Picture this: You own a bakery in Tampa, FL. You decide to promote your budding brand online through social media marketing with an emphasis on Facebook advertising. But here’s the issue—once you log into your Business Manager to set up your audience, you see a plethora of options ranging from target demographics to specific zip codes to everything else that makes your head spin.
How do you know you are targeting the right people? It’s a valid concern. If you get it wrong, you could end up wasting your entire advertising budget trying to reach people who were never going to be interested in your bakery anyway.
When is it time to consider a change in advertising audience? Here are three scenarios that I see all the time:
- You received a large number of engagements and conversions with your first ad, but saw a significant decrease in the next batch.
- Customers are complaining they are seeing your ads too much.
- You’re getting inquiries for areas your business does not serve.
If you’re seeing any of the above, you need to step up your audience targeting game. You can’t get those hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars back just because you chose to target the wrong audience, but you can move forward and adjust your scope.
Do yourself a favor and step away from your business for a moment. Look at your customer base with fresh eyes. You may be interacting with these people on a weekly or even daily basis, but you might not have really looked at who they are.
Sure Marge is a sweet lady who buys your gourmet cupcakes at every holiday, but what makes her tick? What does she want, what interests her, and most importantly, how would you sell your bakery’s goods to a woman just like Marge?
Your goal is to boil down your ideal customer by looking at the categories your current customers fit into.
You should ask yourself the following questions:
1. What age range does my brand appeal to?
Does your business cater to a younger demographic or older adults? Maybe you sell products aimed at children, but remember that you’re really marketing to their parents. Or maybe you manage a senior living community, whose audience is not the potential residents, but rather their caregivers, who are in the 35-55 age range.
2. What location does my ideal customer live in?
Are you trying to appeal to someone in a specific city, like you would if you ran a bakery in Tampa? Or do you need to compile a list of zip codes to tackle a whole region, like say a business that wants to appeal to the Philadelphia/New York region? Regardless, location is an important factor. You may need to adjust your settings so that you don’t oversaturate your market as well, which would actually do damage to your brand as people get sick of seeing your ads.
3. What is the income of your ideal customer?
I once worked with a client who owned a luxury home renovation business. They would do amazing work on homes that were worth at least $650K+. Yet before they came to us, they tried to advertise on their own and failed to specify income in their target audiences. Needless to say, they had a lot of calls, but they were dead leads since nobody who saw the ad could afford their services. Once my team targeted people with higher incomes, we narrowed their reach and brought them real results.
There’s nothing to be done about it: You have to target the right audience. It may be challenging, but that doesn’t make it any less necessary. You need to be sure the people who see your ads will actually be interested in your business!
Are you still a little fuzzy on how to optimize your Facebook ad target audiences? Let’s discuss it during your free consultation with The Go! Agency!
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