Chapter 7 – How To Find Your Customers On Facebook

Find Your Target Audience with Facebook’s Custom Audience Tool

Using Facebook’s Custom Audience tool, you can create a custom audience and then advertise to them.

It’s now easier than ever to find your customers on Facebook with the new Audience Insights tool. Now, with just a few clicks and five minutes, you can laser-target your perfect customers and advertise to them without having to upload your e-mail addresses to Facebook. (You can still do that, too, if you have an e-mail list.)

How to Create a Custom Audience and Laser-Target Your Customers

Next to your News Feed on Facebook is a navigation pane. Find and click Ads Manager. If you don’t see Ads Manager, then go to: https://www.facebook.com/ads/manage/home/

Once in Ads Manager, select Audience Insights. If you don’t see Audience Insights, then go to: https://www.facebook.com/ads/Audience_Insights If the link doesn’t work for you Facebook may not have rolled out the Audience insights tool to you yet. Be patient as they roll it out to everyone.

The first thing you’ll see is “Choose an Audience to Start.” If you don’t have a Facebook page with thousands of relevant Likes from real prospective customers, then just select Everyone on Facebook.

So let’s say you are a wellness coach, and your perfect customer is a woman over age 40 looking to lose 20 pounds with a household income of over $100,000 per year. (Your customers need to be able to pay you well for your services.) The income option is available for United States residents only at this time.

In the Countries section, start typing in the countries or cities, or even ZIP codes, you’d like to target, and select them from the drop-down menu.

In the Age and Gender section, select 40 – Any, then, click the Women button.

Next, in the Interests section, start typing in the word “wellness,” and select it from the drop-down menu.

Once you select Wellness (alternative medicine), then Facebook will populate information about how many women over 40 there are in the respective countries you chose, who also like the general category “Wellness.” Then, select Page Likes to see what categories and individual pages are most relevant to your audience.

For my page, I can see that people who have liked the page Health and Wellness, which has 154,600 Likes, are 27.8 times as likely to be in my target audience. So next, in the Additional Interests section, I will type “Health and Wellness” and select that page from the drop-down menu.

I’m going to continue inputting pages that Facebook suggests my customers will Like in the Additional Interests section.

Even after some filtering, this still leaves me with between 3 and 3.5 million women, which is too large of an audience for my budget of $25/day to target effectively.

In order to refine, I next click Household and select incomes over $75,000 per year. (As of this writing, this option is only available for targeting United States household incomes.)

This further refinement gets our audience down to a manageable 600K–700K women.

There is a significant amount of advanced targeting you can use to further segment your target audience, from Language, toRelationship Status, Life Events, and even political affiliation (again, the latter is only available to the United States at this time).

You should consider creating at least 10 different audiences to advertise to. The way to create profitable Facebook ads is to test many different versions and keep improving the ones that work and discard the ones that don’t.

When you are done creating your custom audience, give it a descriptive name, and then, click the blue Create Ad button in the upper-right corner. All you have to do now is select Use Ad Create Tool, and you are ready to get discovered by your customers.