3 Targeting Strategies to Find Your People on Facebook and Instagram

Are you wondering how to find your people on Facebook or Instagram? Tried running ads and it just didn’t work?

You can generate free traffic to your offers by posting on your Instagram or Facebook page. However, if you really want to expand your reach, running paid traffic can exponentially increase the number of people who see your offer.

Facebook and Instagram make it really easy to run ads. To create the most effective ads, it’s critical that you get specific on who you want to reach.

The targeting options that are available on these platforms make it easy to get specific. Being specific about your audience’s interests is critical to optimizing your ad performance. If your audience is too broad, it may cost you significantly more to get your message in front of your ideal clients.

If your audience is too broad, you can waste your ad dollars showing ads to people who are not interested in your offer.

In this week’s episode of The Expert Called YOU, we’re going to talk about three different ways to narrow your ad audience so you can target and find the people looking for your offers. 

Quick note: In the examples below, you will see references to creating ads on Facebook. When you create an ad on Facebook, you can also display it on Instagram. Facebook owns Instagram and makes it easy to build your ad on one platform and then share on both.

Targeting Strategy #1: Demographics 

You can inform Facebook or Instagram that you want to show your ads to a specific demographic. 

Think about who is the ideal candidate for your course or offer. Can you identify certain common demographic elements? 

Here are examples of the demographics you can target on Facebook and Instagram:

• Age 
• Gender 
• Language
• Job – title or role, industry, employer, office type
• Education – field of study, which school(s) they attended, education level, when they were an undergrad  in college
• Location – people who live in a specific location, are traveling to a location, or have recently visited
• Income
• Relationships – status, what type of relationship they are interested in
• Home – what type of home they live in, if they rent or own, and who lives with them
• Life events – anniversaries, birthdays, new relationships, recently moved, new jobs, etc
• Parents – new parents, parents of different age groups
• Politics

The more you know about your ideal people, the more you can inform Facebook about who should see your ads. 

Targeting Strategy #2: Interests 

Here’s where it gets really interesting. You can take the information you identified in the demographics portion of your ad and start to combine with the interests of your ideal audience.

For example, if you are teaching a course for real estate agents on how to stage homes for sale, you know your ideal audience is selling homes and they need to know how to stage those homes to increase their closing rate. 

Your audience might have interests like:

• Real Estate 
• Interior Design 
• Home Improvement 

You can easily layer the demographics you defined earlier with the interests to create a more specific audience. 

Gender: Women

Age: Between the ages of 30 and 50

Career: “real estate agent” as part of their job title

Education: High School +

Location: US

Interests: Real Estate, Interior Design, and Home Improvement

This audience profile is more specific. However, you can still go deeper.

In addition to their general interests, you can think about what type of content they are interested in on Facebook. What pages do they like on Facebook that would indicate that they’re your ideal audience? 

For example, real estate agents might follow pages of:

• A particular real estate agent 
• A competitor in the real estate space
• An educator who teaches real estate agents how to grow their business
• A software provider of tools for real estate agents

You can add these interests to your target audience. Each layer of interest you add can provide more focus in the distribution of your ads. Click To Tweet

Targeting Strategy #3: Behavior 

You can also target based on behavior. What actions has your ideal audience taken?

Some examples of how you can use behavior-based targeting:

• Inform Facebook to show your ad to everyone on your mailing list 
• Inform Facebook to show your ad to everyone who has liked your business page 
• Inform Facebook to show your ad to everyone who likes your page and all their friends (who tend to be similar in audience) 
• Inform Facebook to show an ad to viewers who watched a video you posted

Behavior-based targeting is a great way to show your content and offers to people who are already interested in your course topic. Click To Tweet

Summary 

Here’s your homework: Think about your ideal audience. Describe them.

Review the demographics, interests and behaviors we discussed in this post and make a list of known targeting factors for your ideal audience. 

This is THE secret to running Facebook ads that work. If you’ve tried Facebook ads in the past and they haven’t worked, I’m willing to bet the problem is that your audience was way too broad. Start here, get more specific, and you’re going to have better results in finding your ideal audience.