To take a social campaign from good to great, sometimes all you need is a little creativity. Now don’t get me wrong, Facebook is already a virtual treasure trove of targeting capabilities—what could be a more accurate form of interest targeting than someone clicking a thumbs-up icon to say, “I like this”?
Sure, you could make use of the basics, like age ranges, gender, and location, but that’s kind of like throwing a huge net into the middle of the ocean and hoping some fish think it looks cool enough to swim into—not very strategic. Thinking outside the box with Facebook targeting capabilities makes your ad more efficient, and ultimately more successful. Don’t know where to start? Try these four creative targeting tactics and elevate your next campaign.
Layer Your Targeting
Bigger isn’t always better when it comes to creating an effective targeting group on Facebook. While it’s helpful for testing purposes to break out distinct targeting groups, you’re more likely to get your ad in front of people who really care about your product when you layer multiple targeting criteria. Let’s say you have a new line of women’s snow boots that you need to sell quickly before Punxsutawney Phil’s early spring prediction becomes a reality.
You have your standard segmentation of targeted groups—maybe a group for female Millennials, one for moms, and another for competitor brands. While these targeting groups are pretty comprehensive, the tradeoff is they will also be massive. You’ll end up spending a good deal of your budget on passive viewers who may have no interest in your super-cool boots. Instead of a one-dimensional group like “Millennial women”, add some additional criteria, like “Millennial women, with an interest in fashion, who live within a 20-mile radius of a recent snowstorm”. Your list might be smaller, but layering your targeting ensures that your audience is all the more relevant to your product.
Leverage Indirect Interests
Interest targeting may seem pretty straightforward, but sometimes taking a roundabout approach can pay off in the end, especially if your normal targeting groups are getting stale. It happens to the best of us—we think we’ve assembled the most perfect targeting group for our product. But even a perfectly targeted audience can start to slow with fewer and fewer clicks to your site. Perhaps you have a high-end line of cat T-shirts. Cute cats, grumpy cats, whatever flavor of cat one might want, your company has shirt for it.
While targeting individuals who are interested in cats is a no-brainer, sooner or later those cat lovers will have plenty of your shirts, so what are you to do? Approach your targeting in an indirect way to gain more unique impressions, but from viewers who act similarly to your initial group. For example, you could target followers of Animal Planet’s Facebook page, or people who like the SPCA. Approaching your targeting from a unique angle not only helps you add interested followers to your network, but also extends the shelf life of your product’s ads.
Target Your Biggest Fans
This sounds like a no-brainer, right? Delight your current fans with special messaging tailored just for them. Facebook’s custom audiences tool makes this very easy—simply upload a list of your site’s most frequent visitors or converters. This might require a bit of digging, but Facebook allows you to define these individuals by their email address, phone number, name, date of birth and more, so you have a lot of options.
Since this group already has a strong history of purchasing on your site, target them with an ad containing a special promotional offer, exclusively for your best customers. Now, don’t confuse this sneaky targeting strategy with the regular ol’ Fan targeting option. Just because an individual likes your page doesn’t mean they’re actively engaged with your brand. They might like you, but do they really like you? Save this one for your very finest, and watch those conversions come rolling in.
Get Granular
Do you know how many options come up when you try to add “moms” as a targeting criterion? Fit moms, corporate moms, soccer moms, new moms, big city moms and moms of grade school-aged children, just to name a few. Facebook clearly has an abundance of this highly specific demographic data, so get a little creative and use it to your benefit.
The more detailed you can make a simple targeting term, the more likely it is that the ad will end up in front of someone who it will really resonate with. And that’s the ultimate goal, right? Why advertise your organic fruit snacks to all the moms on Facebook, when you could advertise to “green moms”? Why advertise your designer bags to someone interested in “fashion” instead of “high-end retail” or “above average spending”? This kind of specificity will ultimately save you valuable advertising dollars, because you’re no longer wasting money on impressions that are unlikely to convert. Get more granular than a simple one-word targeting term to ensure more relevant views—it’ll pay off.
With just a little creativity, you can turn Facebook’s extensive targeting capabilities into your secret to success—saving you money with more valuable impressions, and increasing the chances of a conversion.