5 Powerful Facebook Ad Targeting Strategies

You can use a dozen different ad formats and thousands of possible ad targeting parameters to target audiences on Facebook.

Mastering your Facebook positioning strategy can put you in front of a very specific and usually motivated audience on the web where Americans devoutly spend an average of 40 minutes a day. Here are some very powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies you may not have heard of.

1. Tap Into Recent Purchasing Behavior Among Facebook Users

Prior to this, Facebook was criticized by advertising analysts as an interesting meeting place, but it was a network with little commercial intent or potential for consumer insight. In early 2013, when Facebook established partnerships with data brokers (including Epsilon, Acxiom, and Datalogix), the situation changed.

These companies have access to trillions of data transactions each year. Acxiom executives said that their database alone contains information on about 500 million active consumers around the world, with an average of 1,500 data points per person.

This enables advertisers to go beyond their own CRM databases and use insights collected from various shopper loyalty programs and matched with personal user profiles. Facebook advertisers use this data to target audience segments through thousands of different purchase behaviors.

This is the one I use: people who buy commercial marketing services (this is related to my company because we sell commercial software and services).

Subcategories of buying behavior include buyer profiles, clothing, food and beverages, health and beauty, and more. In each of the broad subcategories, you can gain insights into behavior types; for example, choosing buyer profiles will allow you to target DIYers, fashionistas, gourmets, etc.

Based on aggregated multi-source offline transaction data, Facebook shows you how many user profiles you can target in each subcategory.

2. Get Creative With Life Events Targeting

Certain types of businesses or activities are based on selling to people who have experienced certain major life events. If you have just purchased a new house or apartment, a moving service will appear in front of you. The target group of wedding photographers is engaged people.

Facebook has almost all imaginable life event positioning options because we tend to post these to our timeline. (Fun fact: weather-based positioning is now also available on Facebook!)

The uniqueness of the Life Events parameter is that you can choose to target people within a specific time interval after the change. For example, a jewellery company is clearly interested in showing up to people celebrating their first anniversary of marriage so that they can target audiences who just got married a year ago. The possible date ranges are 3 months, 6 months, and one year.

3. Nurture Leads & Build Loyalty With Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook custom audiences is an advanced feature that allows you to connect with existing contacts on Facebook. Presenting to existing customers and app users on their favorite social networks can strengthen your brand while also giving you the opportunity to increase lifetime customer value, order frequency, and loyalty.

This also works in another way-you can increase the efficiency of your marketing campaign and avoid wasted clicks by excluding existing customer lists. For example, if you offer a free trial to new users, there is no reason to show it to your loyal customers.

Custom audiences are created by uploading your customer phone list or buyer/subscriber email list in CSV or TXT format to Facebook. You can also create custom audiences based on your website visitors or specific actions performed in your game or application.

Then use other targeting parameters to target or exclude the entire list, or just a specific subset of it, to target the ideal Facebook audience.

This is crazy powerful! You can target existing customers engaged in specific job functions, earn XX dollars a year, and live in a certain zip code and provide higher-value products, if these insights tell you that these people are more likely to become your customers.

Or, you can offer offers that demonstrate your products to people who have visited your company’s blog. They already know your name and are interested enough to visit you, but they will not switch. Facebook ads for custom audiences can close the gap.

4. Expand To A Lookalike Audience

Once you have developed a good custom audience strategy, lookalike audiences are the logical next step. Even if you don’t have your own email or phone list, you can still reflect your Facebook fan base. By creating an audience that looks like your own target, Lookalikes allows you to expand beyond your reach, but still target people with highly specific profiles.

If you have neither a list nor enough Facebook followers, you can still use tracking pixels to create similar audiences to create custom audiences for websites to mirror.

Once you have identified the audience you want to copy and expand, you can expand (wider) or narrow (more specific and similar to the original audience) audience. At the most similar level, Facebook will find you the top 1% of users in the target country with similar characteristics. On the opposite level, optimizing for reach, Facebook will show your ads to 10% of users in the target country/region who are most similar to your target audience.

5. Get Super Granular With Layered Targeting Options

The real power of Facebook advertising is that you can overlay targeting options to gradually make your audience more specific.

You can use a combination of behavior, demographic, and geographic data to reduce your audience to just one person. However, this is the ability to match advertising ideas and offers to smaller audiences created using a combination of data.

For example, a moving company that offers special discounts for seniors can target people who bought a house in the last month and stratify them by age range and service area location 60 years or older.

If you can understand the intent, needs, and likelihood of responding to any given audience segment, you can layer Facebook ad targeting options to take advantage of it and show it to them.

The Best Facebook Ad Targeting Strategy Is Diversified & Comprehensive

When determining your Facebook ad targeting strategy, you don’t have to choose just one of the above techniques; check each of them to see how they fit your various target market segments.

Create roles for your ideal customers-who are they? Where do they live? What do they do when they work and what do they do after get off work? What features and characteristics may they have, and how do they align with many of the positioning parameters listed above? 

Identifying the people you want to reach will lead you to use the most effective Facebook ad targeting tools and options to stay ahead of them.