We are now entering Q4, and this is a time when most business owners can really drive a lot of sales and finish the year strong. Having said that I want to share with you a tactic that will help you to Laser Focus your Facebook ads targeting using interactive content.
So typically when you are creating a Facebook campaign here’s how you begin your targeting:
Select gender, age group, location, add interests related to your business or store’s niche, then exclude certain interests if desired to narrow it down as best you can.
Now for many, this is a great place to start and you can get some decent results from targeting people this way, but there is another way that can actually give you much more focused targeting than just using Facebook’s tools.
And here’s why you should try it. Did you know that you can actually see what ‘interests’ Facebook has tagged you with? At the end of this post there is a link you can use to see what interests Facebook thinks you have. It’s actually a really fun exercise, and in mine I have some really funny stuff. (like sea turtles and guitar) But I’m never gonna buy anything from people that advertise to me based on that interest. I must have clicked on some random stuff like 10 years ago.
This is bad for you and for your ads. Because you’re paying to reach people who are simply never going to buy from you. No amount of amazing ads or copy or creatives will change that. Which means you are wasting ad spend, and consequently your costs are unnecessarily higher.
So how do we fix this? By creating a piece of engaging content on Facebook that will ONLY resonate with our target audience.
Did you ever see Facebook posts like ’10 things only hardcore Friends lovers will know about the show’ or ’10 must-have products for makeup lovers in 2019’. Now if you really love Friends, you are going to click on that link and check out that first post, and if you really love make-up, you will click on the second one. If you’re not you will probably just scroll right past.
That’s why this native content is great, its perfect for Facebook and this kind of stuff is already all over the platform, you will blend in perfectly and only pique the interest of relevant people!
So this is what we do, we create a listicle (list article) or a video in a very similar format about our niche. For example, if you sell dog toys so you might make something like ’10 of the coolest dog products out right now’ or ‘Are you a crazy dog mom? Check out these 10 questions and see ’ and make it super specific to your niche so that only your IDEAL customer would read it. You can create it in a blog post using WordPress or make a video / have a video made.
Then we send it out. When we do we super broad with the targeting. Maybe just gender and country. Leave everything else really broad. Audiences can be 4 – 20 million here. Use the objective of traffic or video views depending on whether you made a listicle or a video. Then we wait.
What happens is, after a while you get a ton of cheap traffic and video views on this piece of content. Let it run until you get a few hundred to a thousand clicks or views. What this means is that out of the millions of people you sent this out to, the ones who engaged have now ‘digitally raise their hand’ and TOLD you they are interested in this product or niche. Who clicks on a post that says ‘are you a crazy dog mom’? – obviously someone who thinks they are, and probably is!
What we now have is a group of targeted people who we know are interested in products or services in our niche, then we have 2 more things we can do with them.
- Retarget them directly with your product or offer
- Create a lookalike audience of these people
If it hasn’t hit you yet, this means you can actually use this tactic to create targeted lookalikes EVEN when you are brand new to eCommerce and don’t have any sales or customers yet! If you are starting from zero and trying to get sales in your store but costs are out of control, this could be a way to bring them down without waiting months to build lookalikes of store buyers.
Of course buyers are even better but without them this is a great strategy to start to build audiences you know yourself are interested in your product because they told you so!
If you liked this post, I made a YouTube video explaining how to do this. Check it out & subscribe to my channel for more eCommerce help. If you have any questions you can email me at gredmond5833@hotmail.com and I would be happy to help.
*Head to www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/ to check your interests. It always has something interesting!
