How to Build Custom Facebook Audiences for Marketing and Advertising by @esornoso
Over the last few years, Facebook has been home to the worlds largest internet audience, and 2015 is shaping up to be another major year. When it comes to online marketing and advertising, Facebook has been a very valuable tool for businesses of all sizes and categories. From small companies that manage their own pagesto large corporations that employ entire social media departments, Facebook has become the platform of choice in terms of establishing a solid online presence.
One of the major reasons Facebook is so attractive and valuable to small and medium-sized businesses is that this is a social network that is very powerful in terms of audience segmenting. In online marketing and social media development circles, this is known as Customer Audience Targeting. Essentially, custom audiences enable advertisers to determine targets for advertising. Custom audiences can be further segmented by age, gender, geographic location, occupation, interest, and others.
From a marketing point of view, Facebooks Segmentation Tool allows targeting of ads by certain traits and interests such as geographical region, gender, age, the brands they follow, and their social network connections. Segmentation is crucial because it effectively addresses the issue of scalability, which is otherwise difficult to accomplish online. Once you figure out the audience that is converting for conversions, you can find similar audiences on Facebook, and scale with thesecampaigns. The beauty in Facebook is theabundance oftarget.
One of the tenets of marketing and advertising is that brands should always strive to reach those potential consumers who are truly interested in a product or service; this makes advertising efforts more effective. In essence, Facebook empowers brands by allowing them to find and reach potential buyers through segmentation. The Facebook Segmentation Tool can be accessed once an ad has been designed, and the targeting options are:
For most owners of small businesses, the prospective audience segments generated by Facebook may seem very large; but, it is important to note that various segments can be targeted with different ads that will appeal to them. Each Facebook ad targeted to a specific audience can be thought of as a campaign, and should be tracked separately for the purpose of maximizing return on investment (ROI). For example, a tour operator in Miami Beach that offers both shopping trips and nightlife tours can design two different Facebook ads based on demographics and interests. The responses and engagement interactions that audiences have with the two ads and corresponding landing pages can be tracked through the use of Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) codes.
UTM codes are essentially parameters that can be appended to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL, or website addresses) to track campaigns. These codes can be created with the Google Analytics URL Builder Tool, and they essentially serve as online A/B testing platforms. By using UTM codes, Facebook advertisers can see the traffic coming to their websites and landing pages through various versions of their ads. You can see the results of these codes in your Google Analytics or you can use an advance Analytics platform, like Mixpanel.
Targeting Facebook audiences is a good first step in promoting products or services, but it should not be the only effort undertaken by a business looking to make the most out of social media marketing. Building up a social media audience by means of retargeting opens up a new dimension in marketing, and this is something that can be accomplished by installing a Facebook pixel on websites or mobile app.
Once again using the Miami Beach tour provider mentioned above, here are examples of how the Facebook pixel could help in terms of building audiences and retargeting:
Audiences can be built on Facebook based on the interest they showed to certain ads or if they responded to specific content pieces. By retargeting visitors according to their behavioral responses to Facebook ad campaigns, more conversions from prospects to customers or clients can be attained. Another benefit of retargeting via the Facebook pixel is cost-per-click expenditures can be reduced, since specific ads are being offered to people who are far more likely to visit a website with a purchasing state of mind. In all the test I have done, retargeting is the #1 method to increase conversion on Facebook.
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How to Build Custom Facebook Audiences for Marketing and Advertising by @esornoso