Audience segmentation and targeting is one of the most effective ways of reducing your Facebook™ ad spending. This is extremely important for start-ups and small businesses, whose owners cannot compete with big brands. The specifics of Facebook™ layout limit the possibilities of showing ads to a few areas on the computer or mobile screen. This means that every advertiser is competing for the same piece of digital real estate.
The good news is that this piece of real estate is not a fixed one–instead, it is allotted per users’ timelines. It is as if, in real life, your outdoor billboard is not fixed on specific geographic coordinates, but on a specific place where a specific group of people drives through every day.
In other words, targeting and segmentation should not be performed by physical address, but according to the routes taken by the group of people who should see your billboard. This is exactly what we will talk about today: how to identify those people and the actions they take (or don’t take) in order to serve them Facebook™ ads that convert.
To help you out, we prepared a guideline for the segmentation of your customers depending on their actions and behaviours.
- Segmentation by Purchase Date
Some products need replenishing every once in a while. Of course, your purpose is to convince your customers to replenish their stocks of products as soon as possible. This is why you should create a segment of customers according to the last date of purchase. By setting an alarm a few weeks after the last purchase, you will know that the customers in this group need to be reminded of your products with a Facebook™ ad.
This type of segmentation is useful because it creates a habit: after being reminded a few times to restock, people will do it on their own. And this is when you can decrease the reminder period by a few more days (within reason, of course).
- The Segment of One-Time Buyers
These people are and are not your customers, both at the same time. They are your customers because they made a purchase from you. Yet, they are not customers because they are not going to repeat the purchase–unless prompted by you.
In many cases, people do not repeat a purchase not because they were not happy with the product, but because they have simply forgotten the name of the company. This is why Facebook™ ads and other types of social media marketing strategies are useful: they maintain your brand image vivid in your prospects’ and customers’ minds.
- The Segment of Shopping Cart Abandoners
Shopping cart abandoners fall in two categories: people who attempted a first-time purchase, and frequent customers who abandoned a shopping cart on one occasion. Both of them need to be targeted with carefully crafted ads.
A first time customer will not respond to the familiar tone used for a frequent shopper very warmly. They will need to be induced to return on your website by an incentive. For frequent customers, the reminder may be quite enough for them. In many cases, they were distracted from what they were doing and simply forgot to complete the transaction.
- Segmentation by Last Website Page Visited
Knowing what page of your website your customers last browsed is important information. If they browsed products in a specific category, you should prepare an ad for the last product they looked at. If they read the terms and conditions for delivery and return, you should target them with an ad which reinforces your commitments (money back guarantee, free delivery, etc.).
- Engaged Leads
These are not yet customers, but they need only one push in the right direction. Engaged leads are people who are involved with your business: they subscribed to your newsletter, read your blog articles, comment on them and share them, became your social media followers, etc.
For these people a free sample, an invitation for free trial or a discounted offer represent the right kind of ad to help them take the final step in the conversion journey and become your customers.