Obtaining relevant customer data is a marketer’s dream, and arguably there is no better place to find this data than Facebook. What other website can you think of that knows so much about you? Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behaviour. Your age, gender, relationship status, interests, friendships; Facebook knows it all and the majority of us offer up this information freely through filling in sections on our profile and ‘liking’ content and pages. Facebook also collects data through third parties. Logged into Facebook while reading a news article or listening to a song online? It’s more than likely Facebook is collecting that information about you too.
Content marketing continues to grow as an exciting and dynamic sector of the marketing industry, so making the most of the data collection giant that is Facebook is more important than ever. Check out our tips on utilising the ‘Audience Insights’ within the Facebook Ads platform to get you started.
Get to know your following
Facebook allows marketers to gain access to a range of data about their following. You can see what your page followers’ interests are and what they engage with based on what they have “liked” on Facebook. You can then base your page content on what these followers are most likely to engage with.
Get to know your desired following
“Facebook Audience Insights” allows marketers to dive into specific target audiences and uncover demographic and behavioural data. You can drill into data from everyone on Facebook, as well as people already connected to your page.
You can filter the information you are targeting to display factors such as:
- Demographics
- Page Likes
- Location
- Language
Let’s walk through an example…
To get started, click ‘Manage Ads’, which will redirect you to your Ads platform. On the ‘Tools’ menu, select ‘Audience Insights’, and you’ll see this:
For this example, select ‘Everyone on Facebook’. You can then tweak the different factors to create your audience. Facebook will default to a U.S. audience, and you’ll notice that the U.S. have a number of snazzy and very useful features that are unfortunately not yet available anywhere else due to differences in data protection laws. There is no news yet from Facebook if and when these additional features will be rolled out worldwide, but it is clear that marketers elsewhere are missing out on useful knowledge such as purchase behaviour, average spend, and brand affinity.
However, ‘Audience Insights’ can still tell us a lot. For example, if we set the location as ‘Birmingham’ and age range as ’18-30’, we can get a good idea about the quantity and type of people that fit that category.
You can then start setting more specific factors in the ‘Advanced section:
How does this help with your content marketing?
This data we can extract from Audience Insights is invaluable when creating the persona of our deal customers, enabling us to build a data informed picture of our potential audience. After capturing this data and using it to understand your audience and inform personas and content ideas, you can then save the audience to refer back to.
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Effectively target your Facebook ad campaigns:
A better understanding of who your audience is will have a huge impact on how you target your page’s ads. A better insight into their persona and even what sort of copy and visuals they engage best with will ensure your advertising is spot-on for your customers.
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Create an active and engaged audience
Audience Insights is like peering into your customers’ brains. No wonder the CIA have cited is a useful observation tool. In a totally non-creepy way, you can base your posts on exactly what your desired audience will want to see and will therefore keep engaging with. The majority of your customers ‘like’ cat videos? Weave them into your content.
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Beat the competition
Audience Insights allows you to gather sneaky intel on your competitors’ customers. By better understanding the motivations of your competitors’ most engaged customers, you can more effectively grow your own audience and increase category market share.
Defining your target audience is the key to effective marketing – check out our previous blog post here. Want more content marking advice? Get in touch.
