If you’re running Facebook ads for a niche product, there’s going to come a point in time where you’ve reached most of the people in your market.
If your business only ships to a single country or a few states, or you’re running campaigns with high budgets, you’ll hit saturation point pretty quickly.
In this article I’m going to discuss how you can focus on various marketing segments using Facebook ads to create tailored audiences and an everlasting supply of customers.
A lot of marketers rush to create Facebook ads without really thinking about their market segments.
What they end up doing is targeting new audiences using a range of interests and behaviors that relate to their product or service.
For example, someone running ads for a gym may use the following interest targeting:
These are all valid interests to target, but they all belong in different verticals in the health industry.
Healthy food, keto diet, and ketosis are all food related.
Bodybuilding and Arnold Schwarzenegger are related to lifting weights.
TRX, cross fit, and yoga are all group classes, and you could make a very good argument that each interest is its own niche vertical and should have its own market segment.
If you group all your market segments together into a single audience you’ll face the following problems:
Weak messages – As you’re targeting people who have different needs, your ad copy will become too generic. For example, if you’re targeting the bodybuilding and yoga interests, they are two very different verticals with different needs, and by lumping them together into one segment your messaging won’t resonate with either audience.
Audience overlap – If you’re targeting various verticals together, as you create more campaigns your audiences will begin to overlap, impacting your reach and potentially increasing the amount of times prospects view the same ads.
Let’s say you’re selling men’s clothing products. Instead of grouping various interests to create one big audience, segment your audiences by the following categories:
Job role or income level – Target men who want to look stylish at work.
Behaviors – Target single men who like various alcohol companies, DJs, night clubs, and bars. If they are single and visiting social clubs, they too will want to look good.
Brands – Target men who have shown an interest in popular men’s clothing brands.
Sport or use case – If you’re selling a product that has a specific use case, like soccer trainers or a sweat band, target by sports and show the relevant product.
These are four verticals that I just thought of right now.
By breaking down each vertical into its own market segment, not only can you better tailor your ads, but you can also see which audiences are most profitable.
When coming up with your market segments, aim to have at least 500,000 people in your audience. If you have anything smaller then it will be hard to scale.
If you’re a local business, then it may be difficult to get your market segments into six figures. In this case, I would keep a close eye on frequency to ensure you don’t over deliver your ads.
One hack that small businesses can use is to simply target by age and gender and ignore interest and behaviors altogether.
For example, if you’re a local business selling women’s clothes, target all women within a 15 mile distance from your shop using objectives such as reach, website clicks (and conversions if you’re triggering more than 50 per week).
I like to segment my customers by their needs.
For example, someone who is interested in bodybuilding, Ronnie Coleman, protein bars, or squats is somebody who wants to build muscle.
Someone who is interested in business suits and work wear wants to look smart and presentable at work.
By knowing their needs, I can craft the right messages and offers in my funnel to get them to take the action I want.
How are you marketing to your customer segments on Facebook? Are you grouping everyone together, or have you segmented them by their needs and are showing them the correct messaging?