But before you even think about writing copy or creating media to go along with it, you must first think about who is going to view your ad.

Facebook has a powerful audience creation tool built into it and learning to use the tool is quite easy. But finding a good audience for your ad is a little tougher.

In the following post I’m going to explain how to Create a Saved Audience and the audience we decided on for our Facebook ads campaign.

Before you create an audience on Facebook, it’s worth sitting down and trying to think about who your customers are. This will help with your audience creation on Facebook, but will also help you to get an insight into who your ads will be targeting.

When creating your ads, it’s good to always keep your customer in mind. Think about what would engage them and what would spur them into action.

In order to help, we like to create personas for our potential customers. These are profiles which include all the demographic information about our various customers, whether relevant or not. The more the customer is described, the easier it is to find them and communicate with them.

The longer you’ve been in business, the easier this exercise will be. The more experience you have, the more you’ll know your customer. But creating personas may help you to think a little deeper.The profiles should include:

To figure out our own personas, we spoke to our Vice President and Social Media Managers. They’re in touch with our clients and potential clients each day, so they know them well.

With their help we created our own personas.

Now that our personas were done, it would be quite easy to transfer them over to Facebook. We decided we wanted to build as large an audience as possible so we chose a persona that would be broad.

The majority of our services are provided to local business owners so they would be our main target. We’d create a target audience made of:

Entering our business account, we used the menu to go to the Audience section, where we chose to “Create a new Saved Audience.”

From there we gave our audience a name and transferred our focal points over to the audience.

First, the local audience. We decided this would be anybody within a 40-mile radius:

Then the age to narrow down the audience a little:

And finally the fact that we wanted the audience to be made of small business owners:

With the details entered, all we needed to do was to click, “Create Audience,” and that audience could then be used for an ad campaign.
It’s worth noting that Facebook can create audiences as broad and defined as you want them to be. You could send your ad to an audience as large as everybody in the USA. Or you could send it to every 30 year old in a certain zip-code.

In our case, we decided to start off with a broad audience at first and refine it over time. We felt this would be a good way to keep our ad price down and also figure out how to hone in on more specific potential customers.

However, the other option is to dive straight in with your personas. If you’re selling diapers then it’s common sense that you want to sell to women who have recently had a baby. But if you sell special organic diapers, maybe you could also narrow your audience by choosing women who are also interested in organic foods. That way you’re hitting the perfect customer with your ad.

The golden rule is, the better you know your customer, the easier you can find them and create an audience based on them. So start thinking about your customer, who they are and what they like. That way you can target them.