With over 2 billion monthly active users which is 26% of the world’s population and higher than the population of any continent in the world, Facebook remains the king of the social media marketing world and experts claim that it has grown enough to not fade out for atleast a few years. Having said that, it is safe to say that for every business that looks to hold an online presence Facebook marketing remains inevitable.

Facebook ads have been helping businesses get conversions for long and if you have not really mastered the art of reaching your right audience, read through this article and get to know the different ways through which you can build audience in Facebook as audience creation is the most important part of a Facebook campaign.

Choosing the right audience (The right target for your business) is the key to Facebook marketing and this is the part when most marketers fail. Facebook marketing is simple and not as complex as other ad platforms. However, there are a few places where marketers fumble and choosing the right audience is the most important one among them. Read on to learn how you can create different types of audiences for your campaigns and reap the benefits.

There are three primary types of audience sets that can be built across Facebook for advanced targeting. They are

• Saved audience
• Custom build audience
• Lookalike audience sets

A saved audience in Facebook lets you create an audience from the group that is already specified on Facebook and the closest match that we need can be created to suit our business. The basic audience selection that one would get when they try to boost or create any campaign includes location, age, gender and languages. Detailed targeting includes selecting audience sets based on Demographics, Interests and Behavior.

The primary advantage of this is that we can create an audience set of the people who like our competitors or even based on the user behaviors like frequently shopped members or their interests like fitness, business, hobbies or even on their current phase of life like parenting, motherhood, marriage etc. This is definitely of very good value for any business that has a hold of who its target audience are as they audience can be reached at much lesser costs when compared to other marketing platforms where the reach will also be for the less likely to convert audience.

Through custom audience one can use their own databases which they had accumulated over time for their businesses. There are different ways through which one can upload or use their audience and they are given below.

One can upload the databases of their customers that they would have collected over time and Facebook matches them with the profiles to get an audience set which can be targeted using the different ads.

Traffic to the website can be collected in a Facebook pixel and that pixel data can be used later to target in ads. Facebook pixel has proved to improve the conversions to a good extent as it helps in cross selling your product or service in the worlds most used social media platform.

This is something similar to the website traffic and for businesses that have an app they can collect app activity like events or conversions and use them to target for engagement

In offline activity, people who converted or interacted on your physical business can be uploaded and re-targeted. This will be useful as satisfied clients will be happy to convert again when new products or offers come up.

A list of audience who have engaged in any of your content in your page can be created and used to target using ads

Lookalike Audiences are sets that were created to bring out the best results for businesses. Lot of marketers struggle to get best results for their campaigns consistently and this is primarily because they are not able to define the right audience. Lookalike Audience sets are similar to  Adwords Similar Audiences Lookalikes are very similar (except better). The best part about them is that these new people are people who share similar traits of the people who have engaged with the business before (Online or Offline).

To create a Lookalike audience one needs to first create a custom or saved audience set with a desired audience which will work well for your business and then create a lookalike of it. The custom or saved audience list that was created initially should be somewhere between 1,00 to 50,000 to match closely. should be big enough so that Facebook is able to find a more relative audience set which will more likely work for your business. If you sell widgets, uploading a list of customer email addresses can help you find Facebook users who act like past widget buyers. If you’re trying to generate leads, creating a lookalike audience based on form fill completions will help you reach folk on Facebook more inclined to fork over their info.

There are two main types of lookalike audiences.

• You can create a lookalike of people who like your page.
• You can create a lookalike of audience set that you already have.

Apart from these methods of creating audiences that can be targeted to develop your business, there are two more features that are necessary to run a campaign effectively. They are given below.

A Facebook ad account may have multiple audiences based on the campaigns that have been run and are to be run. Let’s say, John runs a hotel and runs 2 campaigns.

He runs Campaign A to create an awareness and brand reach in his area.

He runs Campaign B to make people who already like his page or have checked in at his place to “Book a Table”  but have not liked his competitors page (As his business is new when compared to his competitors)

In order to not show the ads to the people who have liked his competitors page, he we will have to exclude those audiences. This is when John would create a set in which he adds the audiences as per his preferences but then excludes the ones he does not want (People who liked his competitor)

Audience overlap is one part where most businesses fail. It is nothing but an overlap between two audience sets (i.e. Two audience sets have similar attributes). This might lead to the bid price of your ad to be higher as the ads within your account would be bidding against each other. Hence it is always advisable to check all your audience sets for overlap so that the problem doesn’t occur.

Let’s say, John runs a hotel and runs 3 campaigns.

He runs Campaign A to create an awareness and brand reach in his area.

He runs Campaign B to make people who already like his page or have checked in at his place to “Book a Table”.

He runs Campaign C to the people who have liked his page.

In this scenario, there is a very high chance that the audience in Campaign A and Campaign C might have an overlap because of which there will be people in his area who would have liked his page.

These are the different types of audience creation in Facebook and one should make a careful note of the negative audience and audience overlap feature to get the best out of their campaigns.