- Hey, it's Andrew here from andrewhubbard.co.
And in this video we're talking
about Facebook audience targeting,
and how to choose the right interests for your Facebook ads.
So one of the biggest mistakes I see with advertisers
on Facebook when they're trying to set up their targeting is
they pick interests that are way too broad.
And what ends up happening is
because these interests aren't narrow enough,
because they're not specific enough,
they end up not getting the results
they want with their ads.
And then they end up giving up and saying,
well, Facebook ads don't work for me,
or they end up paying way more than they need to compared
to what they would actually be paying
if they got their interest targeting right.
So whether you're brand new to Facebook ads,
whether you've been running them for a while,
and you wanna improve your costs and improve your results,
this video is for you.
Now, before we jump into the content,
if you enjoyed this video,
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Alright, so getting straight into the content.
Now, let's talk about what makes a good interest
and what makes an interest that's not so effective.
So a good interest is one that is specific.
And what I mean by specific is it's something
that only your target audience would be interested in.
So think about it like this,
if I wanted to target entrepreneurs, and I was trying
to get my ads in front of people
who were either entrepreneurs or interested
in becoming entrepreneurs, then I could target, let's say,
Mark Cuban as an interest.
That however, wouldn't be a great interest to target.
Yes, Mark Cuban is really well known.
He's got a huge following on social media and on Facebook,
and it would seem to be a good fit.
The problem with targeting Mark Cuban as an interest
if I wanna get in front of entrepreneurs is
he's also a bit of a mainstream celebrity now.
He owns the Dallas Mavericks, he's on Shark Tank,
which means that there are hundreds of thousands,
maybe even millions of people who know of Mark,
who aren't necessarily entrepreneurs.
My wife, not an entrepreneur, but I could say,
"Do you know who Mark Cuban is?"
And she would go, "Yeah, he's the guy of shark tank," right?
So that makes it not a great interest to target
because inside that target audience,
there are going to be people who are interested
in Mark Cuban that don't fit my ideal customer,
which is an entrepreneur.
Now, in contrast to that, a better interest target would be
somebody like Peter Thiel.
Now, if you're watching this, and you don't know
who Peter Thiel is, and you're not an entrepreneur,
that's a good thing, right?
But Peter Thiel, he was one of the co-founders of PayPal,
he's written a book called, "Zero to One,"
he might have written other books as well,
but he's really well known in entrepreneurial communities,
but he's not so well known outside of those communities.
So again, if I use my wife as an example,
if I said to her, "Do you know who Peter Thiel is?"
She would go, "I've got no idea who you're talking about."
And that's a good thing, she's not an entrepreneur,
she doesn't fit in that group.
So you can see between those two examples,
although, on the surface, Mark Cuban might seem
like a good interest to target if I wanna get
in front of entrepreneurs, when I look at it and say,
is it really specific or is he more well known outside
of those circles as well,
outside of that target audience group?
Then the answer is, yes, and I rule him out.
And we wanna go for that more specific interest.
So that's the key.
You wanna get in front of really specific interests
that only your target audience or your ideal customer
would be interested in.
So if it passes that test, it's a good interest to target.
Ideally, now people ask me about how big,
how many people should be in these audiences
'cause when you choose an interest to target on Facebook,
it gives you an estimated audience size.
Now, I like to say you want at least a million people,
but not all interests will have that many.
A lot of them will be much, much smaller
and that's okay.
You don't want to disregard
an interest that you're targeting
because it doesn't have a million people in it,
we can simply stack multiple relevant interests
together in one ad set to get our audience
over that million person threshold.
So you're not going to rule it out, but you might have
to stack a bunch of interests together in the one ad set
to get to that one million people.
So now, let's talk about how to actually research
and come up with a great list of interests
for you to target.
Step number one, brainstorm.
You will need to go ahead, create a spreadsheet
or grab a pen and paper and create a list with five columns.
We're going to brainstorm in five different categories.
First one, at the top of the first column,
I want you to write websites.
In this column, we're going
to brainstorm all different websites
that your ideal customer looks at.
So which websites are they spending their time on?
At the top of the second column,
I want you to write competitors.
In this column we're going to list all
of your biggest competitors.
Then at the top of the third column,
we're going to write people or influencers.
And in this column we're going to go through
and we're going to put all of the influencers
that your particular audience is following.
So who are they following on social media?
Who are the big influencers in the space?
Authors as well, so if there are really popular books,
best selling books in your space
that your target audience
or your ideal customer are reading,
what books are they?
See who the author is, and you can either put the title
of the book in this column or put the author
as part of the brainstorming process.
In the fourth column at the top,
I want you to put live events or conferences.
And in this column, I want you to brainstorm all
of the different live events and conferences
that your ideal customer attends.
So for me in the digital marketing space,
I'm going to put conferences
like Social Media Marketing World,
like Traffic and Conversion Summit
and all those different things.
But for you, it's gonna be totally different depending
on your ideal customer and the niche you're in,
but put down all those live events,
they can be great to target as interests in Facebook.
Now, at the top of the fifth column,
I want you to write tools.
And in this column,
we're going to put all the different tools and services
that your ideal customer is using.
For example, if I stick with the digital marketing audience,
I might put tools like Active Campaign
because that's the email provider that a lot of people use
and Infusionsoft could be another one.
So people in online business and online marketing,
they use these tools, but for a lot of different,
other groups, let's say local businesses and things,
they probably have no idea what these tools are.
The tools are unique to my audience.
So again, in each of these columns,
I want you to brainstorm the relevant groups,
and try to think of those things that are unique
to your ideal audience, okay, and list those out.
And that's this first step.
Just sit there for a little while and go through everything
you can think of, each of those categories
in those five columns, and fill that out.
Now, this doesn't have to be a complete exhaustive list.
It's a starting point.
So do those things that come to the top of mind,
but don't stress if you only have a few in each column,
we're going to expand on it,
there are a few different tools and techniques
that we can use to really expand on those
and find new interests that you may not have thought of.
So that moves us on to step two in this process,
which is expanding on the list.
And there are a few tools
that I'm gonna walk you through now.
And we're going to apply those tools
to that brainstorming list that you've come up with
and really come up with many, many more interest
that you can potentially target.
So the first tool I'm going to share
with you is called SimilarWeb.
So if you go to similarweb.com,
you can actually enter a website,
and that will bring back a list of similar sites.
So if you have a website that you know lots
of your ideal customers visit and spend time on,
you can pop that in here is going to give you a list
of other websites that you might also be able to use
in your interest targeting, really, really helpful.
So what I've actually done is created a demo sheet.
You can see that here with a few different things entered,
I've got those five columns,
and I've entered some data in each one.
So what I'm going to do is grab socialmediaexaminer.com
as the first example, put it into SimilarWWeb,
and show you what kind of results we see.
So now we go back over to SimilarWeb,
and I'm just gonna put socialmediaexaminer.com
and hit Search.
Now, that's brought me back a lot of information
on the site, but what I'm most interested
in is down here in the competitors section.
So if I go to competitors, I can see sproutsocial.com,
jeffbullas.com, AdEspresso, Neil Patel,
and a bunch of others.
So what I can do is grab those.
And now, I should mention that for this example,
my avatar or my ideal audience are digital entrepreneurs.
So people who are in the online business space,
they've got startups or there's early stages
of online businesses that they're working on.
They wanna learn how to market it
and how to grow those businesses.
So that's the kind of avatar or the audience
that I'm using in this example.
So that's why I've chosen these websites, these influencers,
okay, yours is going to look very different, obviously.
But to continue this example, I'm gonna go,
okay SproutSocial, you can click on that, check it out,
make sure that it seems like it is something
that your audience would be using.
And if it matches that criteria that we talked
about earlier, which is being highly relevant
to your audience and not a broad audience,
then you would add it to the list.
So go yeah, definitely Sprout Social.
And Jeff Bullas as well, I know is one to add.
So I would just go over to my list and add those two.
And you can continue doing this for as long as you want.
You can add in all these different websites,
continue popping them in to SimilarWeb,
getting more results and it kind of creates a bit
of a spiral because you'll find new websites
when you do a search and then you can actually enter
those websites into SimilarWeb again,
and get a different set of results and keep digging.
So keep doing that until you've got a
fairly comprehensive list.
You feel like you've exhausted all of the
really likely candidates.
And you can also enter things like if you go back
to your spreadsheet, you might notice things
like these influencers have their own websites,
you can put those into SimilarWeb.
These tools have their own websites,
you can put those into SimilarWeb,
and you can expand your tools list.
So if we go infusionsoft.com, let's try that.
And now, you can see that gives us other tools,
like ShoutMeLoud, upwork.com, which is a hiring site,
where people hire remote staff, Zoom, which again,
this is another great example, Zoom.
You might think, okay, that is something that people use
for remote video conferencing.
So yeah, that would apply to these online business owners.
However, it goes back to that example I used at the start
of the video, Mark Cuban appeals to a broader audience
and not just the entrepreneurial,
online business type audience.
Zoom, now, with everything that's gone on in the world,
Zoom has now become a tool, it's used
by a very broad range of people,
so many people are using Zoom now,
it doesn't just apply to the online entrepreneurs
that we're going after now.
So I would actually rule Zoom out
because it's not specific, it's too broad.
Okay, so I'd go and add these all
to the list based on SimilarWeb.
So that is the first tool that I wanted to share with you,
so you can go and use SimilarWeb to expand
on that brainstorming list.
The next tool I wanna show you is
one that you're probably familiar with,
I'm sure you might have heard of this one.
It's called amazon.com.
(chuckles softly).
Alright, so we're going to go over to amazon.com.
And what we can do once
we're here is its suggestions engine is really powerful.
So we wanna go to our spreadsheet
and let's say we take out influencers.
Peter Thiel was one that I used at the start of the video,
so let's grab Peter Thiel, and we're going
to search for Peter Thiel.
You can see his book comes up,
but what also comes up are a bunch of other books
in the same category, so you can see
there are bestsellers here.
"Bezonomics," okay, so who's the author of that?
So Brian Dumaine, and we can go and look into all
of these different authors.
And if they're influencers in the space
that we're looking for.
So for my target audience, if that influencer is
in that industry, I can go and add
them to my influencers list.
So I might scroll through this list and go,
okay, Elon Musk, no, not specific enough.
Everybody knows Elon Musk, whether they're in my audience
or not, but we might go okay, Eric Ries.
Eric Ries, yes, he's an influencer that only really appeals
to my target audience, so I would add Eric into the list.
And the same principle applies here,
you can continue to enter different search terms
into Amazon, see what comes up,
you can dig into different books.
So if I click, "Zero to One,"
it's going to suggest any customers who read this book,
also read, and I can go and look
at the different authors here,
research each one, learn a bit more about them
and if they fit into my influencers category,
I can go ahead and add them.
So another fantastic tool and a really easy way to expand
on what we're actually brainstorming.
So that's tool number two.
Now, let's look at the third tool.
This one's probably going to be the
most helpful out of all three.
This one is called Facebook Audience Insights.
You can access it from the Facebook ad manager in the menu,
you can go click up there
and there'll be Audience Insights.
Go to Google, Google Audience Insights.
It's a free tool that Facebook offers all advertisers
to let them research their audiences.
So if you go over to Audience Insights,
you'll see a screen like this.
Basically, what this allows you to do is enter
in any interest and it will give you a bunch
of information about that interest.
So I'm gonna go to my sheet and I'm gonna grab something
like this influencer Mari Smith.
Go back to my Audience Insights tab
and down here in the intersection you can see
I just cleared the location.
And I'm putting Mari Smith in the interest section.
Click on that.
And now, that's gonna give me a bunch of information.
Once I'm here I can see age and gender.
So it shows me interest group 61% of people are women,
and 39% of people are men.
Compare that to the entire audience on Facebook,
which are 56% men and 44% women,
see this interest skews more towards females.
And we can see relationship status, education level,
all that stuff.
That's not what interests us most here.
We wanna click on this page Likes tab.
That's going to show us other pages that people
who like Mari Smith also like,
so if we look at this top section,
we can see it's categorized for us.
So business consultant
and it'd suggesting Jon Loomer Digital,
Network Marketing Pro.
Then we've got service here, MeetEdgar.
We've got right up ProBlogger.
So we can go through and look at all of these,
so I would click on each one.
And I will go in and I'll look at what it is.
So ProBlogger, what is ProBlogger?
It's provided bloggers and pre-bloggers
with information on profitable blogging since 2004.
You can go look at the website.
And if I think that is a great fit for my target audience,
then I just add it to my list.
And I can keep going through audience insights
and doing things like that.
So I can look at things like AdEspresso,
and all these different things.
You can go to here and see page like, so Ryan Deiss.
Ryan Deiss was actually an influencer that is
on my list already.
But I can go through and just keep searching
through these, looking at each one,
getting an understanding of hey, is this something
that my audience would be interested in?
And if it is, yes, I'll add it to my list.
Then I can even dig further, as I said before,
so Amy Porterfield.
I know Amy Porterfield is somebody that I would want
to add to my list, but she's not on there.
So I would add her to my sheet
and then I would actually serve for Amy Porterfield
in Audience Insights, and it's going to give
me even more suggestions.
James Wedmore, Jeff Walker, Derek Halpern,
all of these different things software,
Keap, ClickFunnels, Moz, Mailchimp,
and I can add those to my tools list.
So you can just keep digging through Audience Insights
until you expand your interest list
to as big as you really need it.
And ultimately, what we want to do is get to a point
where we can go in to the ads manager, create our ad sets,
and we just wanna add our interests
in groups inside each ad set.
So we've got at least a million people in that audience.
And the way I like to do it is set up an ad set
for each of those five columns that we created in our sheet.
So I'll have an ad set that targets all of our influencers,
and I'll put all of the influencer interests into there.
And I'll have another ad set that targets our websites
and I'll put all the interest into that ad set
and so I'll have a a bunch of ad sets to test
and I can test all those interests in groups like that.
And then once I get my test results back,
I can start to split those out into smaller
and smaller groups to really optimize.
But it's a great way to get started.
So that's it for this video.
If you are looking to improve your interest targeting
on Facebook, follow those steps.
And I can tell you, it's going to greatly improve the way
you do things and it's gonna improve your results.
Because if you're targeting really broad interests now
and not getting the results you want,
following this process is going to allow you to narrow down
and get in front of your specific audience
while still having a really big audience to target.
So I'm not telling you to target very tiny audiences,
but if you follow this process, you get specific
with your targeting.
So if you enjoyed this video, the only thing I ask is
that you click the like button.
And if you wanna find out whenever I release new videos
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click the subscribe button, hit that little bell
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As always, I really appreciate your time
and appreciate you watching this video.
And I'll talk to you soon.
(upbeat music)