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Facebook ad targeting is one of the key campaign elements that help you get high ROI out of your ad campaigns. A poorly targeted ad set will have a lower click-through rate, resulting in higher cost-pre-click and fewer results for your money. So why let your money go to waste? What you want to achieve […]
May 15, 2019
Facebook ad targeting is one of the key campaign elements that help you get high ROI out of your ad campaigns.
A poorly targeted ad set will have a lower click-through rate, resulting in higher cost-pre-click and fewer results for your money.
So why let your money go to waste?
What you want to achieve instead, is reaching the people who see your ad and think “THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER I NEED IT NOW!”
How seeing a well-targeted ad should feel – Image source
… While you’re just sitting back and waiting for the sales come in.
Yass, got the targeting right again! – Image source
Luckily for marketers, Facebook and Google are collecting TONS of data about their users, including (arguably irrelevant, but useful for targeting) information such as:
Well, you get the point.
If this sounds creepy, that’s because it is. However, that is also what makes Facebook ad targeting so efficient.
Whisper “cat food” and the next time you open up Instagram, there will be a row of cat food ads greeting you.
As you just looked at this GIF, you too will have cat food ads in your feed – Image source
So how can you improve your Facebook ad campaigns’ targeting?
It comes down to three main pillars:
This article’s divided into three main topics. If you’re already familiar with the basics of ad targeting, no worries! We guarantee you will learn something new today, be it a Facebook targeting mistake to avoid or a new hack to build a more efficient marketing funnel.
Ready to set your Facebook campaigns up for success and improve your results 50%-200%?
Let’s go!
PS use these links to navigate to the subject you’re most interested in or read through the entire guide top-down:
Part 1: The complete overview of Facebook ad targeting options in 2019 Part 2: TOP 5 Facebook ad targeting mistakes to avoid at all cost
Part 3: Facebook ad Targeting best practices for TOP 3 business types
According to the common belief among advertisers and media, the average person sees 5000+ ads per day.
If we noticed all of the 5k ads targeted at us daily, we’d need 100 extra hours a day to register all of them. So, to cope in this modern day ad jungle, our brains have developed what’s called ad blindness.
We are blind to 99% of the ads we see, only spotting what’s really relevant to us.
Like a Snickers ad suddenly showing up when you’re hungry…
What if it was there all the time but we just didn’t notice?! – Image source
The point is:
This makes your job as a digital marketer to deliver your ads to the people for whom your product is relevant. It’s a good thing then that Facebook has one of the most advanced targeting features in the industry.
On a high level, Facebook ad targeting options include:
Facebook ad targeting options
If you’re a newbie to Facebook advertising, start with testing a few different Saved Audiences. Once you feel that you’ve mastered the basics, jump on to Custom and Lookalike Audiences.
Saved Audiences let you target any Facebook user in the world, based on their location, demographics, interests, and much much more.
Here’s the full rundown of all Facebook Saved Audience targeting features:
You will soon know which of these targeting methods to use!
When setting up a campaign in Facebook Ads Manager, you can target people by location:
In Ads Manager, you can also select Browse to open a drop-down menu of regions and countries.
Or if you have some specific address in mind, you can set a pin right on the map to target an area surrounding it.
Drop pin to target specific areas
There’s a location that you specifically do not want to target? – Great, Facebook also allows you to exclude locations.
Exclude specific locations from targeting
And to make matters even more complicated, you can select between people living in a location, having recently visited an area, or traveling in a location.
When in doubt, just use the default option: “People who live in this location”
This one’s quite straightforward – If you know the age range and gender of your target audience, use these features to fine-tune your Facebook ad targeting.
Target based on age and gender
The language targeting comes in handy if you’re advertising to a multi-language market such as many European countries.
In this case, you can create multiple ad campaigns with ads in different languages and make your ad sets target people speaking that particular language.
If your ads are in English and you’re targeting a non-English-speaking market, we recommend to leave the language targeting unspecified – Let Facebook’s algorithms to figure it out.
Select the languages you want to target
Detailed targeting is where advertisers can have the most fun, targeting people based on additional demographic information, interests and behaviors:
Detailed Targeting includes tons of options
Demographics help you reach people based on education, employment, household and lifestyle details. (Some data is available for the US only.)
Education:
Life Events:
Birthday:
Parents:
Relationship Status:
Work:
⚽ Interests:
(All of the below categories come with specified options)
Behaviors:
In this audience section, you can target people connected to your Pages, apps or events.
Facebook considers a person “connected” if they’ve engaged with a page, app or event or are a friend of someone who has.
Use Connection-based targeting to reach your page fans
Here’s a breakdown of all targeting options based on Connections.
Facebook Pages:
Apps
Events
New information overload – Image source
If all the above options make your head go round and want to make you quit Facebook ads for good, hold on!
Here’s the thing: You don’t actually need to go super specific in your ad targeting. These are just all the options available.
You can just as well set up a high-performance Facebook campaign by only tweaking the location targeting of your ads and adding a few interest-based targeting layers.
Which brings us to…
Best practices for advertising to Facebook Saved Audiences:
Using the AND/OR features, you can reach people interested in A and B and C and D and…
For example, people who like both cookies AND milk.
That’s still the entire population tho…
+ = all the people in the world
Lastly, let your Facebook ad sets be live for at least 48h before making any conclusions on the results.
According to Facebook, “it takes the ad delivery system 24 hours to adjust the performance level for your ad. It can take longer when you edit your ad frequently. To fix it, let your ad run for at least 24 hours before you edit it again.“
Every time you tweak your Facebook ad targeting, the algorithms need to find your new target audience and buy ad placements in their feeds on the auction. This will take some time even for one of the world’s most advanced algorithmic system.
Most of the people you get to visit your website won’t convert on their first visit.
Yet as an eCommerce store owner pointed out in Shopify’s blog, remarketing to leads with an ongoing email campaign helped to eventually convert most of them to buyers:
Every email brought additional conversions – Image source
There’s a saying “to strike while the iron is hot” and that is exactly what you can do with Facebook Custom Audiences.
Using Custom Audience targeting is almost like getting a superpower. Imagine being able to target:
These audiences are so close to converting it would be a sin to let them go off the hook.
Facebook’s got your back here. And so do we!
Here’s a quick breakdown of all Custom Audience targeting options available in the Ads Manager:
Plenty of options to reach your highest-value audience!
Does your business have a website?
Of course it does!
This means that you can use Facebook Custom Audiences for retargeting your website visitors.
Important! To be able to create Custom Audiences based on website traffic, you need to set up Facebook Pixel on your web page. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
Setting up the Facebook Pixel takes about 2 minutes – Image source
Once you have added the Pixel to your website, you’ll be able to target:
Retarget your website visitors with the Facebook Pixel
If you set up Standard Pixel events such as “Add to cart” or “Lead,” you’ll also be able to target people who have completed a particular event.
Set up Standard events to expand your targeting options
Here’s the Facebook guide to setting up website events.
And here are the most commonly used Standard events that let you track the key actions people may take while on your website:
Here’s a link to the full list of Facebook Standard events.
Unsure if installing the Pixel is worth the hassle?
It totally is!
And to prove it, we will show you some magical Facebook targeting formulas made possible by Custom Audiences.
Here come the Facebook targeting formulas! – Image source
Remarketing to shopping cart abandoners is a no-brainer. So is setting up Dynamic remarketing ads to people who visited your product pages without making a purchase. (PS we’ll get to these best practices under the eCommerce targeting suggestions.)
However, what advertisers often forget is are the people who have already made a purchase.
A study by Adobe that looked at conversion rates of repeat customers found that:
Repeat purchasers have the highest value – Image source
How to retarget past purchasers on Facebook?
Google Search ads are highly efficient for bringing high purchase intent audience to your website.
However, Google Search ads’ CPC can be expensive, going up to $20 per click for the most competitive keywords.
That’s why, when running Search ads, use the less-expensive Facebook ads to run remarketing ads to the people whose website visit you’ve already paid a lot of money for.
Larry Kim from Wordstream wrote in his article for the Moz blog that using remarketing on top of SEO and Search ads allowed them to increase our repeat visitors by 50%, boost conversion by 51%, and increase time on site by an insane 300%!
Mastering all the remarketing hacks is an eye-opener – Image source
How to retarget Search ads audience with Facebook ads?
When setting up your Google Search Ads campaign, make sure to use UTM tags. It is very easy, just use Google’s UTM builder.
UTM tags go on top of your website URL
Next up, set up a Facebook Custom audience of website visitors who visited links matching your Google campaign’s UTM code. Just using “google” in the UTM code is the most foolproof way to get your retargeting right.
Set up remarketing to your Google Ads traffic
Your company’s Facebook page is an amazing channel for keeping in touch with your audience and sharing relevant content.
However, as there are thousands of brands competing for people’s attention, Facebook has severely limited the page posts’ organic reach.
SocialFlow analyzed more than 3,000 posts by publishers on Facebook and found that organic reach dropped 42% between January and May 2016.
It has dropped even further since 2016 – Image source
So how to make your Facebook posts’ engagement ⬆ go while their organic reach is going ⬇?
By promoting your page posts to your page followers.
Using Facebook Custom Audiences, you can target:
Remarket to people who engaged with your posts and ads
We recommend boosting your Facebook page’s posts to people who have previously engaged with your posts and ads.
This audience is more likely to engage with your page posts again, and help to increase your Facebook posts’ reach.
Alright! Now that you know how to set up Facebook ad targeting with Saved and Custom audiences, it’s time to take a look at the third option: Lookalike Audiences.
We all have some amazing customers who buy frequently, leave positive reviews, and refer friends to check out the website.
Your TOP 20% customers contribute up to 80% of your revenue and keep your sales from dropping.
So what if you could find more people like your favourite clients?
Facebook Lookalike Audiences can do just that, helping you reach people with similar interests and activity patterns as your existing high-value customers.
What if you could basically clone your best customers… – Image source
Here’s the logic behind Facebook Lookalike Audiences:
When you create a Lookalike Audience, you choose a source audience (a Custom Audience created with your pixel data, your mobile app data or fans of your Page) and Facebook identifies the common qualities of the people in it. Then, the algorithms will find more people similar to your source audience.
You can choose the size of your Lookalike Audience during the setup process. Smaller audiences (1%-3% Lookalike) match more closely your source audience. Creating a larger audience increases your potential reach, but reduces the level of similarity between the Lookalike Audience and source audience.
A good Lookalike Audience size is between 1 000 to 50 000 people.
Lookalike Audiences are country-based – Image source
Facebook shares some additional suggestions:
Here are 5 ideas for creating Lookalike Audiences to get you started:
If you’ve read this far into the article, it means that you are now aware of all the available Facebook ad targeting options.
Now, let’s put your newly-learned skills into use by learning more hacks for creating the perfect Facebook audiences for your specific business type.
But before we get to part 3 of the article, let’s make sure you won’t fall into the common traps when it comes to Facebook audiences.
The best way to master Facebook advertising is by creating campaigns, testing, and learning.
Making occasional mistakes is actually a good sign that you’re experimenting with different options and getting valuable insights out of it.
To speed up your learning curve, we listed the most common Facebook targeting mistakes, so that you can focus on making other mistakes.
Just kidding!
By avoiding these rookie mistakes, you will end up saving thousands of advertising dollars.
Don’t get caught up in the wrong targeting trap! – Image source
Here’s a quick overview of the main targeting mistakes we’ve seen when auditing hundreds of ad accounts:
Let’s make sure to avoid this happening on your Facebook ads account.
Facebook offers unlimited ways to specify and narrow down your audience.
By using the and-or and exclusion features, you can go hyper granular when setting up an audience.
You can endlessly narrow down your audience
In fact, you can easily get so caught up with all the interesting targeting options that you will end up with only 1000 people in your audience.
Why is a 1000-person Facebook audience bad?
Unless it’s a Custom Audience of a very specific customer segment, having narrow audiences restricts Facebook algorithms from optimizing your ad delivery.
Especially if when using a Saved Audience (interest- and location-based targeting), you will get better results with broad audiences.
Use Broad audiences – Image source
Based on Facebook targeting options, we recommend the following audience sizes:
We all get lazy sometimes, trying to find the easiest way out.
However, your Facebook ads targeting is not the best place for cutting corners.
Don’t get lazy with your Facebook targeting! – Image source
If you’re spending thousands of dollars on Facebook ads, here’s the rule of thumb: make sure to take advantage of all the available targeting methods.
This means setting up a Facebook Pixel and using a mix of all targeting methods: Saved, Custom, and Lookalike Audiences.
Start out by running a campaign using the Saved Audience to build up your remarketing list. Then, follow up with more complex Custom Audiences and high-value Lookalikes.
See Part 3 of this article for advanced targeting suggestions.
Have you ever seen a brand’s Facebook ad so many times it becomes annoying?
That brand is probably having troubles with ad fatigue caused by high ad frequency.
You can check your ad frequency in Facebook Ads Manager
There are two main reasons why your ad frequency gets high:
When the same people see the same ad all over again, their engagement with that ad is likely to drop, making your campaign a lot less efficient in terms of ROI.
AdEspresso analyzed how ad frequency affects the click-through rate, cost-per-click, and other performance KPIs of Facebook ads. Here’s what they found:
High ad frequency = low results – Image source
When the audience saw the same ad twice, the click-through rate decreased by 8.91%. When shown repetitive ads for four times, the cost-per-click was already 68% (!!) higher.
Better to keep the ad frequency low – Image source
Here are a few handy tips for avoiding high ad frequency:
To exclude past converters from your Facebook audience, create new Custom Audience of users who have visited specific web pages (e.g. the check-out page).
Next, use the Exclude feature to stop targeting those people.
Exclude converted users from sales campaigns
Imagine that you set up a new Facebook ad campaign, then go to check its results after 5 hours, and see that it’s performing really poorly.
Something must be wrong – Image source
In fact, seeing poor (or no) results during the first days of your Facebook campaign is completely normal.
Facebook’s algorithms need some time to start learning about your ads. This period is called the learning phase.
Here’s an explanation by Facebook:
“When we start delivering our ad set, whether at the start of a campaign or after you edit it, we don’t have all the data necessary to deliver it as stable as possible. In order to get that data, we have to show ads to different types of people to learn who is most likely to get you optimization events. This process is called the “learning phase.” Learn about editing during or after the learning phase.”
The following changes are considered significant edits, which reset the learning phase:
Moreover, your ad set needs to get about 50 optimization events after starting to run or since the last significant edit to complete the learning phase.
Every time you make substantial changes to your campaigns, consider waiting for at least 24-48 hours before drawing any conclusions.
This also applies to the changes you’re making to the target audience.
Once you have found a Facebook target audience that delivers good results, it is reasonable to keep using it until it stops performing.
However, make sure to regularly check on your target audience’s performance. If you leave an ad campaign unattended, you might be in for a bad surprise.
AdEspresso was open about making this mistake once in their own ad campaigns.
In five months, the average cost-per-conversion for their campaign increased over 1050% from $3.33 to $38.47.
The CPC was skyrocketing – Image source
Here’s a comment from AdEspresso’s CEO Massimo Chieruzzi:
“While, through split testing, we had found a great design and an audience that loved our product… it was a very small audience! Throwing a lot of money at this small audience, we soon saturated it after only two months, wasting a load of money in the process.”
At some point, every Facebook target audience stops performing.
The best way to be prepared for that moment is to have a list of new audience ideas ready to be used.
Keep testing new Facebook ad targeting ideas every month.
Keep testing to learn what works – Image source
In addition to looking for new broad audiences, play around with Custom and Lookalike Audiences to find more granular (yet high-value) target groups.
By avoiding all the above Facebook targeting mistakes and using all your newly-learned skills, you are all set to run your first high-performance ad campaigns.
To get you up to full speed in no time, we decided to share our secret sauce for creating the best Facebook audiences for three popular business types:
Read Part 3 of this guide to learn some pro hacks.
While this may be hard to believe, sometimes the most efficient targeting means a broad audience of people aged 18 – 65+ with no specific interest selection.
On the other hand, there are also use cases where using Lookalike and Custom Audiences or narrowing down your targeting to a specific mobile OS works best.
It all comes down to the product you’re advertising, the budget you’re working with, and the events you’re optimizing for.
We’re about to share with you the targeting hacks for TOP 3 business use cases. See how to win in the targeting game no matter what product you are advertising.
Learn to get it 100% right each time – Image source
If you’re running a small business, Facebook is probably the most efficient channel for promoting your product or service.
However, most small business owners encounter similar challenges:
We’ve have seen 90% of companies getting a positive ROI out of Facebook ads. All it takes is a strong initial setup and some tweaking of targeting and creatives to learn what works best for your product and brand.
Tip: Your small business is selling a specific service, e.g. you’re running bike repairs hop? In this case, you will also benefit from setting up Google Search ads so that people will find your business when googling for a service like yours.
You can benefit from both channels – Image source
Before you start setting up an online ad campaign, stop and figure out the answers to the following questions:
Depending on your answers, you can start building your Facebook ad targeting strategy.
A good Facebook ad campaign’s audience size for a campaign with $500-$2000 budget is between 10k-50k people.
This is narrow enough to only include a highly selective group of users while leaving Facebook’s algorithms some room for automatic optimization.
You probably have some knowledge about what type of people buy your product. Try to figure out what’s their age and interests.
TIP: If you already have a Facebook page, check out the Facebook Audience Insights tool.
Select “People connected to your page” to learn more about your social media audience and use it to narrow down your campaign’s targeting.
It is specifically useful to learn where your audience is located (so that you can target based on their city or country) and their gender + age range.
Learn about your audience with Facebook Audience Insights tool
If you’re doing a Facebook campaign for your small business, edit the following targeting options:
Age range
Specify your target group’s age
Best practices to keep in mind:
Gender
This targeting method is a good option to target your ads only on 50% of the potential audience, making sure you reach the highest-potential buyers.
As reported by CNBC, more women shop online compared to men – you are more likely to drive sales for your online store by targeting women with your Facebook ads. (Of course, if you’re selling a product made specifically for a male audience, that’s whom you should target.)
Women are more active online shoppers – Image source
Location
There are a few reasons why you should target your small business’ ads based on specific locations:
Target based on location
Tip: If you want to reach people who live in a location or who have recently visited some area in a city, you can use additional targeting options to specify this.
Specify whom you want to reach
Interests
Have some big brands whose target audience matched with yours? Great – you can reach the people interested in the bigger company.
Also, you can define your audience by specific interests such as “fashion” or “cooking.”
Tip: Make use of the AND + OR features in Facebook’s interest-based targeting, using it to narrow down your audience. E.g. you can target people who are interested in fashion AND music AND Beyonce.
Simply use the “Narrow Further” button
Tip: Unsure what works best? You can A/B test targeting various age groups or interests by setting up multiple campaigns that have the same ads but different ad set-level targeting specs.
If you have run your first campaigns and want to move forward with more advanced targeting options, scroll down to the remarketing and Lookalike Audience’s sections.
Efficient Facebook campaigns for eCommerce are a mix of smart targeting and the work done by Facebook’s algorithms.
This holds true for lifestyle brands especially, as Facebook has plenty of relevant Instagram data on the users’ interests and profiles they follow.
When creating a Facebook ad strategy for your eCommerce business, run 1-2 high budget campaigns rather than 10 smaller ones.
Why? – Because Facebook optimizes ad delivery on ad set-level and if you spread the purchase events too thin between many campaigns, the algorithms’ magic will vanish.
Many big eCommerce stores have developed a complex Facebook ad targeting strategy, delivering varied offers to the buyers in all stages of the sales funnel, promoting discounts, next purchase ideas, and running remarketing campaigns via automated product feeds.
No matter what’s the size of your e-store, you can do that as well!
Include all marketing funnel stages in your ad campaigns – Image source
Here’s an overview of Facebook audience targeting features that you can (and should) use for your eCommerce business:
Facebook algorithms are crazy good in finding the most relevant target audience for your product.
To benefit from the full scope of Facebook’s user data, follow these suggestions:
Why target such a broad audience? – To reach the highest-potential buyers with the help of Facebook’s targeting, build brand awareness, lead people to your online store, build a retargeting audience and score your first sales.
Start broad to build brand awareness – Image source
Right after you’ve set up the broad targeting Conversions campaigns, follow up with retargeting ads to turn more leads into customers.
Facebook Custom Audiences allow you to target your ads on people who have:
Set up remarketing ads with Custom Audiences
For eCommerce businesses, the most efficient type of remarketing ads is Dynamic Product Ads.
Dynamic remarketing ads track which product pages on your website a person has visited, and compile a personalized remarketing ad for them.
Set up Dynamic Product Ads – Image source
Sounds efficient, doesn’t it?
According to Facebook, retargeting is a real goldmine for online stores:
Kristi Argylian, Senior Vice President at Target, remarked that Dynamic Product Ads ads resulted in a 20% increase in conversions compared to other types of Facebook campaigns the company was running.
To set up Facebook ad targeting with Dynamic Product Ads, follow these steps:
Once you’ve got the retargeting campaign up and running, your audience will see Facebook ads featuring products that they previously have viewed – like the two examples below.
Both of these ads are based on Dynamic Product Ads template
Lookalike Audiences enable you to reach new audiences similar to your existing customers or website visitors.
One of the leading newspapers in France was able to increase their digital subscriptions in 2018 by 20%, using a combination of Facebook Custom and Lookalike Audiences.
You’re welcome, pal! – Image source
Here’s how the Lookalike Audiences’ logic works:
That’s actually pretty straightforward, huh?
We’ll be touching upon the Lookalike Audiences in greater detail in another chapter of this article. Click here to navigate to the chapter.
As a quick heads-up, know that in order to target a Lookalike Audience, you first need to set up a Custom Audience, then use it as a “seed” audience for creating your Lookalike Audience.
Set up Lookalike Audiences in 2 steps
In the eCommerce industry, your workflow for Facebook Lookalike targeting could look like this:
Tip: When setting up Lookalike audiences, you can create 1 audience per country. However, it’s ok to include all your buyers across the globe in the Lookalike audience’s “seed audience” – you will have more data for algorithms to learn from, leading to better results.
The best time to set up Lookalike targeting campaigns for your eCommerce business is after you’ve already reached 500+ sales.
Look at the Lookalike Audiences as a Super Mario superpower that you only unlock after defeating a number of levels.
New targeting methods open up as you get more results – Image source
If you haven’t worked on advanced Facebook prospecting before, the above information can contain a lot of new stuff to take in.
Let’s break it down once more, to summarise the three main steps you should follow for better Facebook ad results:
In fact, make a deal with yourself right here and now to experiment with this 3-step Facebook targeting strategy to boost your online store’s sales figures.
Pinkie promise! – Image source
Facebook can seem like an unlikely marketing channel to work for B2B businesses.
There’s LinkedIn, Google Display ads, review sites… A wide selection of ad channels with seemingly higher relevance for business audiences.
Yet if you’re reading this blog, there’s a 99% chance you’re a potential buyer to some B2B products.
Consider your own daily social media habits during daily coffee breaks at work…
You might check out LinkedIn and your inbox, but you’re also likely to check out what’s happening on Facebook.
Facebook ads reach everyone – Image source
The point we’re trying to make is that Facebook can be a highly efficient marketing channel for B2B businesses.
And B2B marketers agree.
A survey of 342 B2B marketers concluded that 58% of managers see Facebook and LinkedIn as the social media platforms with the highest marketing ROI.
B2B marketers believe in Facebook ads – Image source
In 2018, nine out of 10 B2B marketers were already including Facebook ads in their online marketing strategy.
However, you can’t just apply the same Facebook targeting strategy with your B2B business as the consumer brands around you are doing.
Selling chocolate bars and project management software is not same-same.
You need a game plan specifically developed for a B2B product.
B2B marketing is a game of seduction – you first need to get the prospect interested in your product, then convince them to sign up for a trial period, and finally, convert them to a long-time paying customer.
You need to turn your cold leads into paying customers – Image source
Naturally, you can’t target people with the exact same ad messaging, touting a single slogan throughout the 5-step marketing funnel.
Instead, what you should do is build a smart B2B marketing strategy containing both traditional and digital sales channels.
When combined with traditional sales methods like pitches over a conference call and other online channels like Google Search ads, Facebook ads will help to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.
facebook ad targeting ftw
To create awareness around your B2B product, we suggest focussing on content marketing (blogging) and Google Search ads. For closing the deals, B2B companies generally rely on sales meetings.
Facebook ads work best for people in the Interest and Customer funnel stages.
Consider the social network as the soft-selling channel in your B2B marketing strategy.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can target both of these audience groups on Facebook (and what type of ads to show them).
The Interest stage is a step in your B2B marketing funnel where a person has already heard about your product but is not yet thinking about trying and buying it.
That’s a perfect opportunity to show them some Facebook ads, making sure that the lukewarm leads warm up instead of cooling down.
Take this Facebook ad by Asana as an example:
Example of a B2B ad by Asana
Alright, so you get the point what a B2B Facebook ad should look like…
Who is the audience you should target?
Here are the three usual suspects for B2B Facebook ads targeting in the Interest stage:
Set up a Facebook audience of blog readers
When targeting B2B audiences in the Interest stage, promote soft-sell offers like educational content, a free trial period or a product demo. (Using Facebook ads for closing the B2B sales deal generally doesn’t work.)
For example, Dropbox is sharing a blog article about one of its products – Dropbox Paper. It serves both the function of informing people about the product (Interest stage) as well as providing useful tips for becoming a power users (Customer stage).
Dropbox is going for a soft sell
The main challenge for B2B advertising on Facebook is to reach the right audience at the right time.
Set up multiple ad campaigns targeting people in various stages of your sales funnel, moving them closer to purchase with each ad they’ll see.
Alright. Way to go! Congrats!
You have reached the finish line of this Facebook ad targeting guide.
What we recommend you to do next, is to go to the Facebook Ads Manager, navigate to the Audiences section, and set up a few new audiences right away to put the theory into practice.
If you want to learn more about online advertising, check out our other guides:
Using data collected from our in-depth audit, we’ll deliver a detailed plan to grow your business month after month. Your proposal includes:
WRITTEN BY
Karola Karlson
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