Archive for category Viral Marketing/Social Media

There is an old saying in real estate that what matters is “location, location, and location.”

In Facebook ads, it’s “demographics, demographics, and demographics!”

But how do you know the demographics? And how to you group your demographics? How do you target them better?

Well, I hope Part Two in our 15+ Facebook Advertising Tips helps.

The first place to start is our “Course Demographics” page in our Affiliate Tools Section. This will give you what I would consider a medium level view of the target markets. Broad would be “people” and narrow would be “women in the southeast U.S. ages 34-38, married and college educated, who like ‘Twilight’.” These demographics fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.

So, for this lesson, I will focus on two examples. Our Learn & Master Home School Editions and our Learn & Master Ballroom Dance course.

What is the demographic for the Home School Editions?

Using strictly the demographics we provide,  you will first see that they tend to be lower middle aged, 25-44 years old with moderate to high incomes. They are typically married.

A little bit more research will show you that they are predominantly women (of course their are men, but as far as buyers, they tend to be the women).

Using Facebook’s Targeting, you can narrow it down even further. Here is a screenshot of an ad targeting Home School parents (click for a larger view).

As you can see we narrowed it down to the United States only. You may choose to regionalize it more. Are there certain parts of the country that will tend to buy a DVD-based course? Perhaps more rural areas where there is not as much instruction available locally?

Then we targeted a small age group (27-32). I segment each broad age group into much smaller age groups. So for the Home School Editions I am targeting 25-45 year olds. I broke that down into 25-26, 27-32, 33-38, 39-43, and 44-45. Older women will typically have older kids and vice versa, so perhaps we may stumble upon the perfect age group in there.  No rhyme or reason really for those exact numbers, but you get the idea. You could literally do it year by year if you wanted.

I then narrowed it down to married women who speak U.S. English only.

The likes and interests part is the most important part in this example I think. I literally picked anything that has to do with “Home School” or “Homeschool” and ran with it. If they are in any of these groups, they ARE our target market.

Now for the example of Ballroom Dance, I decided to target an even more specific audience, but yet one that still reaches almost 300,000 people and has been getting super high CTR (click through rates) and impressions.

The ad targets married women and suggests they get their husbands to learn Ballroom Dance. It has a picture of two people dancing and the clincher is the subject line (more on that factor later in this series) and the ad copy. It plays on “Dancing with the Stars.”

So once again, I targeted:

• the United States only
• ages 25-50 (broken down into smaller groups)
• women
• married
• English (US)
• Likes and interests: ballroom dancing, ballroom dance, dance, Dancing with the Stars, and more.

One caution in targeting demographically: Be careful when targeting people who are TOO in your niche. An example of this might be targeting the Likes and Interest of “guitar” when running an ad for Learn & Master Guitar. These people already play guitar…therefore, they are not in your target audience most likely. Tread carefully there. I am not saying to NOT include that, but if you do, put it in its own ad and bid low and set a low budget.

OK, I think that is it for this part of demographic targeting in our 15+ Facebook Advertising Tips Series.

Until next time…