Once you know the fundamentals of Facebook you can start building buyer personas and defining your core audience to help you be successful with Facebook. These are the key points taken from the first episode in a two part series on Facebook Lead Generation
Does this mean Facebook is dead?
No of course this doesn’t mean the end for facebook, with 1.4 billion active current users the platform still has the legs to go on for ages. With all the changes to Facebook Advertising it just means that you need to be much smarter with your advertising efforts and targeting to ensure you are still garnering value from your efforts.
Difference between a Post and an Advertisement
A post is a something that you can put on your wall or on your page that will reach all your friends and followers who have followed your page or profile whereas an advertisement is a post that is targeted at a certain audience with the goal of sending them to your website or sending the lead down a sales funnel.
A post generally has a smaller reach than an advertisement as the post will only organically appear in peoples news feed and the advertisement will reach a much wider audience as it is curated or targeted at a particular group of people. Facebook Advertising also has the most in-depth and largest number of customisation options of any social media channel allowing for extremely precise targeting.
Basics of Facebook Advertising
Before you even consider creating a Facebook ad there are a few things you need to have in place a Business Manager account that gives you access to a Facebook Ad Manager Account – this is essentially a place where you can view, make changes and see results for all your Facebook Ad campaigns. If you haven’t created an account go to https://business.facebook.com/ and follow the instructions.
Pictured above is the home screen of the Facebook Ad Manager, contained within it is;
- Ads Manager Tool Selection
- Account Selection
- Reports
- Campaign Selection
- Campaign Metrics
- Campaign Metrics – Columns and Breakdowns
- Daily Spend
- Filters, Search and Timeframe
There are 3 levels to your Facebook Ad structure:
- Campaign – The campaign is the type of ad campaign you have chosen to use within Facebook. We discussed these in more detail in a a previous article
- Ad Set – The ad set is where you are going to find all the targeting options to help you reach your core audience
- Ad – the creative elements that you use to make up the ad including the copy, the image and all the information you see in the finished advertisement – we are not going to cover this in this article, but there’s lots of great information online on what a great Ad should contain.
Understanding your Core Audience
Defining your core audience within Facebook Ads Manager is all about gathering information on their shopping habits and buying behaviours to make informed decisions about how you will advertise to them.
To do this we’d recommend you build 3 to 5 Buyer Personas. A Buyer Persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. If you haven’t done this exercise before or are unsure read our article on Buyer Personas and start with our free Buyer Persona Guide .
Here’s a list of questions to answer about your ideal customers (just save the answers in a document or spreadsheet):
- What websites do they visit?
- What books do they read?
- What magazines do they interact with?
- What type of car do they drive?
- Are they married?
- Do they have children?
- Are they using Facebook or Instagram?
- Are they using an Android phone or an IPhone?
- Are they on a tablet or a desktop?
- What language/s do they speak?
- What is their level of education?
- What is their financial situation?
- What parents do they have?
- What political beliefs/affiliations do they have?
- What major life events have they experienced (marriage, home ownership, having kids)?
- What TV shows and movies are they interested in?
- What sports do they enjoy playing/watching?
- What hobbies do they have?
- What foods do they eat?
- Have they changed jobs recently?
- What role do they currently hold?
- What role did they hold at their last company?
Where do I start?
Before you even start looking at Facebook Advertising there is one thing that you must do prior; by working out who your core audience is of course. The best way to find out who your core audience is to interview your current clients and ask them questions or ask people who call in to the business. If you can use the same phrases your clients are using when they tell you about their problems your marketing will instantly seem more applicable to their business.
For your ideal client or customer you want to identify what their core problem is and do they know they have that problem or do they need to be educated.
If you are having difficulty defining your core audience we’d recommend you build some buyer persona’s. We at the Marketing Strategy Co have built a guide to creating buyer persona’s check it out here or by clicking on the button below.
When thinking about your customers we want to know what websites they visit. what book they read, what magazines they interact with, what type of car do they drive, are they married? do they have children?
The “Hairdresser” Example
An example Adam Arnold used was he was working with a client who was a hairdresser and Adam asked them “what is a common type of customer you receive here” and the hairdresser said “60-80 year old senior women” so Adam said “focus on one of these customers, what is the core problem they have?” and the client said “well Betty comes in every few weeks because she has arthritis and that makes it difficult for Betty to reach her arms up and fix her hair”. By knowing this the hairdresser can start to use this information to better target clients.
You can use information gathered from a single customer to help build out your buyer personas. Using the Betty example above you could as this hairdresser put an ad in an arthritis magazine or pay to advertise on a video about shoulder exercises.
Other things to consider
- Budget – You should have budgeted at least $20 per day to spend on a particular ad group as if you are using any less you cannot gather enough information to get some measurable results
- Audience – Through Facebook ads you can whittle down your target audience from several million to tens of thousands. Ideally you have 20,000-30,000 as a minimum target audience before you start using Facebook ads properly as any less and you likely won’t be reaching enough people that you want and if you have somewhere near 1,000,000 it becomes too hard to get extremely accurate results and you start to target people that don’t quite match your audience.
Buyer Persona Guide
It’s important to establish buyer personas for your business so you can segment your audience and create stronger marketing campaigns. But, how do you start researching and creating these personas from scratch?
Our free, customisable buyer persona guide will let you easily organise your research to create your very own buyer personas. Get yours by clicking here or on the button below.
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