All You Need To Know When Creating a Facebook Audience Strategy

Join Seer as we take a deep dive into Facebook audience strategy with our audience first mentality.

The paid social marketing funnel illustrates the consumer’s journey to a brand through social marketing. Consumers enter the funnel through prospecting and move further down the funnel the more we retarget them. The funnel shows how consumers come to know a brand and how paid social can make prospecting customers into clientele.

There are two overarching ways to target on Facebook: Prospecting and retargeting.

Within those lie our more specific targeting methods:

Interest audience
- Based off audience personas, have had no interaction with the brand
Lookalike audience
- Facebook finds people who are similar to a seed audience (website custom audiences or customer remarketing lists)
Retargeting
- People who are familiar with the brand by interacting with the website (WCA – website custom audiences) or are part of the customer retargeting list (CRM list).
Dynamic retargeting
- Show customers products/services they have already seen through dynamic product ads based off-site pixel.

Prospecting Audiences

Prospecting audiences are interest or lookalike audiences and are comprised of people who have never interacted with your brand before. They are leveraged to coax people into the top of the funnel so that they can then be retargeted.

Interest audiences are based on consumer insights from audience insights, Facebook analytics and Google analytics.

We recommend prospecting targeting when your client wants to drive traffic to site with low CPCs. Think of it as a great first step to getting possible consumers into the funnel!

Get to know your audience

Audience Insights

Due to recent events, Facebook has limited our ability to gather information through audience insights. Currently, the only way to use audience insights is by connecting to your client’s page.

How to get here: Drop down menu → Plan → Audience insights

Once you’re connected with the page, you are able to gain demographic and activity insights with users who have connected with your page.

💡 Pro Tip: Try breaking down your audience by gender, age or location to see how interests may change. This could help you tailor your prospecting audiences and make them more specific.

Facebook Analytics

With Facebook analytics, you’re able to find information on location, gender and language that is presented in a very visually pleasing way that’s also great to share with clients!

💡 Pro Tip: If possible, encourage your client to create an event source group through FB analytics. This will allow you to measure how page engagement plays a part in conversions (info on how to create this is found in Facebook analytics settings).

Google Analytics

Google analytics has the interests tab that includes affinity categories, in-market segment, and other categories. Compare audiences in GA versus what you see in audience insights to discover more targeting options!

Affinity categories are what people higher in the brand’s funnel would be interested in. Keep in mind that this information is more general than what Facebook provides.

The in-market segments show what consumers are more likely to purchase. This might be helpful when determining which part of your client’s business you should promote.

Once you select the seed audience, you will select which percentage of the population you want to target. The population amount will increase as the percentage targeted increases.

We recommend prospecting targeting when your client wants to drive traffic to site with low CPCs. Think of it as a great first step to getting possible consumers into the funnel!

How to Speak to Prospecting Audiences

To distinguish between audiences, it’s important to cater your message to each audience. For interest-based audiences, we’ve found that the following perform best:

Shorter and direct copy.
Convey value where possible and align to brand voice.
Promos and sales are great tools to entice first-time customers with eComm clients .
Align messaging to specific ad set targeting so you can speak to the specific pain points/interests of your audience.

💡 Pro Tips:

Use your best performing first party audience as your seed audience
Layer on additional targeting or group together lookalike audiences to broaden the scope
The larger the seed audience, the more data points Facebook has to build the lookalike audience

There are several options available when it comes to the type of campaign to run on Facebook. Below are a few options.

Brand Awareness

More reach and impressions
Bigger audience reach
Options to optimize towards:
- Ad recall lift (maximize total number of people who will remember seeing your ads)
When to use: When the focus of the campaign is branding

Reach

More reach and impressions
Bigger audience reach
Options to optimize towards:
- Reach (ad gets served to the maximum number of people)
- Impressions (deliver ads to people as many times as possible)
When to use: When the focus of the campaign is to get your ad in front of as many people as possible

Traffic

When to use: When the focus is for the audience to click on the ad, load the landing page, or be exposed to the brand

Conversions

It’s important to align your campaign type for prospecting audiences based on goals. Below are some examples of goals and KPIs to keep in mind when targeting interest or lookalike audiences.

Retargeting Audiences

Retargeting on Facebook consists of re-engaging people who are already familiar with a brand by interacting with the website. Through Facebook’s pixel, you are able to engage with people who have been to your site, your brand page, or interacted with your ads.

To create a first-party retargeting audience, go to the audience tab within Facebook and select custom audience:

Here, you’re able to upload email lists, retarget website traffic and activity, retarget app activity, and retarget offline activity and engagement.

Re-Engage Consumers

You have the ability to re-engage your desired audiences a couple of different ways. The first is through email.

Upload your email list manually or create automatic imports from your email marketing service if supported by Facebook. Some example email lists are:

Highly scored sales leads from Salesforce, Marketo, Pardot, etc.
Webinar or event attendees
Newsletter subscribers
Email subscribers who have not responded recently to an email marketing campaign

The second way to re-engage your audience is through engagement. The engagement tab of Facebook’s custom audiences section allows us to retarget people who have interacted with our Facebook/Instagram brand pages, video ads, leads, and events.

If you’re looking to engage current customers, try targeting those who follow or like your brand on Facebook. Furthermore, if your client is focused on lead gen campaigns, the lead form targeting is a great way to capture all your leads in a retargeting campaign.

How to Speak to Retargeting Audiences

Be memorable, friendly, and have personality!
This audience is already familiar with your brand, so keep this in mind when creating messaging and ad creative
Leverage different forms of content, CTAs, and messaging to test how you can further guide your audience down the funnel

Dynamic Retargeting

With dynamic retargeting, you’re able to show customers products and services they have already seen through dynamic product ads based off the site pixel. This targeting method is at the very bottom of the funnel because you’re showing people products they have already viewed. Note that this type of campaign is only available for e-commerce clients because you’ll need a product catalog.

With dynamic retargeting, it’s best practice to target product viewers and cart abandoners. In addition, Facebook recommends that each DPA ad set receive at least 50 conversions per week so that the engine can best optimize. This will play a big part in the date ranges that are being retargeted.

Pro tip: If a client has several repeat purchasers, include a past purchaser segment targeting past purchasers from 30-90 days ago!

Who Should I Be Targeting?

If a client has an extremely low conversion rate (>10 conversions/week) break out ad sets like this:

Product Viewers	1-30 Days
Cart Abandoners	1-30 Days

If a client has a low conversion rate (10-50 conversions/week), break out ad sets like this:

Product Viewers	1-10 Days; 11-30 Days
Cart Abandoners	1-10 Days; 11-30 Days

If a client has a higher conversion rate (50+ conversions/week), break out ad sets like this:

Product Viewers	1-3 Days; 4-10 Days, 11-30 Days
Cart Abandoners	1-3 Days; 4-10 Days, 11-30 Days

How to Build DPA Ad Sets

As mentioned above, dynamic product ads allow us to retarget people based on products they have viewed, products they have added to cart, products they have purchased, and much more! To create these ad sets in a DPA campaign, you will need to use logical statements. Here are some examples of how the ad sets should be set up. You’ll just need to change the time frame per ad set!