 Reaching anyone and everyone? There's a better way to promote your business. While trying to reach as many people as possible may sound like a good idea at first, spending money advertising to people who have no use for what you offer or are outside of your service area is a waste of money. Spend time identifying your target audience and ideal customers/clients before you spend a cent. If you have a modest advertising budget you want to ensure every dollar is spent wisely, reaching the right people. If you’re a local business with a physical location or specific service area, make this clear on your page and on any ads you’re running. It’s obvious but often overlooked. You don’t want to be one of the many business owners having to answer endless “where are you based?” comments and messages on your page. For example, if you're a small service-based business somewhere in Dunedin, you wouldn't want half of your ad spend going towards reaching people in Auckland. However this is the reality for many businesses who overlook location targeting settings and let Facebook run with the nationwide default. Think about where most of your business comes from? What does your ideal customer or client look like? Key aspects of audience targeting to consider include; location, age, gender, interests, and buyer behaviour. You can enter these details into Facebook's 'Saved Audience' tool and you'll be provided with an estimated range of your audience size. This can help guide how narrow or broad your target audience is (or should be) and much you might want to spend on your ads. As an example, on of my own Facebook Ads target audiences looks like the following: Note that Facebook has recently made changes as of April 2023 that actually reduce location accuracy and even if you are careful with your location targeting, Facebook does make errors. To quote Facebook directly; "Complete accuracy is not guaranteed with location targeting". This is why it's important to control what you can. Learn more about Facebook's location targeting here. Some key metrics to consider...
Your Reach and cost-per-per 1,000 reach figures can fluctuate a lot depending on your goals and ad creative. I find an average for my clients or at least a rough ballpark figure is it costs $5 to reach 1,000 people using a reach objective with a defined audience of around 50,000 people. If your target audience is too specific, it can cost more to reach less people, an audience that is too broad can result in cheap ads however that comes at the cost of paying to reach people who are less likely to need the products or services you offer. Another metric that requires a manual calculation is something I'm calling 'audience coverage', the % of your target audience a particular campaign has reached. For example, say I spent $100 on a Facebook Ad campaign and reached 20,000 people. I reached around 75% of my target audience. This figure is calculated by dividing my campaign reach of 20,000 by the average audience size, 26,750 (24,600 + 28,900 divided by 2). With these figures you can then get an idea of how much you may need to spend to reach 100% of your target audience. Want to learn more? To help business owners understand the power of Facebook Ads targeting I offer free Facebook Audience size estimates using the process outlined above. To receive this, just fill in the web form on my work with me page and copy/paste the below in the COMMENT field adding in targeting details relevant to your business as below. "Hi Jason, I'd like a free Facebook Ads audience estimate based on the below please: <a brief description of your products/services> Age: <any desired age range between 18 - 65+> Gender: <male, female or all> Location: <your city or region> Interests: <a couple of things your customers might like or care about>" Other blogs you might find helpful:
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