Since its inception, Facebook has taken careful consideration as to how to develop an advertising platform that works for users and generates results. That’s part of the reason that eMarketer forcast for 2011 showed that Facebook would be the leading website for online display ads in 2011.
So, I want to take just a few minutes of your time to share with you one of the coolest features of their advertising platform: targeting.
Once you’ve developed your ad, it’s relatively simple to target any demographic or psychographic market via Facebook. Here’s an example.
Let’s say that Lil Wayne is performing in Atlanta and the venue is interested in promoting the concert via Facebook. We establish an ad that looks something like this:
Alright, so now that we have an ad, let’s determine who are target is for this first ad. Through Facebook’s ad targeting features, we can select our target market by the following:
- Geographic area
- Age
- Sex
- Precise or Broad Interests
- People connected (or not connected) to a Page, App or Event we’ve established
- Interested in Men or Women
- Relationship Status
- Language
- Education
- Workplace
All of these allow for some amazing capabilities in targeting users for any given target market. So, in our case, we want people in Georgia between the ages of 18 – 32 interested in rap. So here’s how we set it up.
This wide array of Facebook Targeting capability allows to set up a campaign for almost anything. Targeting people that work at a certain company? You can do that. Targeting business owners in a certain geographic area? That’s possible. Want to meet your target market on Facebook? Easily accomplishable.
The keys to success in any Facebook campaign are relatively simple. Engage your audience.
Oh, and one other thing, ads in Facebook should link to Facebook if possible. Ads that link to other Facebook pages generate higher engagement and better results as users aren’t being driven away from their current experience. Some recent statistics stated that Facebook ads across the board don’t perform as well as other online advertising…but that’s simply because most ads are linked to pages outside of Facebook. The best performing campaigns from our experience link back to other Facebook pages or give the user an opportunity to “like” another page.
