Useful Tips for Facebook Audience Research

Facebook audience research is critical to Facebook marketing success. The need to know your target audience remains one of the most crucial steps for successful Facebook Ad campaigns. In addition, there are so many ways of looking at the same audience, let alone finding them online.

With billions of active users, Facebook is likely one place your ideal customer educates and entertains themselves. Just as you would optimize keywords for Google ad campaigns, you must use Facebook audiences to target your customer through Facebook Ad Campaigns.

Because nearly all of us turn to Facebook’s feed when seeking fresh information, it’s essential that you know your audience closely and target them with a clear message. Your audience will determine the success of your ad on Facebook, and they will decide whether to engage based on its relevance to them. So choose your audience carefully.

In this post, you will learn what types of Facebook audiences exist, how to find audiences using the Insight Tool, and ways to leverage audiences to establish and expand your ads. Centaur Consulting Group hopes this helps you clarify what audiences are and how to use them to push your metrics.

To fully understand audiences and deliver ads with precision, read this guide to Facebook Audiences.

Types of Facebook Audiences

Facebook automatically shows your ad to those most likely to find it relevant. Its methods for doing this are not always clear, but you can help the process by further targeting your ad delivery with three kinds of audiences:

• Core Audiences
• Custom Audiences
• Lookalike Audiences

In each of these audiences on Facebook, you can narrow your scope and target audiences in complex, refined ways. Let’s dig a little deeper into what defines them.

Core Audiences

When you target a core audience, you are defining your audience based on criteria like their age, geography, interest, and the like. This allows you to advertise in specific cities and countries as well as choose your audience through things like education, gender, job, and others. Finally, you’re able to add and track the interests and hobbies of your ad audience.

Custom Audiences

Custom audiences allow you to target your ads according to behaviors. When your customer engages your company, tries to buy a product, or uses a certain device, you can target them based on their activity as a consumer. Within custom audiences, there is the ability to combine with contact lists, certain app users, and website visitors. You’re empowered to retarget customers who may be close to repurchasing a product and educate those who are loyal to competitors.

Lookalike Audiences

Reaching new users whose interests resemble your customer’s passions is easy when you try lookalike audiences. Here, you can choose to include people who are connected with your Facebook page or an event. (You can also exclude them as a negative audience in order to find a new audience.) Facebook will then deliver your ad based on the source audience to people of similar interests and traits.

We want you to explore how using demographics, behaviors, and connections on Facebook can help you gain insight into your audience. Next, we explore using the Audience Insights tool to understand our customer’s unique intersections and to find them for ad delivery.

How to Target Delivery using Audience Insights

At heart, Audience Insights is a tool to shed light on your real Facebook audiences. In order to create campaigns that attract audiences and delight clients, Audience Insights can help you break down demographics, find out what your audience likes, and learn about their lifestyle. Through the tool, you will have access to information about people connected to your page as well as everyone on Facebook, and you can help connect your brand with the right customers.

Follow these steps in your Facebook audience research to build a target audience and discover their interests and passions. Please note that you will need to create a business page on Facebook in order to use Facebook Ads Manager (where Audience Insights lives).

Review Your Facebook Audience Insights

Facebook gives us useful information on who our audience is using the audience insight tool. It is located in Meta’s Business Suite under Insights. Based upon your Facebook/Instagram pages, you can see what your top demographics are under the current audiences tab & look for new core audiences under the potential audience tab. 

Getting started with Facebook Audience Research

Meta’s Business Suite Insights is a good place to start to understand your current audience. Next, you’ll be able find new audiences based upon your current audience. To get even more information, we would recommend you do the following:

• Go to your Google Analytics account and look under the Audience tab. The Interests, Geo, Demographics, Technology, & Mobile reports sound be loaded with useful insights. In particular, the Interests reports can be used to find top in-market/affinity audiences that you could target as new audiences on Facebook.
• See what your competition is doing on Facebook by going to the Ad Library. From there you can see if they are using messaging to go after any particular audiences that you might not have covered yet.
• Use third party tools & industry insights to look for emerging trends that could be potential audiences. For example, are there any particular holidays, groups, or life events that resonate with your audience? You could target interests around those key moments.
• If you have data in your ad account already, you can also download this data to see what your top performing demos & geos are for specific ad campaigns. Then you can while use Facebook’s ad set setup to find similar audiences based upon the audiences you already target (example below):

1. Build a demographic using core descriptions.

Demographics can include anything from location to gender, from age to interests, and language to education. But, to a certain extent, the best demographics for your campaign will be determined by your client’s business.

An interior design shop in New York City and a landscaper in Denver both have a sphere of influence and a location. A brand, on the other hand, is building itself across the web. It will have other demographic and regional interests. So it is with age, gender, interests, language, and many more demographics.

To choose your best demographics, consider using your research or audience persona to guide your selections. If you are not sure about a demographic, such as age or gender, you can leave it blank for refinement later.

You will find that there are many options that can pinpoint an audience. Think about how interests allow you to navigate entertainment, sports, tech, relationships, restaurants, and even spiritual topics with ease. Each interest, such as “Food”, will break into further details, such as “Restaurants,” and then further, like “Diners.”

There might even be a reason—depending on your client or brand—to look into advanced demographics. These can include language, relationship status, education, job, politics, and life events. In the “Advanced” tab, you can see how precise details affect your chosen demographic. You can then start targeting that specific audience. One example is college-educated women from 25 to 50 who have kids and just moved to a new city.

Your specific client or brand will determine its audience’s best demographics. Look deeply into who needs your message before moving on to establish or expand your campaign using these insights.

2. Narrow your focus with a lookalike feature.

Once you’ve selected an audience and defined its boundaries, you can analyze your audience’s interests through likes. Let’s say new fathers in Seattle aged 25 to 50 most care about the Seahawks and Public Radio. This information could be used to help your next marketing strategy or campaign. In addition, you can also choose an audience based on their connection to your page or other pages.

Make a list of the pages your audience likes. Turn to the demographics tab, and enter that name into the ‘Interests” field. You will then see changes to your “Demographics” chart showing you that you have targeted customers as a core and lookalike audience. We touch on custom audiences next.

Expand Facebook Ad Campaigns with Facebook Audience Research

Use Audience Insights to target a specific and unique audience, and your Facebook Ad campaigns will never look the same. You can simply and easily populate the Ad Manager with the data you explored in Audience Insights. (And it will track the performance of each campaign for that audience as well.) If you’ve been running a successful campaign with Facebook Ads, you can leverage your audience to deepen your reach.

Gain more impressions, grow larger audiences, extend post reach, influence share of voice, and sell lots more products using audiences. The key is custom audiences.

Use custom audiences to expand and deepen reach

In audience research and design on Facebook, there are three kinds of custom audiences. These include people on your own list, people who visit your site, and people who have used your app.

Whichever method you choose, drive up results by using custom audiences to gain relevance and proximity to your customers. You can target them as a custom audience using tools like Facebook Pixel to note your audience’s consumer behavior. Or, you can have an audience who liked your Page.

Most importantly, the closer you get to your ideal audience, the more likely you are to boost returns. Consequently, this also helps you lower your costs and double conversions. Some businesses are able to multiply their customer base many times and decrease their cost per customer simply through using custom, lookalike, and core audiences.

Final Thoughts on Facebook Audience Research

Centaur Consulting Group wants you to know who your Facebook audiences are. We can show you how to target them, and how to expand your Facebook Ad success using audiences. Use the steps above to discover an audience and gain insight into their likes and behavior. Above all, our consultants help you leverage those audiences when designing your ads. We are experts in Facebook audience research and can help you grow your Facebook marketing efforts with confidence.

Centaur Consultants partners with marketers to drive better outcomes through thorough communication and marketing innovation. We collaborate with your team to develop solutions and strategies that will work for your clients.

Save time by avoiding Facebook advertising errors, and ensure that your clients are satisfied again and again. Schedule a free consultation with Centaur Consulting Group.