5.3 Audiences on Business.Facebook

As we mentioned before, the best way for you to learn is to see us actually set something up from scratch. In the last episode, we gave you a peek into Lancify Abroad's ad account.

But now, it's time to get our hands dirty and build things from scratch for Lancify Abroad. So we went ahead and created a business manager account for Lancify Abroad. As you can see, this is a clean ad account without any campaigns. The first thing we are going to do is set-up what are called audiences. Let's take a moment to understand this concept.

A couple episodes back, we talked about who we wanted to target for Lancify Abroad. We're looking to reach students in high schools and colleges.

How did we say we would do that? We said we could target by age, location and even based on whether they are in high school or undergrad. Now, here is the key part. You want to target high schoolers and undergrads differently because, you know, their needs aren't exactly the same.  

What I mean is, the high schoolers are probably looking for help with SATs and have no clue about universities, while the undergrads are looking to do their GMAT or their GRE and probably have more context on what they're looking for. So it won't be smart to put them all in one bucket.

Thankfully, to help you target your market better, Facebook allows you to create groups of target users that are called audiences. That way, you can go and define different audiences on Facebook and save them. That way when you want to start a campaign, you can just pick from your list of saved audiences. 

Okay, let's get into this.

To start, click on this grid icon here and then on audiences. Click on Create Audience and then on Saved Audiences. And there you go.

Welcome to the Facebook targeting center.

All of those targeting options that we talked about in the last chapter are accessible from here. Now, while this section might seem small and insignificant, it is incredibly powerful. You literally have over 1000s of different ways you can target your audience right from here.

We’re going to go with a few specific audiences but the goal is for you to really experiment with these options. For now, let's just show you the ropes. Right here, you can select what location you want to target, this one lets you select an age range, then gender and language. Simple stuff right? This section itself lets you target very effectively. You could reach women between the ages 20 and 21 living in a specific pin code in the US. But the real magic happens right here where it says, detailed targeting. Here is where you can target with all those options we talked about like interests, behaviours and demographics.

For example, if you click on Browse, demographics, work, and job title, you could even target CEOs alone. Now if you use the other targeting options above, you could target CEOs between the ages of 40 and 60 who are female and living in New York.

Here is another cool feature of this tool. Let's say you want to target every male between the ages of 20 - 30 living in New Delhi, you type in New Delhi here, set the age range and gender. Now if you look on the right, you see the number of people that fall in that target audience. 

So that’s enough for stalking 101 with Facebook Targeting. Let's get to the task at hand now.

We need to create audiences for Lancify Abroad. So what we're going to do is create these groups or specific audiences that we talked about. For the sake of this series, let’s target students in India looking to study abroad. So, the first audience we want to create is a basic audience to target high schoolers in Metro cities in India. To do that, we go here and type out Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Chennai and Kochi. We then put the age range to 15 - 19. We leave the gender at all and move down to detailed targeting. Here we click on browse, demographics, education, education level, and select high school and some high school.

And that's it. Go ahead and save your audience.

Now let's go ahead and build a similar one for undergrads. It's the same process, just a different education level. Let's take the targeting up a notch. We are going to add a special layer to our targeting called interests. The reason we use interest-based targeting is, you can tell a lot about a person from their interest.

For example, you can probably assume that someone looking to go abroad will have a bunch of interests like international sports, Hollywood movies, popular English music. Basically, what your Indian uncle would call western influence. So rather than just tell Facebook basics like Age and location, you can also add some of these kinds of interests to help Facebook find people that you are looking for.

Again, the same drill. Click on Create audience and saved audience. Now, we are still going to separate high schoolers and undergrads, so let's build this audience for high schoolers. I'm going to use the same steps as we did before and add the metro cities here... add age from 15 - 19..

Now, we come down to detailed targeting and we are simply going to type out interests our audience might have. What are teenagers today interested in? Obviously political reform, international trade, the stock market….Lol. Let’s go with Beyonce, BuzzFeed Tasty, Balenciaga, Netflix, and throw in one of the Kardarshians. Is Kim the favourite? Sure. You have meme pages like LadBible or 9GAG.

And maybe throw in a sports team too? Now we don’t want to start a sports war so let’s go with a smaller team that doesn’t win too much. Like Manchester United.

Basically what we are doing is telling Facebook that our audience is probably interested in these kinds of things. Once you have entered the different interests, go ahead, and save your audience. Now you have a slightly more advanced targeting option. Let’s do the same for undergrads.

There you go, we have 4 audiences now.

That's a great starting point, but we are going to add one more special kind of audience. And this is really an ad marketer’s best-kept secret.

Lookalike audiences. 

What's a lookalike audience? Well, odds are that the business you are running ads for, already has a list of customers or leads that they know are the perfect kind of people. So let's say the business has a list of 1000 email ids or even phone numbers of their customers or leads. This list represents exactly the kind of people you are looking to target on Facebook. So what you can actually do is make a list - an excel sheet basically, and upload it to Facebook and then tell Facebook to find you more people that are similar to your list. Make sense?

Take, for example, Lancify Abroad. Let's say we have this list of students that have already signed up for a free session. Now we know this is exactly the kind of people we want more of. So let's create a lookalike audience based on this list.

We hit “create audience” and then go to lookalike audience. Now you are taken to this page to create your audience.The first thing Facebook will ask you for is a source to understand the kind of people you want more of. Click on create new source and then on custom audience. You will see a bunch of options here. There are different ways you can tell Facebook the kind of people you are looking to target, but for now you want to click on Customer List. This next page tells you what you need to have in your list. Basically you need at least their email id, phone number, and first name.

Go ahead and hit next. This is a really cool section that talks about customer value, but let's skip that for now. Hit no and then next. Here is where we upload our file. Let me just go ahead and do that. At the final step, you will be asked to enter the country you are looking to target and how big a lookalike list you want. Let’s go somewhere in the middle. And that's it! You have created a lookalike audience for your business.

Look-alike audiences are extremely powerful and will give you exactly the edge you need, an edge because it's based on people you already know are perfect for you. We’ll show you how we use these audiences in a real campaign very soon so stay put.