There are two types of business owners: those who want to serve everyone and end up serving none, and those who know their target customers precisely and sell consistently over time and become successful. Why is it wrong trying to target everyone? For one, it is extremely impersonal. Who is “everyone”? Men or women? Young people or elderly pensioners? Top-level managers or stay-at-home parents?
The second major problem with targeting everyone is the high cost associated with advertising campaigns targeted at a very large potential audience and the low return on investment (ROI) for these campaigns. In short, you lose money on inefficient advertising campaigns.
Now let us focus on the profitable and logical way of promoting your business: by targeting the right group of people, those most likely to want or need your products. Targeting is very important especially for social media marketing, with a special focus on Facebook advertising. This is owed to the fact that your ad campaign cost is calculated based on the number of people who will see your ad on their Facebook timeline.
So, how do you target your customers efficiently?
1. Target by Professional Status
If your product is addressed to busy professionals, to help them get through their days without hassle, providing services such as concierge, personal shopping and such, it sounds only natural that your ads should be targeted at CEOs, Managers, Directors, and such. Thankfully, you can use this type of filter in selecting your potential audience for an ad campaign.
This type of targeting is one of the most relevant ones. Most new businesses try to solve what we call “first world problems” for time-poor people who are willing to pay in order to clear their daily schedule of certain chores.
2. Target by Interests
Now then, interests say a lot about people and they are very helpful if you are at the beginning in defining an audience for your Facebook ads. Interests tell you that an energetic, gym-going new mum will definitely love your home fitness program, because she has less time to go to the gym after giving birth. An interest in bio food and holistic medicine will tell you that a health conscious person will buy your vegan recipes cookbook.
And, as you develop more insight into the personalities and lifestyles of your target customers, you will identify other interests they all have in common and can add them to the description of your prototype customer.
Why does it help? See below!
3. Develop Lookalike Audiences
If you know that the typical person who needs your 10-minutes-a-day slimming program is aged between 30 and 45, female, a high-level earner, interested in yoga and follows a paleo diet, you can use this set of characteristics to define a new audience for your ads which has not been targeted before. These are people who have never visited your website or your Facebook page, and have never subscribed for a newsletter, but are highly likely to do so and become customers if they see your ads.
4. Location Matters
Unless you sell digital products which can be downloaded or sent by email, you should limit your audience to the geographical area where it makes sense to deliver your products and services. Based on relevance and shipment costs, you should define a radius around your location and limit your audience to the cities and towns within this radius.
For example, if you sell homemade gluten-free cookies in Perth and its suburbs, you will certainly not need your ads to be visible to people who live in Indonesia or the United States. As I stated before, refining the target audience decreases your overall advertising costs.
5. Use Surveys
That’s a very simple way of defining your target audience without hassle. Surveys are great if they do not take too much time, and if you offer a small reward for people who complete them. It can be something as simple as a free eBook or anything similar, but you have to offer an incentive. Construct your survey around the key elements you want to know about your audience and then carefully sift through the data, organising it properly.
These simple ways of targeting your potential customers may seem simplistic, but they are extremely effective. Apply them and you shall be serving ads to the right kind of people, not just everyone indiscriminately.