One of the primary goals in advertising is to reach the right people, at the right time, as affordably as possible.

Facebook is the ideal place to start promoting your business because of its advanced features, insights and audience customisation.

Unfortunately, many business owners end up wasting money because they’re failing to use this platform and its features effectively. To be more specific, businesses tend to run into trouble when first identifying an ideal customer base.

Facebook has roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users and as an advertiser, it’s important you aim to reach only the users who could be interested in the company’s offering.

If your ads appear in the wrong target audience’s feed, the probability that users will click and convert on the ad will decrease. Therefore, the cost of your ads will increase, and the return on investment will be much lower. No one wants that as the end result!

How to Create Custom Audiences on Facebook Ads

If you feel hesitant when building Facebook audiences, this article is for you.

In this post, we will be looking at ways to build the perfect audience for your business or brand and will help you improve your strategy and lower your Facebook ads cost.

Unique Ad Sets for Each Audience

With ad sets, you can create different audience types at each ad set level.

With these sets, you will be able to deliver your ads to audiences from each stage of the customer journey, starting with a broad audience then adding a custom audience, and finishing with lookalike audiences.

Targeting A Core (Broad) Audience

Remember, your goal is not to reach all 2.89 billion monthly active users.

When you try to target everyone, you end up targeting no one. You need to always think about your overall target audience and from this, you can begin to learn what their individual needs may be.

By broadly targeting people on Facebook with interest in luxury travel for example and showing them an ad, you can learn about their needs and begin to build more relevant audiences. You can adjust your target audience to be as broad or well-defined as you like, based on the following options:

  • Location
  • Demographics
  • Behaviour
  • Interests
  • Connections

If you are struggling with the audience size, you can apply the rule of 7 to find out the audience size suitable for your budget.

This rule simply states that it takes on average 7 interactions with your ad before the customer decides to take action.

The formula you need to use is:

(Audience size x 7) x avg. CPM

After you have decided on the target audience size it’s time to launch your campaign.

If, for example, you have decided to create awareness of your luxury hotel with a video ad, you can further refine your target market by creating a custom audience.

Custom Audiences

Custom Audiences allow you to connect with people who have already shown interest in your business.

Those Facebook users could be extracted from:

  • Customer file (email addresses you upload)
  • Website traffic (Facebook Pixel needed)
  • App activity (Facebook SDK needed)
  • Engagement (Video, profile, lead form, events, instant experience)

In the case above, you can decide to target people who have watched 10 seconds of your video. You can also exclude people from your list such as customers who have made a purchase in the last 14 days.

When you choose your ideal customers, the next step is to run ads for this specific audience group and encourage them to take action.

Lookalike Audiences

Custom audiences are generally limited due to the fact you have to upload a list of customers. Lookalike audiences differ because they combine users with characteristics mirroring the source audience.

The degree to which they match can be altered (with 1% matching most closely and 10% matching the least). Therefore, if your goal is to target the most potential lead prospects, you should create Lookalike Audiences targeting 1%-2% of a country's population, instead of aiming for 10%.

In order to create a lookalike audience, your source (custom) audience must contain at least 100 people from a single country. It’s important to choose people who are likely to take action, therefore you need to exclude people from your custom audience who have already purchased from you.

These lookalike audiences are connecting with people who are likely to respond to the ads and are ideal for the action stage from the customer journey.

Why Use Specific Audiences?

Micro Targeting

With custom audiences, you can target your users based on their interests, behaviours, demographics, age, connections, locations, and languages.

By using Facebook’s targeting capabilities you can fine-tune your audience and eliminate users who don’t fit your target market, which is an incredibly valuable tool. Audience quality is far more valuable than quantity, and if you are targeting the right audience, you will increase your conversion rates.

Cost-Effective Conversions

When using custom audiences correctly, you can obtain CTR and conversions without breaking the bank. As Facebook’s advertising tools have improved, so has the platform’s CTR and businesses are clocking on to Facebook’s advertising potential.

Facebook is constantly improving its targeting capabilities and creating innovative solutions so that brands can successfully target their desired users for a low cost.

Please do remember that testing your ads is what will cost you the most money. Facebook ads very rarely work on the first go and in most cases will need to be tweaked or reworked. So, it’s worth adding an allowance for the testing phase into your overall budget.

Customer Loyalty

Brands have been creating Facebook pages to allow users to feel as though they are a part of a community. Businesses can directly interact with customers, build a positive and trustworthy brand image and therefore increase customer loyalty.

Facebook ads give brands more opportunities to engage with their audience. This added engagement can lead to further growth, a higher retention rate, and greater sales.

Final Thoughts

Lowering your Facebook ads cost and improving your ROAS starts with getting to know Facebook features and targeting the right audience.

It could be overwhelming at the beginning and the best advice is to introduce your brand with broad targeting and from there start developing your custom audience and lookalike audience.

By following these steps, you can create a killer audience list of fully engaged customers in no time.