Step 2: Find Your Ideal Audience

There is a proven formula that you can use in your business to market online. One of the key advantages of this process is that you and your staff don’t have to spend hours on Facebook or Instagram.

The steps to the formula are:

  1. Create a sales-orientated Facebook page.
  2. Find your ideal audience.
  3. Deliver value before you ask for a sales
  4. Get contact information.
  5. Market to these people (sell them something).

In the first article we talked about creating your sales-oriented sales page and what’s involved in that. CLICK HERE if you want to refer back to that article and see what’s included in a sales-oriented Facebook page. If you would like to see an outline of the entire formula, CLICK HERE!

Now we’re moving on to Step 2 and covering the process of finding your ideal audience.

The ability to find your ideal audience is what makes Facebook marketing special.

You can have the best product in the world and have your marketing down pat but still not sell anything if you’re talking to the wrong people. The opposite is also true: you can have a mediocre product and a mediocre message and be talking to the perfect audience and get great results. It all comes down to who you’re talking to.

The advantage that Facebook gives you is the ability to find a large audience that is interested in your products and services so that you can keep using the same message and product over a longer period of time. It’s not uncommon to be able to identify audiences of 500,000 to 1,000,000 people in smaller niches and in the ten to twenty million or more in larger niches.

Although there may be only a few people in your immediate area who want your product or service, the many people who use Facebook regularly allow you to reach large numbers of your ideal prospects affordably anywhere in the world.

The challenge with Facebook is knowing where to look for those prospects and how to test and see whether they are interested in your products.

In other words, finding your ideal prospects on Facebook takes a bit of research. The great thing about Facebook, though, is that it provides you with the tools to do this research—for FREE.

Step 1: Start with Google

If you have no audience or presence of your own to start with, spend some time on Google before you move on to Facebook.

What you’re looking for are your target audience’s items of interest. Are there celebrities your audience is interested in? Are there magazines or books that they tend to read? Are there events they often attend? Brands they like? Products they use?

You’re looking for any piece of insight you can take and follow that to other pieces of information. You’re doing detective work here. Make sure you follow the trail of information.

Step 2: Check out the Insights Tool

This will give you insights into the people who already liked your page. As long as you’ve grown your audience organically and the people in it would be good customers this is a great place to get information.

Check out the Insights tool on your Facebook page.

This will give you more insights into where the people in your audience live and what they’re interested in.

You’ll find it at the top of your business page under the More label.

There is a wealth of information available to you.

You can see where your followers live, what cities and countries, what language they speak along with:

  • Your total number of page followers
  • The ages of your page followers
  • The ages of people who engaged on your page
  • What time your followers are most active on Facebook
  • Other pages you can watch, along with suggestions of what pages you might want to consider watching

There are many more pieces of information stored in the insights tool on your Facebook page; you may want to look through them to see what you’ve been missing and most importantly get to know your audience.

Step 3: Audience Insight Tool

This free tool from Facebook provides you with a wealth of information. Facebook developed this tool so that companies could find out about their audiences and improve their targeting.

It is accessed via your ads manager. If you’re not advertising yet, you can create a free ad account and access this tool, and if you’re advertising you access it from the main navigation menu in your ads manager.

This tool is underused by most marketers. Spending an hour or two using this tool will provide you with insights that used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to discover.

You can find out in-depth information about your current Facebook connections. The amount of information available with this tool is incredible.

For full access to all the data available your audience has to be large enough for Facebook to work with. You need over 1,000 active monthly users to have access to Facebook’s Audience Insight tool. The larger your audience is, the more analysis you can get from Facebook.

If your audience isn’t big enough to get your Facebook connections information, you can still find out about people who are interested in your products and services

This is where you take what you found out in Step one of your google search and enter this into your interests.

Not every page is available when you are targeting by interest, but if you have been adding to the list I mentioned in Step 1, you should have 20–50 pages and possibilities to work with.

You’ll find a substantial amount of information about this list including:

  • Demographics of the audience
  • Top Pages they like
  • Other pages they like and that pages affinity for the interest you entered
  • Their relationship status
  • Their education level
  • And how active they are on Facebook
  • And much more

This tool insides the ads manager gives you valuable insights into your target market.

Step 4: Test Your Audience

Now that you have a list of audiences that might work, you need to test them. You should strive to have 3-5 audiences to target in your testing.

Just because you think you have the perfect solution to one audience’s problem doesn’t mean you do: until an audience responds to your offer, you don’t know.

What we’ve found to be the fastest and cheapest way to test new audiences is running a “like-my-page” ad to the relevant audience.

In this ad, make sure you clearly state what people are going to get by liking your page.

For a Go Social Experts page, we might use the following: “Like our page for all the latest tips and insights about using your Facebook page to grow your business.”

With this ad, you’re testing both the message and the audience. If you feel that you have the proper message, you’re looking for the audience that responds the best. If your cost per like is $0.30 with one audience, $0.50 with another, and $0.75 with another, you have a starting point to work with.

The goal of this ad is only to test each audience. Once you know you have an audience that resonates with your message you can stop running these ads and move on to connecting with these people.

Wrapping it up.

Spending the time and effort to get your audiences set up can pay dividends for months or even years. These are the starting points for all your marketing on Facebook. If executed well, these strategies will allow you to profitably market on Facebook; if they’re done poorly, you’ll be one of the people who hear of others’ successes with Facebook—and wonder how they did it.

When you know who you’re targeting and that they respond to your message, your Facebook marketing gets easier and more profitable.

Start with the audience that responded best to your test and watch your results get better. When you want to increase your exposure, you can move on to your second or third audience and keep growing the reach of your ads.

My next article will give you some ideas about what you should be sending to the audiences you’ve identified as responsive so that they become buyers of your products faster.

Have a great week!

Brian

P.S. If you’re wondering how to make this happen faster. Sign up for my FREE video masterclass. We’ll walk through each of these steps in detail. Go to www.gosocialexperts.com/masterclass to get started.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Dec 29, 2015 and has been completely revamped and updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.

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