Targeting Your Ideal Buyers With Facebook Ads

A Detailed Thread on Targeting Your Ideal Buyers With Facebook Ads - Specially created for Nigerian Small Business Owners.

Enjoy!
In one of my recent Youtube tutorials, I talked about how targeting the wrong audience might be the reason why your ads do not bring you enough customers to break even and make a profit.

You can watch that video here. https://youtu.be/FvM4NiScQhg.

Moving on...
So how do you target your ideal audience?How do you filter through the millions of Nigerians on Facebook to find the kind of people who will buy your Products?

Here's how. [This is game-changing information]

Read also : How to run a successful Instagram advert using whatsapp business messenger.

When creating your target audience with Facebook, You'll be asked to target based on:

1. Age
2. Location
3. Gender
4. Language.
If you've conducted basic research on your target audience, these four criteria are easy to fill in.

Where it gets tricky is in the fifth one. Facebook calls this "Detailed targeting."

This part is very confusing. Even for me most times.

Under detailed targeting, Facebook gives you the option to target based on
1. Demographics

Read also : 9 things you need to know before running a Facebook Ad.

2. interests
3. Behaviours

Here's what these three targeting options help you do.

Demographics: This allows you to select an audience based on age, gender, education, relationship status, job title and more

This targeting criterion blew my mind the first time I saw it.But I found out not too long after that most of the information provided with demographics are only available for people in the US.

And I sell to Nigerians. And so do you... I think... moving on... 

Read also : 3 tips on writing Facebook ad copy.

Plus many Nigerians don't take out time to fill in all this information on their facebook profiles. They just create their profile, add a display picture and proceed to send friend requests to family members.The next one is

Interests: This allows you to choose the interests and hobbies of the people you want your ad to reach. Interests also get really detailed.

When conducting research on your ideal buyer, you should also find out the kind of businesses they follow that are similar to yours
for example, is I sell Expensive wristwatches, I can go to the interests bar and search for "Gucci" or "Armani"

Why? Because the people that like these pages may just be interested in spending money on my N150,000 watches.Next,

Behaviours: Select people based on their prior purchase behaviours device usage and other activities.

Read also : how you can start learning about FB ads today.

With behaviours, you can do things like target "engaged shoppers. "And just play around with it. Okay, now that you understand what the interface is like and know the various options Facebook has available for you.

I'll give you the advice some more experienced Facebook Advertising Agents that service Nigerian businesses gave me when I first got started.

*Let Facebook study your ad and figure out the people to show it to.*

What this means is... when you try to target your audience, LESS IS MORE.

So, although Facebook gives you many targeting options, it is best to do more of your targeting based on age, gender, location and language Leave the detailed targeting as broad as possible.

For example... 

Let's say I sell a health supplement that promotes sleep.This is how I'd target my audience.

Age: 35-64 (because they're most likely to need this product other people might, but I'm focusing on the people most likely to buy)

Location: Lagos, Abuja, PH, Calabar. (because there are credible delivery agents in these states that can handle my "cash on delivery" option and based on statistics, the people in these states are buyers )

Gender: Male and Female (I'd use both genders here because I'm not sure which would buy more after running my ad for 5-10 days, I will check the ratio of female customers to male customers and if it's a 7:3, 8:2, or 9:1 result, I will edit my targeting and show my ads to only the gender with the most buys.

Language: English. or whatever language your ad is written in. Wazobia!! 

Read also : Five Facebook Ads hack that will improve the quality of your ads.

Detailed targeting: Here, I can do either of these four things:

1. I can search for terms related to my sleeping supplement. so things like "insomnia, sleeping positions, sleeping problems, etc" I'll pick one or two... some might now be there.

2. I can search for "health and wellness"

3. I can just leave it empty

4. I can create 3 different ads to test the first three options and go with the one that brings in the most results after 5-10 days of running my ad.

And just like that my ad is ready to go! And boy will I get results!!  And also note that other things like your ad copy, landing page, sales copy, total offer also matter.

So even if you get your targeting right, you still need to optimize those.

I hope this helps.

For a detailed tutorial on Targeting, Facebook.Pixels, retargeting, custom and lookalike audiences you can watch my New Youtube tutorial,
"Facebook Pixel is Your Best Friend" 

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