How to Hit Your Target Market Bullseye

IN the digital world, your marketing dollars can stretch further than traditional channels like radio, print, or television advertising.

This is due in large part to advanced targeting and segmentation of the available channels online.

Knowing your target market can ultimately make or break your business.

And if you have been sloppy with your targeting, you are more than likely throwing your money at people that will never buy from you.

As a marketer (or business owner), I’m willing to bet you would rather hold on to more of your money?

Yeah, I thought so.

Luckily, there are services at your disposal that can help make this happen.

Utilizing Facebook Advertising To Make More Money

One of the easiest ways to maximize your investment for a quick return is through paid advertising.

By paid advertising, I’m not talking about things like buying banner ads or even buying email lists.

Instead, I’m referring to pay per click (PPC) advertising.

With PPC, you have several options. Some of the most notable are:

• Google Adwords
• Bing Ads
• Twitter Ads
• Facebook Ads

I’m going to focus on Facebook Ads since they are largely underutilized by most businesses.

Now, I won’t go into the nuts and bolts of setting up Facebook Ads from start to finish, but rather how you use them to better identify your target market and make your ad spend go further.

And when you can properly target your ideal buyer at a lower cost, you can ultimately make more money for your business.

Finding Your Target Audience on Facebook

Out of all the paid advertising platforms, Facebook is one of the best at allowing you to target the people you want to reach.

Since Facebook has so much demographic data on its users, you can really drill-down into specifics.

When you are setting up your campaign, you can segment users based on different criteria.

Let’s say that you own a Bed and Breakfast just outside of Austin, Texas that is looking to fill up some empty dates in the coming weeks.

Why not target parents of newborns who have an upcoming anniversary for a weekend getaway?

But how can you find such targeted information?

I’ll show you how using Facebook Ads, so let’s get started…

As with most PPC platforms, you can target your ads based by location.

And you know that a large portion of your fictional bed and breakfast business comes from people who live within the Houston area since its less than a 3-hour car drive.

So in Facebook, you are creating a new ad geared towards people who live in the Houston Area. What’s nice about this feature is you can see a map of the area and use a slider to increase or decrease the radius of people you want to target.

Be sure to select “People who live in this location” from the drop-down and then enter your location and adjust the radius to encompass the area you want to target.

You’ll also want to adjust your age range. In this case, I have it set to the range of 18-40.

Next up is where you will really define your target audience. To do this, you will need to focus on the “Detailed Targeting” section.

In here is a goldmine of targeting opportunities.

You can click start typing away in the search bar, or click on the “Browse” link.

From the browse link, you are presented with four options in which you can drill-down into:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviors
• More Categories

Under the demographics section there is a sub-section called “Life Events”. Within this you can select “Anniversary Within 30 Days” that will target anyone how has some sort of upcoming relationship anniversary. So you check off this box.

Next you will need to find parents of newborns. To do this, under the demographics section click on “Parents” then select “0-12 Months (New Parents)”.

With these options selected, I now have a potential target audience of about 70,000 people to market to.

It’s not too broad and not too specific.

You’ll need to craft ads based around anniversaries, newborns and getting away for the weekend as a couple. It will relate to their current and upcoming life events, building their awareness that they could use a weekend getaway.

Targeted? Yes.

Creepy? Kind of.

But that’s the type of thing you can do with Facebook Ads to really define and market to your target audience.

Do You Know Your Relevance Score?

Most people think that all they need to do is create some compelling ad copy, add an eye-catching image, and sift through target users who meet certain criteria (like outlined above).

While these are all important, you can squeeze more out of your marketing budget by improving your “Relevance Score”.

Do you know what your Relevance score is?

If not, you might be asking yourself, “What is Relevance score?”

In short, Facebook Relevance Score is a calculation derived from what the expected positive and negative feedback from its target audience for an ad will be.

If an ad is expected to have more positive reactions, the relevancy score will be higher.

The relevancy score uses a scale of 1-10. The higher the score, the better.

Once your ad is live, your relevancy score will change based on the engagement it is getting (or not getting).

Provided you don’t go real broad with your targeting and match the ad to the personas of the users you are targeting, then you will increase your odds of having a higher relevancy score once your ad is live since those users should better relate to it.

What Does Relevance Score Have to Do With Anything?

You might be thinking this is some arbitrary number Facebook gives your ad. However, it is much more than that.

This number helps influence what you will be paying to run your ads.

In short, the higher your relevancy score the lower the cost for the ad to be delivered. Facebook wants to serve up the right ads to the right audience and the relevancy score helps accomplish this.

AdEspresso analyzed 104,256 ads and their Relevance Score.

You can see the correlation between having a higher Relevance score, lower cost per click and higher click through-rate.

However, bidding will come into play when multiple people are trying to target the same/similar groups as well as other factors – so keep that in mind.

Using Relevance Score To Your Advantage

Aside from helping you be more efficient with your ad spend, monitoring your score for existing ads is important.

For example, if you start to notice your score decreasing over time it can be a sign that things needs to change:

• Your ad is no longer relevant to the audience
• Messaging has become stale/overused

Swapping out lower scoring ads can help increase the Relevance score and help drive lower costs to your campaigns.

But what if you are not some magical ad-copy wordsmith and need a little help with coming up with new ads?

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Instead, you can use a tool to spy on competitors to grab their ad copy, statistics, and even images to figure out what is or isn’t working for them. Find out what works and tweak it to be your own. No more guessing on what will help increase your Relevance score.

Creating a Balance Between Relevance Score and Targeting

Pairing up a good balance of the right targeting with a high Relevance score can help your business nail the target market bullseye.

When you have properly identified who you want to market to and reduce the likelihood of your ads being shown to the wrong people, it can only help increase your Relevance score that will result in smarter spending of your budget.

By using your budget more wisely, your cost per acquisition goes down leaving you with higher profit margins.

And who doesn’t want an increase in profit?

Staying on top of your Relevance score and audience targeting should be a priority of your Facebook ad campaigns.

I’d like to ask you:

• Are you being targeted enough with your ads to reach the right audience?
• Is Relevance score something you constantly monitor?
• Were you even aware of Relevance score?
• Are you taking full advantage of tools available to you?

Be sure to let us know in the comment section below.

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