The Facebook Audience Insights app is a fantastic tool to understand exactly who you should target for your business.
Everyone on Facebook is by now accustomed to seeing multiple ads on their timeline every day. More than often those ads are so targeted that they will get you to click and at least see what it’s all about because Facebook’s targeting system is the most advanced system on the planet.
If you’ve been following the news, Mark Zuckerberg has come under fire for his association with Cambridge Analytica. Whether there was any foul play or not, it’s clear that collecting and analyzing data is of the highest priority for Facebook.
All that data makes Facebook Audience Insights the number one tool to understand, prospect, and sell to new potential clients. The best part is Facebook Ads are still relatively cheap and the ROI is still very high good. The average cost-per-click (CPC) is $1.72, the click-thru-rate or (CTR) is 0.9%. Those stats may not look like much to the untrained eye, but these stats show tremendous value across all industries.
Regardless of whether or not you choose to use Facebook Audience Insights for the ads platform, it’s still one of the most useful tools available for every business to build a content marketing strategy. This article goes through the ins and outs of the platform and will show you the tools to maximize ROI with Facebook Ads or your business in general.
Facebook Audience Insights Search Criteria
Go ahead and sign in to Facebook, use the top search bar and type “audience insights.”
You’ll be taken to a screen that looks like this…
If you look closely at the left column you’ll notice you can create your audience for your adset. You don’t have to create an adset if you don’t want to, but just keep in mind you can if you want. Did I mention this app is 100% free?
Calibrating the App for Your Company
Interests
Start by clicking on the “Interests” section on the left. Type in your industry or niche and press enter. I selected sneakers for the interest of this article.
Here are the results for the demographics page. Apparently, the largest population of people interested in sneakers is women at 63%, but the largest demographic is men in the ages of 25-34 at 35%.
Learning to understand this data is essential to crafting the right message for your potential customers. The information learned here is also something you can use to make content for your blog on your website and social posts. We’ll go over this in one of the next sections, “Understanding the Data.”
Page Likes
The next section is the “Page Likes.” Here you’ll find the most common pages people that are into sneakers also like. They apparently like to shop online and The Boondocks?!?!
It may seem weird that certain people are into sneakers, Ulta Beauty, and The Boondocks, but the “outliers” most likely explain the male demographics. Targeting that group specifically could be very profitable if you’re selling sneakers that young urban males wear. These little details can be the difference between a great month and unbelievable month when you’re trying to create content, ads, and build your business.
Location
The next section at the top is the locations you should target. You can use this section to not only target specific locations on Facebook, but you can use this information to target worldwide in different languages. Click on the section to the left to change the country, otherwise, it will default to your own country of origin.
Activity
The last, but definitely not least section is Activity. This indicates the last time the audience participated in the pages that came up. If the numbers are high, this could indicate a growing trend or industry. Of course, if it shows decreases it could mean the industry is being replaced with something else.
Fine Tuning Facebook Audience Insights
The data we collected above is great, but it can be much better. If you look at the top you’ll see the audience is 15-20 million monthly active users. This is way too broad of a search for collecting good data on your target market. Sure, it means there are plenty of people looking for sneakers, but if you sell custom sneakers you probably don’t want to market to runners.
Let’s refine the search with the left panel. We’ll stick with our custom sneaker business, but let’s only target the men considering they were a much smaller demographic. Maybe this is the market we want, but let’s let the numbers decide for us.
Location, Age and Gender, and Interests
Let’s keep the audience in the United States, use the most popular demographic for men at 25-34, that are interested in sneakers (footwear).
Focus on the Relationship Status section for now, and hold your mouse over each bar. The bar to the left indicates 43% of the men are single for this interest. You can click this to target just the single men if you want.
Scroll back to the top and look at the total audience and you’ll see it’s decreased to 700k-800k monthly active users.
Looking to the right, the highest Education Level of 66% of this demographic is College and 28% for High School. Each one of these demographics is part of the Advanced section on the left, but you can make changes to them by clicking on the graphs themselves.
Connections
The Connections section of Facebook Audience Insights allows you to toggle your page audiences on or off. If you have a dedicated following on your Facebook page you can use them to test out new products. If they do well you can test new markets with an already proven product. Use this wisely, because selling them a string of products that doesn’t make the grade could cause of some of your followers to seek life elsewhere.
Advanced
The Advanced tab of Facebook Audience Insights is the most important tool to create a truly niche marketing strategy. It works especially well for businesses targeting people with specific levels of education and financial demographics. Going through each of these and finding the nuances that make up your market will take some exploration, but is well worth the effort whether you use Facebook ads or just want to draw traffic to your website.
All of the tabs above are meant to help you find your perfect audience for Facebook Ads, but the data will show you how to talk to your customer. A truly savvy marketer will understand how to take that information and make special campaign that aims specifically at the 25-34 year-old single men from urban locations that love custom-made sneakers.
Understanding the Data
All this data is great at face value, but how do you use it to your advantage.
Sales is about creating a relationship with your clients before they buy your products. By creating content that truly speaks to your target audience, you can gain followers on your social posts, more traffic on your website, and build trust with everyone that comes in contact with your brand.
If you know that your audience is from urban areas and of the ages of 25-34, then you can assume certain things about them or test it in Facebook Audience Insights.
Let’s take a deeper dive into our ideal demographics for the custom sneaker business, by taking out the sneaker interest and just search the page likes of everything else.
The top categories for single men, age 25-34, in the United States gives us a sample size of 6-7 million monthly active users. They apparently like to drink, play video games, The Boondocks, and love the UFC.
Page Likes Expanded
If you scroll down and look at the individual pages, you’ll see the specific audiences for pages like Assassin’s Creed, Coors Light, Fallout, AXE, Irish Spring, etc.
The cool thing about Facebook ads is you can target these pages specifically for ads or just target the interests of the people that like these pages. Either way, you’ve just narrowed down your niche to a workable size and can get more bang for your buck with every ad you make.
The top locations for these demographics (which you can also target specifically) are somewhat surprising to me considering I thought I would see all the major cities, but that is not the case. Cities like St. Paul, MN, and Columbia, South Carolina are very popular, whereas Chicago, IL is not even on the list.
Apparently, sneakers are more niche than I thought, and this is the value of using Facebook Audience Insights because you find these little pockets of loyal fans for your brand. These are easy places to spread your brand, so go after these first highly tailored ads and content.
Looking outside of the Facebook Audience Insights is crucial to understanding your target market to craft the perfect ads. If you find out they love video, don’t hesitate to start making videos. They don’t have to be fancy but make sure they’re transparent.
Further Reading
Continue to educate yourself on your audience. Don’t be afraid to try different markets with different ads to see what works the best. If you’re hesitant to start using Facebook Ads, use this information for your blog.
Another great tactic is to become a regular and authority in the groups surrounding your niche. If you hang out there, you’ll learn the language your market uses to search, write, and talk about your product and your competitors.
For more information on utilizing the Facebook Audience Insights in conjunction with Facebook Ads, click the link and learn to create fully customizable ads for a fraction of the cost in comparison to other providers.
