Over the years, Social Media has flourished and most businesses have moved part of their business online. With so many people on these platforms, it's much easier now to deliver a message to your target audience, obtain immediate results and to analyze the information.

Social Media Paid Ads can be the key to success most of the time, but this is not always the case. No matter how much money you invest, success is not guaranteed if you do not make sure that you choose the right message and show it to the right audience. That's why we have at hand targeting and creating audiences, meant to help us achieve our goals.

LET’S DIVE IN!

We’ll start by answering a few basic questions, which will lead to making the concept of Social Media campaigns much clearer for you

• Start by asking yourself: who is your target audience?

The first and most important aspect is to know your target audience. With millions of users on Social Media every day, it's absolutely necessary to know who you want to reach, to make sure you can succeed with the Social Media Paid campaign you've started.

The target audience is a very important starting point from the beginning of any business, being an aspect after which you should align all your activity. Depending on their age, you will choose both the tone of voice you want to use in your Social Media campaigns, and the concepts of the visuals used. The majority of consumers are again an important aspect, helping you during the activity. For example: if most of your audience is female, you can dedicate March to a campaign specially designed for women, being a representative month. The preferences and hobbies of your target audience can help you in extra activities and partnerships that you can conclude with businesses in those fields, managing to offer your customers offers as diverse and personalized as possible.

• What is a Social Media Audience?

The Target Audience that is set for each campaign, depending on the product or service being promoted, is called the Social Media Audience. You can set a target as specific as possible - from the level of education, to the monthly income, taking into account what you want to promote.

Among the basic features you can choose are age, gender, location, job and much more, but, depending on the platform chosen to run social media ads, the targeting criteria are as diverse as possible. For example, if you have a B2B business, LinkedIn is the perfect place to promote yourself through lead generation campaigns, because it has an extremely specific targeting - but we'll talk about this opportunity a little later.

• What can you do first to get an idea of your customers?

Create a customer persona. Try to create the ideal customer avatar, as specific and as real as possible. Describe them from all points of view: age, level of education, monthly income, what they like to do their free time, in what environment they live, in what industry and / or field they work.

Try to find as many general attributes as possible for your customer persona - this will help you better understand what you are looking for, then go back to creating the audience and you will see that it will now be much easier to understand in which direction. you create your audience.

• How do you create an ideal audience?

If you want to create an audience that is successful and doesn't waste money, this can be quite time consuming for you to start. The audience you're going to create needs to be specific, but not very specific - in some cases, your target audience can be quite small, and a much too specific targeting could keep your message from reaching too many people.

Now, you may ask, how could Social Media Paid campaigns work effectively across platforms? Down below you will find some recommendations for Facebook and LinkedIn, so that your ads can help you find the ideal recipe for your business!

Facebook & Instagram targeting

Custom audiences on Facebook give you many opportunities and help you correlate your website traffic with your platform audience. This way you can target those who visited your website.

As we mentioned said above, there are many possibilities to target the audience. It is very useful that you can combine them in any way, to make sure that your audience is ideal and meets all the goals you have set.

5 features you can use to target

your Facebook audience:

1. Location

You can target your audience by country, city, or whatever you consider relevant to your ad. You can be even more specific here, depending on what you are looking for: you can target them depending on where they live or work.

This way you can target depending on the location of your headquarters or store; Some examples for which this feature is a good option is in the case of gyms, salons, confectioneries or shops in general.

2. Demographics

In this category you can choose age, gender, income, status and many other attributes - Facebook offers you many opportunities here as well.

3. Interests

This could be a very important aspect depending on your business. On Facebook you can target people by many interests; for example, in the case of a travel agency, they may be targeted according to their interest in traveling and visiting.

4. Behavior

This feature is used in targeting Facebook Pixel, a tool that we will discuss a little below. Basically, the pixel is a code that tracks the visitor's behavior, so you can show different ads depending on how their interaction evolves.

5. Engagement

When someone interacts with your Facebook or Instagram page, let's say they comment on a post or like it, Facebook then shows them an ad of yours. This feature has great potential, because people who have already interacted with your brand / products or services, will be much more likely to make a purchase.

Facebook Pixel

Facebook Pixel is an analysis tool, a unique code, through which you can measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, understanding the behavior of visitors to your website. This tool can help you optimize your ads, being based on visitor behavior. With its help you can set Retargeting campaigns, for example for visitors who have abandoned their shopping cart or for those who have looked at your product / service pages without buying.

• The benefits of using Facebook Pixel

Your visitors may not have been prepared for a purchase when they entered your website. Maybe they didn't have enough money or they weren't ready to make the purchase yet. With the help of Facebook Pixel, you can reach them again and maybe this time is a better time. Chances are that 70% of those you will target will complete the purchase this time.

Facebook gives you 3 great types of audiences you can work with:

1. Saved Audiences

2. Custom Audiences

3. Lookalike Audiences

   
   

What’s the difference?

While Saved Audiences are about creating an audience, saving it, and then using it in multiple campaigns, Custom Audiences give you the opportunity to target people who have already interacted with your website or Social Media pages.

Most of the time you may want to promote the same product or service or maybe some similar ones, and to save time, you can use the same audience you created in the past.

With Lookalike Audiences, you can target people with characteristics similar to those you have already targeted in Custom Audiences. Be careful with the volume you choose, you can deviate quite a bit from what you are looking for if you are not careful.

linkedin targeting

LinkedIn is the perfect place for B2B targeting and more. The precision that this platform offers you is fantastic and can help you a lot in generating leads. Targeting on LinkedIn encounters certain difficulties, namely how complete is the profile of the people you want to target.

Many people may not go through all the details there, so it is important to try as many combinations of features as possible to get where you want. And here, as on Facebook and Instagram, you need to test and see which combinations are right for your business.

And here are some essential tips!

Similar to Facebook, the most important aspect is the location. Make sure you have a well-defined location for your audience!

Choose the features that might interest you for your business:

1. The Company: choose followers, industry, company name, company size; Demographics: choose the age and gender of the targeted people;

2. Level of education: for some, this may be an important issue - choose the diplomas you would like your target audience to have, specializations or whether they are members of an institution. This feature can be useful if you recruit and want to target candidates as concretely as possible.

3. Work experience: position, whether senior, middle or junior, skills acquired, years of experience. If you have a B2B business and want to sell your products or services, then you will need a decision-maker in the company, and these people usually have many years of experience and roles as seniors, managers or directors.

4. Interests: in terms of members or groups.

For every Paid Social Media campaign you set up, regardless of platform, it's important to test and see what the magic recipe is for your business! Every business or maybe even every campaign created may need a different targeting.

The key to success is to get to know your target audience as well as possible and to know who and how to address yourself.

Now that you have all the information you need to start your first targeting, we wish you a lot of work and a lot of inspiration! Don't forget to test every time and don't rely on the first try!

And if you need help in creating Social Media Paid campaigns and targeting, give us a sign at hello@marketiu.ro and we will be happy to help you!