Standing Out: How to Target Your Ideal Audience with Facebook Ads

With the way the social media landscape has changed, ads have quickly become an essential part of maintaining your online presence. However, getting it started isn’t always easy. At first, you might want to simply boost posts, but what are you measuring? What is the goal and how do you know it worked? Impulsiveness can lead to a waste of time and money, resulting in a loss of new fans or even existing patients. In order to combat this, goals must be established – one of the biggest being identifying your ideal audience.

When you begin to specify and figure out what results you’re looking to see with ads, the process begins to become more clear. Through the use of targeted ads, you will be able to cut through the noise and have your content be seen by the people who will be the most receptive and responsive to it. This is done via four categories:

1.       Location – Targets your audience on a geographical basis.
2.       Demographic – Includes parents, people of a certain age, and so on.
3.       Interest – This dives into a users’ activity on social media based on what they “Like,” post about, and comment on.
4.       Behavior – Targets people who act a certain way, such as a frequent online shopper or a recently moved individual.

These four categories are included in the Facebook Ad Manager, allowing you to build insight into your desired audience. Using these functions and thinking about the individuals in your community all help in building a buyer persona. This is the culmination of all of the goal gathering and audience building, the answer to the question, “Who should I target my ads to?”

With the information gathered, you can access Facebook’s Audience Insight Tool to start creating the perfect audience for you. Whether it be people all over Facebook, fans of your page, or people who visit your website, you’ll be able to break it down to the very nitty-gritty and find the people who will interact the most with your content. Below is an example of what you can expect.

Successfully navigating the Facebook Ad Manager and Audience Insight Tool can be daunting at times, but that’s why our team is here to help. If you’re looking to expand your practice’s brand with ads, we can work with you to help you define goals, narrow down audiences, and find the buyer persona that best fits your practice.  

—Adrian Vargas, Social Media Specialist II, Sesame Communications