On Facebook, audience targeting is a key factor in driving successful campaigns and achieving marketing objectives. It doesn’t matter how big your budget is and what your various campaign settings are: if you’re promoting your products or services to the wrong audience, you’ll never get the results you want. Fortunately, to be successful with your advertising campaigns, you can rely on the powerful targeting capabilities that Facebook makes available to advertisers…
For companies that know their personality, this is a real opportunity.
Indeed, when you know your ideal customer, you are able to deliver your ads to the people who are most likely to be interested, thanks specifically to audience by interest centering.
Interest based audiences allow you to target your personas through various criteria: age, gender, location, interest centers or behavior on the web.
In this article, it’s about learning how to discover an interested audience and create a persona for them to reach targeted prospects.
What are interest-based audiences?
Interest-based audiences are audiences that you create based on criteria such as age, gender, location, interests, or behavior.
Here is a detailed description of what each of the criteria is at your disposal to target your personas.
where is your personality
It is a question of notifying the country, region or even city to suit your personality.
You can also specify a specific address to target people located in the vicinity.
Plus, geographic targeting is so advanced that you can split it between: people who live in the indicated location, people who visit there regularly or even just pass through.
Your personality’s age, gender and language
This is to find out which gender and age group your product or service is aimed at.
It is also recommended that you choose your target language to ensure that your message is read by the intended audience.
interests of your personality
It is a question of informing the centers of interest of your target. Think of examples of topics that interest her, her hobbies, the media she consults or a brand your target admires.
behavior of your personality
This option allows you to target users by their birthday or by the way they interact on the web, for example: you can target compulsive buyers.
Why use Interest-based audiences?
As you might have guessed, interest-centered audiences allow you to reach your ideal customer thanks to a number of criteria that you specifically select.
Therefore, this type of audience can be very powerful and very effective, provided you know your personas well and choose the right targeting criteria.
To enhance your understanding of your target, we recommend that you use the Audience Insights tool.
This tool allows you to access audience demographics, interests and behaviors.
Thus, you can study your personality more deeply or study your direct competitors by selecting the customers of their social networks.
An example of using an interest-based audience
You’re a shoe store and you want to target people looking for a new pair of sneakers.
You can select the following criteria:
- Location criteria related to your catchment area, for example: Nantes, if your store is located in this city;
- Age, gender and language criteria: Your ideal customer is a male between the ages of 20 and 40 who speaks French;
- Interest criteria related to your area: fashion, shopping;
- Interest criteria related to the purchase action, for example: sneakers, shoes
Nice to know: When you create your campaign, consider excluding users you don’t want to reach.
In prospecting logic, you should exclude all the people who already know you.
Thus, it will be a question of what to exclude: your visitors, your customers or even the subscribers of your social networks.
With this you will be able to reach only new people.
To do this, you must first create one in the Custom Audience tab:
- an audience of your visitors;
- Another audience of your customers;
- And another audience of your customers.
You would then exclude these audiences when creating your campaign.
In this part, we take you step-by-step through creating your audience based on interests.
To create your Interest-Based Audience, go to the Business Tools tab, then click Audiences.
Next, click on Create Audience and select the last saved audience option.
A window will appear, this is where you create your audience by interests.
good to know : It is also possible to create your audience by Interest Center when creating a new campaign.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to make your audience the center of interest by following the stated path, as it allows you to protect your audience.
If necessary, you can quickly reuse it in future campaigns.
audience name
Choose a name that is clear and reliable enough for your audience to know.
It’s important to enter your audience name correctly in order to easily find your way to Ads Manager and easily follow your audience growth.
Going back to our previous example, if your ideal customer is a person aged 20 to 40 living in Nantes who loves fashion and shopping, this could provide:
custom audience
This option is used to create Custom Audiences, in other words, retargeting audiences.
This option doesn’t apply to Interest-based audiences.
Location
Enter the geographic area of ​​your target here. This option is very important for local shops or large companies with several points of sale.
In this tab, several options are available to you:
- people living or recently living here : to reach current residents of the area or those who have recently left the area but are likely to return;
- people living here : This option allows you to target people living in the selected area;
- in the surrounding area : To reach people around your business;
- passing by : To target people near your business who live more than 200km from their location.
For our example, we choose the city of Nantes, because that’s where our ideal customer lives.
age
Enter the age range of your personality here.
For our example, our ideal customer is between the ages of 20 and 40.
gender
This option allows you to hit your targets according to their gender. Entering the gender of your target is important when your offer is targeting a specific gender: in our case, shoes for men.
advanced targeting
This option allows you to enter specific targeting criteria that should be directly or indirectly related to your personality.
The Refine Audience sub-option allows you to be even more precise in your targeting.
Through this option, you signal to Facebook that your target share must conform to Criterion A as well as (mandatory) Criterion B.
In our example, our target has a passion for fashion and shopping.
deprecated option
This option allows you to exclude people from other centers of interest from your targeting.
In our case, we can refine our targeting to exclude all users who are fans of a brand whose shoes look opposite to ours.
login options
This option does several things:
- Target people who already know you : it is therefore a question of remarketing, in an article or dedicated section dealt with a typology of the audience;
- Target friends of people who already know you : This is an interesting targeting in some cases, as it allows you to take advantage of the social proof effect. In fact, the target will be informed that his friend likes your page, so he will be more inclined to read, view or click on your ad;
- Exclude users from your app : As stated earlier, exclusions are configured when creating a campaign.
Now you have all the keys to set up a Interests Audience based on your personality.
By examining various information about your audience, you should find the details of your ideal customer.
A successful campaign isn’t just about targeting. To best guide you in the success of your campaign, we recommend our article on creating effective ads.