It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when it comes to audience targeting on Facebook once you get past all the “obvious” interest and demographic settings.
In this video, I outline 4 unique audience research methods you can use to more efficiently target on Facebook Ads.
Hey everybody. Chris Raines here with Bullhorn media with some more digital advertising talk. Uh, today I want to talk about Facebook ads targeting. Now Facebook has a huge list of available targets that you can do. If you go to the ad set level on Facebook and just type in anything, you’re bound to find a lot of things underneath that are targetable. Uh, there’s lots of categories, uh, but sometimes you can get stuck, you know, once you get past the usual sort of your, your own category or your own product or your own target market, just putting in very obvious keywords there, you might get stuck and figure out how in figuring out how to find new audiences. And, uh, you know, I’m a big fan of going, having lots of different audience pockets to go after, even if you don’t launch with all of them all at once.
It gives you a fallback if your main audiences falter or regress over time. So I want to go over for audience research methods that I’ve discovered and used in the past. And that hopefully can be helpful for you when you’re going out there and trying to figure out how to dial in your targeting on Facebook. So the first one I want to cover is books, celebrities, movies, et cetera, related to your niche. So I’m going to go here the screen and kind of tell, tell you what I’m talking about here. But okay, so here we are. And this is just a simple Google search for books about leadership. So maybe you’ve got a product or service that’s geared towards a leadership or training people on leadership. So you can target leadership as an interest. That’s fine. Uh, but there’s all kinds of other ways you can go at it.
And one of them is books about leadership. So here you go. You’ve probably noticed a lot of these books. Here’s good to great. Um, who’s that? Jim Collins. You’ve got the Sheryl Sandberg’s book here. Lean in, you’ve got Drive by Daniel pink. All these popular, your seven habits, Stephen Covey. You know, and so, uh, what I would recommend is going out there, if you’re doing someth ing on this niche and just typing in these authors and maybe even these book titles, maybe those are targetable as well. So that’s one way you can, and you can do the same for, you know, let’s go, uh, speakers. Um, let’s go like leadership speakers. See what that gives us. Boom. So like Google makes it easy for you, right? So you’ve got all these people, I would just go to all of these and, and not all of them will be targetable, right?
But some of them will be. So these are people that are domain experts in on leadership and you could replicate this for any, uh, any niche that you have. So, uh, that’s, uh, method number one of trying to find influencers that write books and do or do seminars. You can do the same thing for seminars, conferences, et cetera. You get the picture, um, ways to find little pockets of interest that you might, that might not be immediately that, but that Google will let you know about. Okay. Method number two is life events. So, depending on what you sell, and this might, this is not useful for every single you know, business category, but it is for some and it’s worth exploring if it, if it’s relevant to you. So here’s what I mean by that. Uh, here, here we are in the Facebook ads interface and if you twirl down here to detailed targeting, you can see life events.
So let’s just scroll down here and see what’s going on here. Okay, you’ve got anniversary, okay, cool. Anniversary within 30 days. So if you’re in jewelry or if you’re in gifts, you might target that for someone that’s super relevant. If you’re targeting someone to, if you’re, if you’ve got a product that’s a good gift item for an anniversary. Cool. Uh, let’s see what else we have here. We have away from family away from hometown. So this is pretty interesting. And so what if you’re in the tourism industry and you want to target people that are in your area but are away from hometown. So if you live in a, uh, an area that has high tourism, uh, you might want to target those people that Facebook knows are away from their home town or they’re in their city. So they’re there. If you’re in a tourism city, they’re likely there to do touristy things and spend money.
So, you know, uh, that’s something to consider. Let’s see what else we have here. Let’s just do one more here just for, just for giggles. Here’s a birthday, upcoming birthday. Okay, cool. Uh, so what if you’re a restaurant and you’re running a promotion that offers a free, a medium sized pizza on your birthday. Okay. So you could target that and make that an ongoing promotion, right? And offer, offer someone a free pizza if they come in on their birthday and show their ID. Right? So that’s pretty cool. It could be like an evergreen campaign cause your ad sets always refreshing. People are rolling off, uh, when their birthday is not coming up anymore and they’re coming on when their birthday is coming up. Uh, so that’s just a few ways that you can use, um, life events to actually go out there and target on Facebook.
All right, number three is audience insights. And so if you’ve never used this tool before, this is a really powerful tool and it’s basically exactly what it sounds like. It’s Facebook. Um, ha, you know, has all this data on what people are interested in and what related things people are interested in. So you could put in one, uh, interest or product or brand and you can see what those people are also interested in. So let me show you what that looks like. Okay. So here we are and audience insights. And so let’s pretend that you can see here this interest area. You can type in anything in this area and it will show you related things to that. So let’s pretend that your selling a product that’s related to running. Okay, so here we go. Running and up pops all of this. So the first time you’ve got demographics that tells you who might be more.
It looks like more women are interested in running than men relationship status. So you’ve got all these kind of interesting things that’s less interesting to me. Then this next tab, which is categories and page likes. So let’s look at this. Okay. Mint, Juliet women’s clothing store. Okay. Color. Here’s the color run. Okay. So this is cool. So you could, this could like kind of get you on a path of a dif, different research methods. So the color run is a, you know, one of these, a fun, let’s go to the page and see what it says here. Yeah. It’s like you’ve seen these, these, uh, bursting colors that people run through. This is a really fun like running event. Okay. So that’s, that’s targetable on Facebook. So you might target that and that might you, that might lead you to other different runs. Different 5k is different marathons that you could see.
If you can target for that. We’ll see. What else is there. Um, a planet fitness. Cool. So that might lead you down. Another path of different businesses that cater different fitness gyms. There’s Gold’s Gym, there’s all kinds of other, uh, gGymm franchises that you could target. Let’s see, what else? Clothing, right under armor. Okay, so clothing that people wear and fit. So you’re getting the idea here is all these different categories. Um, even if they don’t give you immediate things that you can target, they’re going to lead you off into different rabbit trails that couldn’t possibly help you find other little pockets to target. The last one I want to go over is the option to target Facebook page admins from various industries. So here’s what that looks like. Here we are in the ads interface and I went ahead and typed in here. Page admin.
You can target and they don’t have all the different industries here, but if you’re selling into any of these industries and you want to sell to the business owner or maybe even marketers for that industry, for instance, this might be valuable to you. Here’s travel and tourism pages. Um, retail page admin. So what if you’re selling a credit card processing solution for retail that will be good to target health and beauty. If you’re selling products to the health and beauty for hairstylist, things like that, that might be good for you to target. We’ll see what else. Food and restaurant, if you’re selling supplies, a food restaurant on and on and on. And so the idea here is that if someone is a page admin for that rest for that industry, they’re much more likely to be owner business owners in that industry than say someone who’s just interested in food and restaurants, which should be, which could be a wide variety of people.
Uh, so there you have it. That’s four ways. Those, those are four things that I typically go through on top of just regular targeting that I know I’m going to go after. And that’s just ways to not only find targets, new targets that are immediately targeted below on Facebook, but also to just spark ideas for you, for different rabbit trails to run off of that can then lead you to even more things to target that weren’t immediately available. Uh, so there you go. I hope that was helpful and I hope you can take that stuff and use it if you’re ever stuck on your Facebook ad targeting or you just want more options, more ad sets, uh, to go out there with. So thanks for watching.