Jun 17, 2020
The creative ideas you hatch for your social media targeting campaigns no longer need to resonate with every type of customer you desire to reach.
The days of trying to be everything to everyone are over.
With social platforms like Facebook that offer personalization at scale, you can deliver unique social ads that are tailored to specific subsets of your target audience.
To truly understand why social advertising works so well, our social media marketing team has broken down the importance of understanding and comprehending the vast amount of information that is collected.
This will not only allow you to tap into delivering personalized advertising experiences but also grow your clients ROI.
Using Unique Audiences For Your Social Campaigns
Instead of running one video to a wide audience as you would on television, you can deliver a unique message and wildly different creative to a multitude of niche audiences.
By tapping into the sophisticated targeting options available, you can narrow the delivery of your personalized social ads to people that “like” sneakers, the ballet, country music, or thousands of other random interests.
Before you go all-out trying to plan ads for 100 different segments of your intended market, just remember it’s difficult enough to get clients to invest in a decent budget for a single ad, let alone hundreds.
If you play your cards right though, you can absolutely make the case as to why clients should create several different ads that speak to various sectors of the market they wish to connect with.
As you brainstorm on the many possibilities for personalization and marinate on the diverse data sets that exist for you to reach, consider a combination of attributes to reach the right customer.
You might just find that young moms that love video games and skateboard are ready to buy today.
Facebook probably knows more about your next customer than their mother does.
Reach Returning Customers (and Exclude Them)
When you start an account on one of the major social media platforms, you generally provide your email address and phone number.
This is the first of many pieces of data these social services collect, most of which are offered as targeting options for advertisers.
With billions of emails and phone numbers collected between Facebook and their family of apps including Instagram, you can import your own data and choose to target (or exclude) people you have contact info for.
By matching your first-party data with existing customers and prospective leads, you can deliver ads to just those accounts on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and more.
If you have a variety of data sets at your disposal, you can create multiple campaigns tailored specifically to unique audiences like people that have ordered online, registered a warranty, joined an email list, filled out a form, or somehow provided a phone number.
With fewer people liking and following companies on social media these days, this makes it possible to connect with more customers and drive repeat business with ads that are personalized for that audience.
You can also narrow the focus to high-value segments like big spenders, lead you to determine who are most likely to convert, and other attractive areas from your first-party data.
By crafting ads for people that have done business with you before, you can roll out the red carpet with personalized offerings to keep them coming back for more.
Whether you want to deliver creative to people that joined an email list, but haven’t bought, or you want to deliver specific messages to customers that represent the lion’s share of the revenue for a company, you can justify a fresh ad set dedicated to ringing the cash register again (and again).
Targeting Profile Data
After they provide their name, email and phone number, most people fill out their profile and provide even more targeting options for advertisers.
By adding your birthday or your anniversary, companies can target you, your friends or significant other with ads for relevant gifts.
If you “like” or follow a brand, a band, sports team or other topics, those entities and their competitors can pay to reach you with ads tailored to your interests.
Beyond adding their age and citing their gender, which are two of the most used filters for social ad targeting, people often list their occupation and where they work on their social profile.
For people that are CDL drivers, Registered Nurses or other occupations in high demand by employers, they often receive recruitment ads.
Employment ads are one of the few areas where using age and gender is not allowed by law, but you can reach people with specific skill sets to attract qualified workers for priority positions.
If you are having trouble running ads, we’ve come up with a few Facebook marketing tips that can help make your ads become more effective.
Location, Location, Location
Beyond considering age, gender, and the brands that customers follow, location targeting is another key area to consider when planning a hyper-targeted social campaign.
With billions of people having installed their apps and most of those people sharing their location,
Facebook can tap into these mobile insights to deliver ads to people within a mile of any given address.
As an advertiser, you can target a radius around an address or blanket specific zip codes and DMAs.
You can even narrow your selected audience down to people that are traveling from out of town (perfect for those looking to reach tourists), people that live in the area (great for everyone from plumbers to direct mailers), and target those that work in the neighborhood (excellent for restaurants looking to reach folks around lunchtime).
The net you cast with location-specific ads can be narrowed down to niche audiences, and you can run different creative based on the time of day.
Your ads can even include a map with directions if you’re running campaigns for retailers.
If you’re looking to reach an affluent audience, you may opt to just target people in the rich part of town that might be more likely to go for that Ferrari.
Demographic Details & Behavioral Insights
Depending on what you’re selling, there are all kinds of details that platforms like Facebook collect that could figure into your ad planning. You can find out a lot of information about your customers by utilizing a Facebook Pixel in your marketing techniques.
If your desired audience is exceedingly upscale, you might narrow your targeting to people with a high level of education and net worth.
If you’re a niche business that specializes in hobbies, musical instruments, or random interests, you can direct ads based on a wide cross-section of related topics.
With the ability to target people that follow big brands, mom & pop shops can pick off local followers of national chains.
If you are logged into Facebook on Chrome or another browser, chances are you are being followed across the web by retargeting pixels that allow companies like Facebook, Twitter, and others target ads based on the websites you visited and the products or services you researched.
By tracking which websites people visit, social media companies know which individuals are likely to be looking to buy a new car or make a big purchase.
Beyond tracking everywhere people go online and everywhere they physically go (e.g. car dealership), companies like Twitter are also known to tap the microphone within your smartphone to listen for words that could put you in an ad targeting category.
By analyzing all of these social signals and understanding what people research and what they do before making a major buying decision, these advanced algorithms and social advertising platforms have gained vast insights on customer behavior by tracking the actions people take throughout the path to purchase.
The Opportunities For Personalization Are Endless
Although intelligent humans can often predict who will be interested in a product or service based on research and existing data, they will never understand other humans as well as machines are able to.
Beyond your own research, you can tap into the insights collected from billions of people in order to unleash personalized ads that deliver results at scale.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others have access to billions of potential customers and offer the opportunity to deliver messages that are tailored to unique segments.
By analyzing what you and billions of other people do, these social systems keep getting smarter and their advertising platforms are getting better at predicting human behavior, which includes anticipating whether or not you are going to engage with an ad.
With machines that have access to endless information and the ability to make sense of data that no human could possibly crunch in a lifetime, these sophisticated social advertising platforms offer capabilities that defy convention and stretch far beyond the capacity that most people can comprehend.
With machines tracking every action that users take on social media. including the links they click and how long they take to read a post or watch a video, these systems can cross-reference that data against similar people to predict behaviors and target ads successfully.
With capabilities like Lookalike audiences that deliver ads to people that share similar interests and attributes with existing customers, existing data on customers can be used to expand businesses and scale success.
The biggest challenge as you plot the future forward is creating personalized advertising experiences that span the spectrum of your target audience.
When you no longer need to appeal to everyone, then you can focus on creating a relevant message for individuals. By doing this, you boost your chances of increasing your social media advertising roi!
Whether it makes sense to create 3 or 300 ads will depend on the campaign, but the options are nearly endless.
With each unique audience, you build a campaign around, you will want to create a sequence of ads to run throughout the customer journey from awareness through conversion, so each segment will become its own pathway toward a purchase.
With truly endless combinations of social media targeting available, you can tailor your creative to deliver a personalized message to the right customer at the right time while they check out what their friends are doing on social media.
