Social media marketing is one of the most essential marketing opportunities for every business. It can be cost-effective and easy to start, but the more you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it.

While posting regularly is crucial, paid ads will take your social media marketing to the next level. Whether you’re trying to publicize a specific event or you just want more engagement in general, Facebook ads can be well worth the cost.

One of the most important ways to make your ads more effective is the customize who sees them. This is a unique advantage you get with social media as opposed to most other forms of advertising. On Facebook, you can do this by carefully selecting your Facebook target audience.

Most businesses aren’t using the target audience settings to their potential, so here are some tips to help your ad dollars go further.

Tips for Strategizing Your Facebook Target Audience

Narrowing your target audience can give you a higher ROI by making sure you’re marketing to the right people. Here’s how:

Put Thought into Your Key Customers

The first step toward getting the perfect target audience is figuring out who they are. Take some time to sit down and define who could use your services and who has the greatest potential.

Go beyond basic demographics. Think about your customers’ style, what their interests are, and how they spend their time.

Don’t Try to Reach Everyone

Let’s say that for the service you’re offering, 95% of your customers are women while 5% are men. Some business owners say, “Men can buy my service so I don’t want to exclude them. I’ll target my ad toward all genders.”

Unless you’re specifically trying to increase your male customer base, this isn’t a good strategy. If half of your budget is going to a demographic that rarely buys your service, it’s doubtful that you’ll get a strong return.

The key is to create a target audience for the people who are most likely to make a purchase, not every who possibly could.

A better strategy for this case is to create two separate ads: one focused on women and one focused on men.

Think Outside the Box

Many businesses only use the primary demographics to customize their target audience: age, gender, and location. However, Facebook has ample amounts of information about its users and you can use it to your advantage.

You’d be surprised by the number of ad targeting options on Facebook. Think about many of the common interests and qualities your customers share. You can target customers with a special event coming, those who work in certain industries, those with kids of specific ages, and much more.

Use Your Industry to Determine Geotargeting

One of the key options you’ll use for your target audience is the geotargeting. If you’re not an online business, you want to target people in your area. You can choose the size of the area to target (city, state, etc.) and how far you want to branch out.

There’s no set area size that works for everyone. It will depend on your industry and how far people are willing to travel.

For instance, if you sell cars, people would travel from several hours away for the right car. You could target your entire state successfully. If you sell cookies, on the other hand, you only want to target your specific city.

Take Time to Create Target Audiences Ahead of Time

When you’re trying to get an ad into production quickly, it’s easy to skip over the audience targeting with the bare minimum. If you want a more successful social media ad campaign, though, you’ll miss out.

To help with these hurried tasks, set aside some time to create and save targeted audience. You can save many audiences at once, so consider saving a different audience for each service you may promote.

Optimize Each Audience for Each Ad

Saving audiences is a great way to save time, but that doesn’t mean you can’t make small adjustments too. Every time you set up a new ad, you can start with a saved audience but add some customization.

These customizations won’t change your saved audiences, so don’t hesitate to get specific.

Think Beyond Facebook

In many cases, you’ll have a lot of customers who aren’t following you on Facebook yet. If you want to send out a Facebook ad specifically to people who have bought from you, this is a little-known option.

Facebook allows you to upload a file of customer data so it can find their Facebook profiles and target your ads to them. Facebook offers tips for formatting your customer data file to help them find your customers. Your primary concerns should be phone numbers and email addresses.

Use Pixels

Another underutilized option for targeting Facebook ads is to use your own website data. You can specifically target people who have visited your site or completed certain actions on your site.

You can do this with Facebook’s “pixels.” Under the Assets category in your Facebook Ad Manager, select “Pixels.” This will give you a piece of code you can build into your website.

With the pixel code installed, Facebook is able to track which Facebook and Instagram users who visit your sites. Keep in mind that it will take some time to get this data. Wait at least a few days after you install the pixel code to include it in your target audience. Otherwise, you won’t be reaching many people.

Making the Most of Your Facebook Ads

Facebook ads have the potential for a huge ROI, but it’s all in how you use them. If you aim for too large of a Facebook target audience, your budget will go to waste advertising to people who aren’t a good fit.

Customizing your target audience carefully for each ad will help you make the most of your budget every time. The tips above are great ways to start.

If you want more hands-on help with your social media strategy or other digital marketing campaigns, reach out to our professional online marketers.