Facebook presents an excellent opportunity to attract new prospects, cultivate their interest, and engage your current clientele. The optimal strategic approach for advertising on Facebook is straightforward:

1. Pinpoint potential customers using sophisticated targeting parameters, such as interests and behavior.
2. Cultivate relationships with website visitors and custom audiences through remarketing.
3. Develop lookalike audiences from your remarketing lists to attract a higher volume of qualified leads.

Lookalikes However, the task of building intricate remarketing funnels might not be feasible for many startups and smaller companies, especially if they lack sufficient traffic or a pre-existing database of leads. This can make generating effective Facebook lookalike audiences quite challenging. So, what’s the solution in such situations? The answer is manual targeting. This involves taking a hands-on approach and meticulously creating your optimal Facebook audiences from scratch. While building Facebook audiences from scratch is perfectly acceptable, it can be a bit intricate. This article will demonstrate how manual targeting methods can be just as effective as other targeting choices offered on Facebook, along with the correct approach to their creation and management.

Tailoring Your Facebook Audiences to Your Objectives

Creating manually targeted audiences on Facebook can be quite a task, especially without prior experience. It’s easy to get lost in the process. However, there’s a systematic way to build audiences from the ground up. The fundamental question to address for every campaign is: “What am I aiming to achieve?” Facebook offers several campaign objectives, each holding unique value for you as the advertiser. While your audience should always correspond with your target demographic, the campaign objectives, from left to right, indicate the level of refinement required for your audience.

Let’s delve into the three categories of Facebook campaign objectives:

• “Awareness” campaign objectives permit the broadest audience scope, as the primary goal is to increase brand and business visibility.
• “Consideration” campaign objectives necessitate a more focused audience compared to awareness campaigns. The aim here is to elicit interaction with your ads or generate a specific response.
• “Conversion” campaign objectives demand the most precise targeting. The objective is to generate outcomes within a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) framework. App installations and lead generation naturally fall under this category. Grasping the correlation between campaign objectives and audience size is crucial for effective manual audience creation. Once you have a clear understanding of the required audience breadth or focus, the remaining steps become much easier.

Structuring Your Facebook Audiences for Broader Objectives

Broader objectives, such as awareness and consideration, offer flexibility in targeting. However, unless you’re selling a universally appealing product, targeting everyone between 18 and 65+ who are interested in unrelated topics is not recommended.

A systematic, business-focused approach remains crucial. Irrespective of your Facebook campaign objective, the ultimate goal is to target individuals with a high likelihood of becoming customers in the future. For instance, let’s imagine you manage a local dance studio and want to boost local brand recognition:

By setting other targeting criteria like location and age, this brand awareness campaign can reach a wider audience while staying relevant to the business. People interested in categories like choreography, street dance, and physical fitness are more likely to respond positively—be it mere curiosity or active engagement—to an ad for a dance school.

Leveraging Facebook Interest Targeting for More Refined Campaign Objectives

Two main concepts, or approaches, govern the manual construction of audiences. First, there’s Core-to-Broad, which starts with the most defining traits of your target audience and expands outward. The second, Broad-to-Core, reverses this process by starting with broad interests and behaviors, then adding layers of specific characteristics to refine the audience. Let’s examine when each strategy proves most effective.

Strategy 1: Core-to-Broad

Sticking with the dance studio example, let’s assume you want to refine your audience further to ensure a higher level of in-market qualification. For a campaign aimed at significantly boosting “qualified” website traffic, consider this approach:

Being a local business, the focus is on the core attributes of the target audience: those within the desired location radius and demographically a good fit for the service. These specifics define who the audience “is” rather than what they are “interested” in, emphasizing characteristics that define them as individuals. The next layer targets individuals within this pre-qualified group who align with interests and behaviors relevant to the business. This approach is effective because it filters a pre-qualified audience, targeting those more likely to be interested in the business. These details are vital for overall engagement and relevance scores, as well as the likelihood of clicking through to the website. This strategy works well for local businesses or those with limited budgets. The audience can be kept relatively small and focused, allowing for effective budget allocation over a specific period.

Strategy 2: Broad-to-Core

Conversely, you can begin with broad interests and progressively narrow them down based on defining behaviors and qualities. This approach is particularly useful for building a large, broad audience with a shared interest and then refining it to a size and profile that aligns with your campaign objectives. This strategy is typically employed when there’s no common thread of behaviors or demographic qualities uniting the entire group. Instead, the emphasis is on refining interests or a set of interests. Consider a company offering PPC software for digital marketers (hypothetically, of course). This is how it might look:

An audience interested in digital marketing comprises roughly 39,764,000 individuals. By requiring at least one of the subsequent topics, the audience shrinks to 7,700,000. While still sizable, if the goal is promoting content loosely related to these interests, the probability of capturing the attention of those genuinely interested increases significantly.

Additional Ways to Utilize Facebook Interests for Finding More Qualified Prospects

Targeting Competitors

If you’re competing with bigger players, use it to your advantage. Target individuals interested in these companies. While your promotional strategy requires separate consideration, this ensures your ads reach those likely already interested in what your business offers.

Account-based Targeting

Adopt an account-based marketing strategy by targeting individuals working for specific companies and holding specific job titles valuable to your business (akin to a recruiting strategy). To do this: navigate to the “Detailed Targeting” section and choose “Demographics.”

Scroll down and select “Work”:

Then choose “Employers”:

You can now search for specific employers whose employees you wish to target.

Determining the Best Behavior Targeting Strategy for Your Needs

The only reliable way to determine the best strategy for your business is through testing and optimization. The positive outcome of all this effort is that defining your audience diligently helps you create that sought-after remarketing pool. It lets you market your business without prerequisites and allows you to build upon your achievements. If your campaign focuses on lead generation or conversions (more on Facebook account structuring here), you can create lookalike audiences based on those who converted, simplifying the process of finding new audiences over time.