like what media do they consume in terms of magazines, books, television, movies? What influencers or prominent people do they like and interact with, as well as other behaviors. What is their political stance or what are their shopping behaviors? So as you can see, there’s tons of different specific things that you can target within Meta’s backend. So get creative and everything that you’ve done in the research and building of that customer avatar and their likes and dislikes is going to help you identify some of these things that you can target.

 

[9:57]

And finally, the last type of audience that we’ll talk about is likely the newest update to Meta at this time. It’s their Advantage Plus update. So what the Advantage Plus audience allows you to do is to maximize your performance and reach a very valuable audience with a super simple setup. So choosing the Advantage Plus type of audience will automatically choose for you. Meta will automatically choose for you who to target on your behalf, working with you to get the lowest cost strategy. This is giving Meta the reins and allowing it to choose the right people to target without you having to manually do all the research or choose all the interests or demographics or behaviors that you want to target. It’s going to do it for you. And we have seen great results with this really easy, simple approach. It is super great. We highly recommend it for any busy founders or solopreneurs who are wanting to run their own ads, but don’t have time for all the research or all the audience testing.

 

[11:09]

And then a side note, within all of these targeting options, you can also exclude certain audiences within each of these as well, so you can get really specific about the person that you want to target within Meta’s backend. 

 

[11:24]

Okay, thanks for listening to today’s episode. I hope that this gave you some insight and inspo to better target the right people at the right time for your brand. Cheers to investing in your growth and your brand’s growth. This is the final episode of our three part Facebook and Instagram advertising series. If you missed the first two episodes, feel free to go back and listen when you have a chance. And as always, let us know your thoughts or question. You can shoot us a DM on social.

 

Karin Samelson: [11:53]

Thanks for listening to the UMAI Social Circle, you all. We’re here to support you in your CPG journey, so be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any new podcast episodes. And while you’re at it, please leave us a review on your listening platform of choice. Shoot us a DM at UMAI Marketing on Instagram if you have any topics you want us to cover on new podcast episodes.

 

Alison Smith: [12:11]

And don’t forget to access our free masterclass where we’re showing you how to create a solid marketing strategy. You can access that at umaimarketing.com/masterclass, and we’ll meet you back here for the next episode.