Account-Based Marketing: A Guide To Hyper-Targeted Advertising

Are your marketing efforts not connecting with your target audience?

Do you ever feel like you spend so much time crafting your message, only for it to not reach who it’s intended for?

If you can relate to either of these, don’t worry, many businesses experience these frustrations too.

Marketing is a broad subject with many facets to it.

Businesses can shoot themselves in the foot and frankly waste their budget, by not approaching their marketing in a hyper-targeted manner.

This is where account-based marketing comes into play.

A strategic approach to delivering your message to the decision-makers in the organisations you want to do business with.

Let’s explore this further below!

What is Account-Based Marketing?

Account-based marketing is a highly focused business strategy, where marketing is directed towards specific customer accounts.

Marketing departments can produce content, campaigns or even events that are designed to evoke a response from an account as opposed to a whole market.

Why is Account-Based Marketing Important?

Account-based marketing comes with a wide array of benefits.

While delivering a well-crafted message that resonates with your ideal customer may not be an easy task, the potential rewards can be very fruitful.

To break it down into some simple benefits, account-based marketing:

• Allows you to create personalised marketing for target accounts

• Can build effective relationships

• Can provide an amazing return on investment

• If done correctly, will get the attention of your target audience

• Can be cost-effective compared to other marketing strategies

• Allows you to get really creative (see below)

If those benefits haven’t convinced you yet, let’s dive into real-world account-based marketing examples and demonstrate the results you could achieve.

We may even include some of the companies that have tried to win us over using account-based marketing!

Examples of Account-Based Marketing

GumGum’s Heroic Campaign

Computer vision company, GumGum, really wanted to work with the infamous phone company T-Mobile.

Aim high, right?

So, what did they do?

Did they produce a generic advertising campaign with the hope that someone from T-mobile would see it, like it and contact them soon after?

Of course not.

GumGum’s chief marketing officer heavily researched T-Mobile’s buying committee, which started with the executive leadership team.

Whilst researching, the CMO discovered that the CEO of T-Mobile is a huge superhero fan, specifically Batman.

Who doesn’t love Batman?

With this key information in mind, GumGum began there account-based marketing campaign and decided to create their very own comic.

The goal was to create a real comic book that made T-Mobile’s CEO part of the GumGum story.

Creativity at its finest!

GumGum expertly utilised their team of writers, illustrators, editors and letterers to produce the comic “T-Man and Gums”.

Not quite as catchy as Batman but nevertheless, GumGum printed 100 copies of their own comic book and shipped them directly to T-Mobile.

So, what was the response?

Luckily for GumGum, the comic book-loving CEO was amazed by the effort and eventually, GumGum won the business.

I guess in this situation heroes do wear capes.

SEO Monitor’s iPhone Invite

This example is quite personal to us at Tao, purely because we were the ones being marketed too!

SEO monitor is an established SEO software company that aims to improve the efficiency and reporting of search engine optimisation.

As an SEO agency ourselves, we were obviously on the radar of SEO monitor and after a call with them, they had the idea of sending us a certain something in the mail.

So, one cold morning the team came into work to discover a parcel on the desk.

Normally when we get mail its either coffee (yes we get coffee delivered) or endless junk mail.

We opened the parcel to find that SEO monitor had sent us a personalised message attached to a fully functioning iPhone 6!

The iPhone had an SEO monitor app installed on it with instructions on how to use it.

Instantly, this caught our attention and we couldn’t stop talking about it all morning.

Of course, we then contacted SEO monitor again, thanked them for the gift and opened up another conversation with them.

A great idea and with even better execution.

If any other businesses want to send us iPhone’s, our mail is open!

The Data Centre Plus Beer Pong Challenge

This one is another personal favourite of ours.

No iPhone’s this time though.

Dedicated server company, Data Centre Plus, caught our attention by sending us beer pong equipment along with an invitation to play.

The marketing material that came with the ping pong balls and cups had a personalised message for digital agencies in the Manchester area.

Along with this was an invitation to challenge one of the data centre plus staff at beer pong.

We found this to be a much more enticing and fun way of opening up a conversation, as opposed to “meeting for a coffee’.

Below the invitation was a hashtag that we could tweet out titled ‘#digitalbeerpongchallenge’ and an email and phone number to contact the company.

For a simple idea, the execution was carried out exceptionally. Instantly, the receiver, who in this situation was us, are spurred to action by either playing beer pong, tweeting about it or reaching back out to Data Centre Plus.

We can assure you that no other company have invited us to play beer pong this year, meaning this stands out strongly in our minds amongst the heap of other generic marketing materials we receive.

Well played Data Centre Plus!

Should You Do Account-Based Marketing?

We’ve established that account-based marketing can be a highly effective strategy to engage specific accounts you want to work with.

But how does this align with your wider marketing strategy?

As a Digital Marketing Agency, we can speak about the world of digital and the benefits until we turn blue in the face.

But alongside your SEO, PPC, Content and Social Media efforts should be a way of reaching the decision-makers you want to work with.

If you want to target a set of specific accounts, Account-Based Marketing should be integrated into your overall marketing strategy, alongside digital or even combined with digital.

The possibilities are truly endless.

So, set out who you want to reach, the message you want to deliver and the action you want them to take.

Then, get creative!

If you are struggling to reach your target audience, or want to engage with specific accounts, get in touch with us below to supercharge your marketing efforts!

5 Ways To Optimise PPC B2B Campaigns

Google Ads/PPC is a great way to generate leads or sales for your business.

Capturing your customer’s attention, whilst they are making an intent-driven search, is guaranteed to secure you qualified leads.

As with any other marketing campaign, driving a healthy return on investment from your B2B PPC endeavours is key to keeping your clients happy.

A Google Ads campaign should be nurtured constantly by looking at existing data and using best practices to optimise results. Wasted ad spend is far too common in Google Ads so your goal is to get the most out of every penny in your budget.

At Tao Digital, we have seen incredible growth in our clients accounts through the implementation of various optimisation techniques.

Because of our kind-hearted nature, we thought we’d share the best techniques that have increased our conversions and reduced our campaign costs.

1. Landing Page Speed

What could be worse than clicking on an appealing ad, only for the website to take ages to load?

Okay, there are probably lots of things that are worse, but the point is that you have literally seconds to make a good impression on your users.

If your landing page is too slow then prepare for users to click off and go to your competition’s site before your page even loads.

Landing page speed is, therefore, a crucial component of your google ads campaign that you should be paying attention to. The faster the page the better!

In November 2018, we took over a clients PPC account and saw that it needed drastic changes.

The mobile speed score for the landing page was sitting at 4/10 which was seriously affecting the conversion rate. By running some speed audits, we began to understand what was causing the site speed to be so slow.

After optimising images and implementing back end and hosting fixes, we were able to increase the mobile speed to 8/10.

As you can see, this had a dramatic impact on the client’s conversion rate rising from 0.17% to 7.89%. A small change but one that has a huge impact!

2. Landing Page Attention Ratio

Once you have directed users to your landing page, they need to know exactly where to look, where to click and how to take action. Too much information can overload people so aim for an attention ratio of 1:1.

If you have no idea what an attention ratio is, you are in for a treat.

Attention ratio is the ratio of interactive elements on a landing page to the number of campaign conversion goals.

If you are running a lead generation campaign then you have one goal – someone filling out a form. With this in mind, your landing page should have only one call to action and only one place to click.

If we look at two example landings pages below, you’ll notice the first landing page has 5 clickable elements.

Whereas, the second landing page only has one clickable element. As a user, you want to be able to find what you are looking for instantly and take action.

Overloading your user with clickable elements such as different calls to action or site links will result in a lower conversion rate.

3. Campaign Structure

Google ad campaigns come in all shapes and sizes. From small local businesses to huge e-commerce sites, every account is bound to have a unique structure depending on the services or products being offered.

There are, however, ways of approaching your Google ad campaigns that will improve the efficiency of your campaign.

When structuring your campaign you need to consider several options.

For our clients, we first analyse their website and see if it would make sense to structure the campaign similar to how their pages are structured.

We love to use this method as mirroring the website structure aligns ad groups and landing pages.

If not, then we further analyse their products and services and split them up into relevant categories depending on the business’s goals.

For example, a tennis equipment store may have a Tennis racket campaign with ad groups based on different models or even prices.

However, maybe the store has the best margins on Adidas equipment which would give way to the possibility of creating an Adidas campaign and having different product types as the ad groups.

Whichever way you structure your campaign, be methodical and do your research into the business’s services and goals.

4. In-Market Audiences

In-market audiences is a relatively new feature from google but one that has made a huge difference to our campaigns.

Imagine the ability to individually target audiences who you know are actively searching for your companies services or have shown previous interest.

With in-market audiences, this has become a possibility.

Google now gives you access to audiences who have specific interests, intents and demographics. Own a gym and need to get more sign-ups?

You can adjust your bids to bid higher on the people within the ‘fitness audience’ or ‘sports audience’.

This ensures that when someone is actively searching for your services with strong intent, you are the first point of call that they see.

5. Ad Copy

Around 3 seconds – that’s how long you have to capture your customer’s attention. Your ad copy needs to instantly let the user know why they need your services and the benefit they are going to gain from them.

You need to speak to your customers in the language they respond to in everyday conversation.

In a split second, your customer will read your ad and decide whether or not you are relevant. Your Google ad copy should be about the benefits or emotional payoffs that a person is going to receive.

Putting the benefits before the features or services is a great way to capture attention and improve click-through rate.

We tested this out with one of our clients and saw a steady increase in conversions and click through rate.

You can see the comparisons below.

Increasing landing page speed, design and ad copy increased our click through rate and conversion rate significantly.

For our client in this instance, a conversion meant some filling out their details in a contact form. Clients want tangible results from their marketing efforts – in this case leads – so being able to consistently increase that number is critical.

This goes to show a few small changes in the right areas can have a huge impact on the results of our campaign.

Final Thoughts

There you have it! The five techniques we used to increase our clients campaign performance. We hope this has provided some useful insights into the world of PPC and campaign optimisation. To learn more about our PPC services, feel free to visit our PPC page here.

Alternatively, if you would like help with a Google Ads/PPC campaign, we would love to help in any way we can!

7 Tips On How To Integrate Influencers Into Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Influencer Marketing has been such a growing phenomenon over the last few years, and as more marketers look to work with influencers as part of their marketing strategy. We thought we’d bring you 7 tips on how to integrate them in to yours.

1. Integrate them in to your social media strategy

Whilst this one seems the most obvious way to start with influencer marketing, it is often one of the most misunderstood. A lot of brands think that Influencers are an answer to all their problems.

They have this idea that influencers will immediately grow sales, increase their social media following, raise brand awareness and increase retention rates. Whilst influencers can do all of these things with the right content and strategy. It’s very rare this works all at once.

We’d always recommend that you always have a very clear objective before you start your influencer plan. Are you looking for sales? Or do you want to grow your own social following and raise some brand awareness?

These are two very different strategies, so think very carefully before you start.

Video is exploding on Social Media right now, with video getting a much higher engagement rate than imagery. So when thinking about your social strategy, look to platforms like YouTube as a great way to engage an audience with video content.

Influencers are extremely relatable to their audience, remember it’s a lot more important understanding how your customers speak about your brand. Rather than how you speak about your brand.

So having influencers spread your message for you is an excellent way to have someone speak about your brand in an authentic and natural tone.

2. Have them write a guest post on your blog

Guest posting is often an extremely effective way to have influencers speak about your brand in a more informative way. With the long form nature of a blog post, Influencers can speak in a lot more detail and have the opportunity to really put forward their ideas and expertise in a way that can appeal to your audience.

It’s also an excellent opportunity to drive audience visits to site, by asking the influencer to share the post on their social media.

Lastly there is also the SEO benefit of linking to the influencers blog, and you may also benefit from their audience searching their name on google and coming across the blog post they contributed on your site.

There’s so many opportunities with this option and comes highly recommended.

3. Have them create content for your website

Influencers are now much more than just a way to share a message on social media, they are now photographers, videographers, editors and creative directors.

Influencers have been creating content for their audience and honing their skills, so why not let them create content for your audience as well? From the studies we’ve seen before in various markets, Influencer content performs far better at converting online than brand shot content. It’s often far cheaper to produce as well.

Having influencers create content for you to use yourself is especially apparent when targeting a younger audience. It’s often likely that an influencer is closer to your target market than you might be yourself. So having them create the content could speak better to that audience than something you’ve created in house.

Working with them collaboratively to create something fresh and new could pay big dividends for your brand.

4. Facebook Advertising

Many companies are now spending more and more of their marketing budget on digital ads, the majority of this now through Facebook and Instagram.

Often brands take it upon themselves to create the content for their Facebooks Ads by using imagery from their website, often captured in a studio. But does this show your product in a real-life setting?

Influencers are amazing at capturing the essence of a product in use and showing the product as it would be used in person. Doing this can often lead to far higher conversion rates, as an audience can see how a product looks in a life like scenario. As opposed to be shot to look good in a studio like environment.

This is more likely to give an audience more confidence in the real-life appliance of a product, as well as seeing it on a person deemed more like them, rather than a celebrity etc.

Tests show Influencer content performing up to 10x better than brand shot content when applied to Facebook and Instagram ad content.

5. Podcasting

Podcasting is becoming the hot topic of 2019, with more and more brands turning to this medium to engage a new audience.

For those of you not sure of what Podcasting is, think of it like hosting your own Radio Talk Show – where you get to choose the topics and control the conversation. Influencers are often experts on a particular subject matter or have a very strong view or interest which is why their audience care about their opinions so much.

They are deemed to have an authority on a particular subject, be this fashion, beauty, travel, health etc. So having them speak on your podcast is a great way to bring their audience over to you.

Often an Influencer will promote the fact they have taken part to their audience. They will often tune in to hear their favourite influencers speak and share more about their lives.

With Podcasting, you are not fighting a social media algorithm to appear in people’s news feeds. If people are subscribed to you, they will see it.

With retention rates extremely high and audio creating a new wave of opportunities, it’s never been a better time to start a podcast and invite influencers to join you.

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is often a great way to engage influencers with your product and have them do the promotion for you. The cost to set up an affiliate programme is often minimal, and rather than pay fees up front for promotion. An affiliate programme allows influencers to promote your product and receive a commission for doing so.

This takes the up-front cost and risk away from you and gives influencers an incentive to push your product hard so they can earn a good commission. Often higher than their original fee should they do well.

It’s easily trackable and allows you to see who is performing well for you so you know who is performing well and who isn’t.

This gives you a lot of valuable data, as you can give different products to your top performers to see which products are best received by their audience and is a great testing bed for new promotions.

7. Events

If it’s not on social…. Did it even happen? Whilst traditionally events are seen as an offline platform, they do tend to have a digital presence surrounding them.

Be it promotion of the event in advance, reporting on the event after, or simply showcasing it as it happens. If you want your event to make a bang, it’s great to track the digital coverage around it.

Involving influencers in your offline events will allow you to create a lot of traction, be it having influencers inviting their audience to your event in order to increase footfall. Or have them cover the event on their social media for increased brand awareness.

There are many ways that involving influencers in your event can benefit your brand.

Events are also an excellent way to meet your influencers in person and start building a relationship between themselves and your brand. Influencer Marketing is about how you treat influencers as people and not just a way to promote your products or services.

The relationships you build in this space are key to your long term successes, and so by meeting influencers in person. Also hosting events for them to attend, this is a great way to showcase your brand in a positive light.

Final Thoughts

We hope that you’ve enjoyed these tips and can take away so key learnings. Remember, influencers are more than just a way to share a message online.

They are creative and incredibly talented individuals who can help you convey a message in so many different ways.

They are more than just a number, and the biggest reach doesn’t mean the biggest impact. Choose Influencers who really share your values as a business and work with the ones most aligned to your goals and ambitions.

Influencer Marketing is continuing to grow and have a measurable impact, so don’t miss them out from your digital marketing strategy.

This article was written by Bee Influence, a specialist Influencer Marketing Agency based in Manchester, you can find out more information about them here. They’re always happy to answer any questions you have regarding working with influencers, so feel free to give them a buzz!

Robert De Niro and Bolton – two things you’d probably never expect to hear in the same sentence. However, today the weird and wonderful world we live in has presented us with a mash-up of the two, in the form of an advertising campaign. Warburton’s… congratulations, you’ve made us care about bagels more than we ever thought was possible.

The two-minute advert opens with De Niro storming into the head office at Warburtons to speak to the top dog about his bagel masterplan. Italian Gangsters entering the bagel market is a no brainer after all. It’s an entertaining exchange between both Jonathan Warburton and De Niro, who plays up to the mafia boss character he’s famous for.

The advert then shows Robert De Niro’s pitch where he and his minions venture through Bolton in order to cook up their rebranded bagels, suitably named ‘Goodbagels”. The advert concludes with Jonathan Warburton being intimidated by De Niro and his men after stating ‘this won’t end well’.

Highlighting Core Values

Exciting probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind when you think about Bolton. Yet somehow, I now want to watch a mobster film set in Bolton. The advert does a great job at showcasing familiar places in Bolton town centre such as the Bolton Train Station and the Warburtons factory.

Any fellow “Boltonian” will be amused throughout.

Combined with the imagery of De Niro and his gang on a mission to create a killer bagel, the advert simply brings Bolton to life.  Being a family-owned business, Bolton is at the heart of Warburtons and vice versa.

Bolton is an integral pillar of the Warburton’s brand and the advert plays on that by showing us that Bolton is producing bagels so good that they are gaining attention overseas. That’s not too far fetched, right?

A Familiar Storyline

In the world of business, many people sell products that simply aren’t exciting. Don’t get me wrong, bagels are great. But, injecting your products into interesting storylines is a great way to build more excitement around a product.

It’s a common tactic in the marketing world and hats off to the marketing team at Warburton’s because they executed it expertly here. Seeing the Warburtons product alongside Robert De Niro in a mobster like scenario suddenly makes me more invested in the brand and the product.

Why?

Because it’s entertaining and instantly relatable.

When I say relatable, I’m not implying that we all dabble in mobster like activities in our spare time. But, relatable in the sense that so many people around the world love Robert De Niro and the films he stars in.

Warburton’s have taken something many people love and care about and promoted their product through that medium.

We’ve all seen product placement before but the way the two are interwoven here is so well-crafted and strangely seems natural.

Seeing Robert De Niro and his men burying their competitor’s bagels is something I’d never thought I see.

Not to forget the lines ‘all we got to do is sit back and watch the dough roll in’ and “you wanna make it in the bagel business? You gotta break some bread.”

So punny.

What Can Inbound Marketing Do For Your Business?

Okay, imagine this.

Your business is going well but you want to see more tangible results from your online efforts.

You’re excited to step into the digital marketing world but you aren’t sure where to start.

So, what do you do?

Facebook Ads! Google Ads! LinkedIn Ads! Marketing Automation!

You throw your hard earned money into paid advertising because, well, everyone else is doing it right?

Here’s the thing, paid advertising can deliver incredible results when done right.

A well thought out digital marketing strategy, however, is what you need to focus on first before handing your money over to Zuckerberg.

When developing a digital marketing strategy, it needs to be realistic, goal based and in line with your current budget.

Let’s say in your strategy, you allocate your budget towards advertising and a fancy website.

Now that your budget is nearly gone, you think to yourself “if only there was a way to attract people to your website and convert them to customers at little cost”… Well, we’re pleased tell you; there is!

It’s called inbound marketing and you’re going to find out why you should be doing it right here!

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing can be defined as the process of drawing customers to products and services via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimisation and branding.

By creating customer-centric content that is valuable, you attract people to your business without having to sell to them.

Once you have attracted someone to your business by providing some form of value to them, you can then convert, close and delight the customer to keep them coming back.

Inbound marketing differs hugely from traditional marketing methods which focus on interrupting a person’s attention to advertise to them.

Methods such as TV commercials, radio ads, intro videos etc, can work well, however, from a customer perspective it can be seen as intrusive and annoying.

The beauty of inbound marketing is that if you create content based around a problem that your business solves and someone searches for that problem, then you are attracting qualified prospects who need your services.

To put it simply, customers find you. What could be better than prospects asking you for information?

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How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

Inbound marketing is a step by step process that guides user’s to eventually converting into customers. The marketing funnel consists of four individual funnels: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight.

Attract

The purpose of the first stage of the funnel is to provide customers with valuable content at the right place and the right time. People may find this content through search engine’s, social media etc.

To attract people to your site you need to create valuable content, this is sometimes called a ‘lead magnet’. This type of content can come in all shapes and sizes from blogs and videos to podcasts and PDF’s.

Convert

Presuming that your lead magnet has worked a trick, the next step in the funnel is to convert your site visitors into leads so that you can turn them into customers.

Converting site visitors to leads involves collecting contact information from the site visitors. For example, when someone comes across a blog that they are interested in, at the top of the page could be an email subscription box for visitors to leave their information and get sent more blogs like the one they are reading.

Close

The third step in the process is called the closing stage, where leads are transformed into paying customers. The closing stage involves lead nurturing, CRM systems, marketing automation etc.

Your leads will be at completely different stages of the buying process. This is crucial to understand so you can deliver the right content, at the right place, and at the right time.

Delight

The final step in the funnel is the Delight stage, where leads or customers are given exceptional service and are engaged with even after they have bought something.

The delight stage involves engaging leads or customers with dynamic content after they have taken an action with your business.

Examples Of Good Inbound Marketing

Coming Up With Content

Let’s say you own a dumbbell business. Stay with me on this one.

You want to target people who want to start working out but have little knowledge of exercises.

Your budget isn’t huge so instead of paid advertising, you turn to your blog.

After thinking of ideas for a while, you come up with a blog called “The Best Dumbbell Exercises For Beginners”.

The blog is filled with valuable information on the different exercises you can do to increase strength and muscle size with dumbbells.

You even throw in a link to some of your dumbbell products for good measure.

https://www.building-muscle101.com/dumbbell_workout_beginner.html

Optimising Your Site

Now, depending on how well optimised your content and site is, when someone searches for ‘Dumbbell Exercises for Beginners’ they should find your blog on Google and be led to your website!

From there, you have to decide what action you want them to take next.

Do you want them to sign up to your email? Do you want them to go to your product page?

The possibilities are endless but you need to define your goals and come up with strategy to convert the website traffic into customers or leads.

If your goal is to get emails, so you can target those leads with a product heavy email campaign, you could set up a lead generation form on the blog page.

This could be an email box that pops up as the user is reading the blog or an email form in the middle of the blog.

Once a user has filled out their email, you can now add them to your CRM system and send them some product deals through an email campaign.

A great tool for this is Active Campaign. Oh, and here’s a free trial on us!

If they choose to buy one of your dumbbells, you could then send them a personalised confirmation email with 10% off their next purchase.

And there we have it! The inbound marketing process in action.

We have attracted prospects to our website without having to sell to them directly, provided them with value and in exchange asked them to sign up to our emailing list.

In doing so, we have built customer loyalty and personalised engaging content to hopefully increase the lifetime value of the customer.

One of the best things about inbound marketing is that the content lives on your site as long as you want it to.

So, now you know about inbound marketing, I guess the next question to ask is.. Is it effective?

Is Inbound Marketing Effective?

The short answer is: yes. But, there’s much more to it.

The Content Marketing Institute found that 80% of decision makers prefer to read about brands in articles rather than in advertisements.

Creating informative, engaging content is a great way to communicate with your potential customers and help build trust.

As mentioned previously, inbound marketing is also cost effective whilst still being effective at generating leads.

“So are you saying we could generate leads, satisfy our customers more and also potentially spend less?”

Yes. That’s exactly what we’re saying! Before you get too excited though, you need to understand the time-scales inbound marketing success happens within.

If you are looking for a quick win to boost your profits then paid advertising will be more likely to meet your goals.

But, if you are looking to invest in content that could consistently generate traffic/leads years after publishing, then inbound marketing may be for you.

Final Thoughts

It needs to be stated, inbound marketing shouldn’t be your only marketing strategy and it’s not something you should solely rely on.

However, you should definitely consider adding inbound marketing to your marketing mix.

On its own, it wouldn’t get you the results you are looking for as it can take months/years until you start to gain high volumes of traffic on your blogs/videos/site.

But, when you combine PPC, SEO, Social Media etc with inbound marketing, then you have a much higher probability of success from your marketing efforts.

If you need any help or assistance with inbound marketing, please do not hesitate to get in touch below.

How To Find Your Target Audience With Facebook Ads

As of recent, Facebook has disrupted the advertising world and climbed the ranks to compete with giants like Google. With a user base of over 1 billion daily users, it’s easy to see why Facebook has become such a lucrative advertising platform.

Marketers and businesses alike are now seeing the value of targeting their audiences down to their demographics, location and interests. But how exactly do you go about finding that ‘target audience’? Luckily for you, we have put together a complete guide for how to target the ideal audience on Facebook.

Whether you are an agency owner or want to get your business seen by more people, Facebook Ads may be the platform to help you reach your target audience.

First things first, you will need to go to the ‘Audiences’ tab in either ‘Ads Manager’ or ‘Business Manager’. The ‘Audiences’ page will allow you to create new audiences and see your previously saved ones.

Before we go into the details of creating audiences, we need to define the three main types of audiences on Facebook.

Saved Audiences, Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences.

What are Saved Audiences?

Saved audiences allow you to create an audience based on the demographics, interests, behaviours and location of the people you’re targeting. These all sound great, but why are these important and how do we go about implementing them?

Demographic Targeting

Demographic targeting allows marketers to draw upon information that people share publicly on Facebook. This ranges from life events and career to political view and education. While there is a whole range of options you can get stuck into, we recommend focusing on gender, age and language to start off with.

Location Targeting

Location targeting is a great way to ensure that people within a certain radius see your ads. Marketers can use location targeting to target ads by postal code, city, region, country or worldwide!

In order to target an area of your choice, type in the city, country or region you want to show your ads to. The great thing about location targeting is that you can go into even more depth and target people who have recently visited a location, people travelling to a location, people currently in a location and people who live in the location.

Does you business operate in a remote location? Target people within a small radius of your business down to the mile!

Interest Targeting

Interest targeting is useful if you have a product based around a lifestyle or interest. This method of targeting allows marketers to focus on consumer and lifestyle categories such as entertainment, fitness and wellness, food and drink and much more.

Facebook gathers this data from users likes and interests, Facebook pages they have liked and apps they have used. Do you have a sportswear brand that sells running gear? Why not select people who have interests in physical activity, running, triathlons etc.

Behaviour Targeting

Behaviour targeting allows marketers to target people by their previous purchase history, events they like, anniversaries and more. Facebook gathers this data by analysing numerous factors and external data sets. Device usage is an important targetable behaviour as you can create ads to include or exclude people by a desktop browser and operating system.

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What are Custom Audiences?

So, now you know how to set up a saved audience, all good to go, right?

Saved audiences are definitely are a great starting point but if you want to delve even deeper into your target audience then you need to know about custom audiences. With Custom audiences, you can target ads to people who have taken actions on your website, Facebook page, mobile app or other sources.

Custom audiences act as your most high-value target audiences because they have engaged with your content/website previously showing they may have purchasing intentions.

You can create audiences based on:

• Website traffic
• Customer files e.g. emails, phone numbers
• App activity
• Engagement on Facebook
• Offline activity

Facebook also allows you to combine custom audiences with different options to reach the right audiences such as location, demographics, behaviours, interests and connections.

What are Lookalike Audiences?

Finally, you’re now ready to target your audience, well, nearly.

Want to target new customers who are similar to your existing ones? Custom audiences act as a building block for creating Lookalike Audiences, a way to reach new customers who are similar to your existing customers.

Facebook allows you to choose the size of your Lookalike audience, the smaller the audience the closer the match to your existing audience/customers. It is recommended by Facebook to go with an existing audience between 1,000 and 50,000 people.

In order to go about creating a lookalike audience, you will need to choose a source so Facebook will know what type of individuals you want to target. A source for your lookalike audience may be your custom audience from your Facebook Pixel, fans of your Facebook page or mobile app data.

It’s important to note that, if you want to set up a custom audience based on your website traffic then you need to set up the Facebook Pixel to track users actions on your webpage.

After you have selected the ‘Lookalike Audience’ from the audience creation menu, you can select a target country and a percentage of the targeted country’s Facebook users.

Summary:

Equipped with the knowledge on how to create your three types of audiences, you should now be able to start building your ideal target audience. Facebook audiences can sometimes be in the millions.

Whether you use a saved audience, create a custom or lookalike audience, focus on keeping your audience size relatively small so you target customers willing to take action.

Of course, this all depends on the goals of your campaign. If brand awareness is your aim, a large audience may be best for you.

Okay, now you’re ready.

If you would like any assistance with Facebook Advertising, do not hesitate to get in touch!