Before we have a look at how to create audiences in Facebook ads manager, here is a story. Your nieces birthday is coming up and you want to get her a gift. She's a teen who loves to read, so you head to the bookstore when you ask a bookseller for some help. And instead of pointing the way to the young adult fiction section and leaving you to browse the bookseller asks you some questions. How old is she? Where does she live? What does she like to do in our spare time and what other books and movies does she enjoy? You answer she is 16 lives outside of New York City, loves to draw and is into stuff like The Hunger Games. And based on that information, the bookseller pulls a book from the shelf about a teenage girl who saves the world, in a dystopic New York City and the book is full of cool illustrations. You give your niece the book and she loves it, saying this is the perfect gift. So how does this relate to Facebook ads manager? Because you teenage niece was the target audience for that book. If you think about your business, you're creating a product that you want to get into the hands of people who are going to say that this is the perfect gift or exactly what they were looking for. Instead of advertising to everyone on the planet and wasting your dollars doing so, you want to focus on those who will be the most interested in you and your product, and who will be the most likely to buy it. Creating a target audience isn't so much about targeting certain people by name, but about choosing characteristics of groups of people that line up with who you think would be most interested in your business. For your niece, it was a teenage girl who likes to read, likes books like The Hunger Games, lives in New York City and loves to draw. When you advertise on Facebook, you can specify the audience you would like to show your ads to. And you do that by creating an audience for your ads. And on Facebook, there are three different ways to create an audience. You can define a core audience, a custom audience or a look alike audience. We'll discuss all of them in more detail in the next video. But in this video will focus on the 1st audience type, the core audience. When you create a core audience in Facebook, there are three main categories of characteristics to consider. Demographics are the most fundamental and include age, gender, location and language. Facebook also includes educational level, income, relationship status and occupation or industry in demographics as well. You can also target an audience's interests like what kind of music they like, what their hobbies are, if they like to go to eat out or what kind of shopping they do. And you can further narrow down your audience by targeting behaviors based on people's activity on Facebook, including purchasing behavior, device usage, political affiliation, or how often they travel. Note that some of these targeting criteria might not be available in every country, so utilize all three categories to get hyper targeted audiences for your marketing efforts. Not only will you find those will be the most likely to be interested in your business, but you will also not waste your ad spent on those who wouldn't. Also, if you've tried Facebook advertising before and you didn't get the return you expect it, you might not have gotten specific enough with your audience A business may use multiple target audiences when creating campaigns. A businesse's products, or services may appeal to different types of people. For example, Apple products appeal to people who are into tech products, but they also appeal to creative professionals and artists. A business might also have different types or lines of products and services that appeal to different audiences. For example, Patagonia has its line of everyday clothing and its line of camping and hiking equipment, and in each of these cases you would not only have a different target audience, but your marketing message will be different as well. Consider your primary audience to be the audience you connect with the most. It will create organic and paid content with them in mind and they will be the ones buying your product or will hopefully be inticed to buy your product if you run an awareness focused campaign and will spread the message as your biggest fans on social media. And this will be the audience you will use the demographics, interests and behavior filter criteria to capture on ads manager. Like we mentioned earlier, your secondary target audience, maybe outside those specific targets. But there's still considered valuable in that they will have an interest in your product or services. They may be a specific audience that's interested in a line of your products, for example, or maybe a niche segment of your market. They may even become part of your primary target audience someday. In course one we took you through how to create a target audience using a template and by creating a template you'll be able to think through who your audiences is and also how you would think about who your secondary audience is based on what kinds of customers you observe. Make that investment into understanding and narrowing your target audience before you start creating campaigns. That way, setting up your audience in your campaigns will be easy once you get to ads manager as you won't be trying to think it through on the fly But how does Facebook make sure that our advertising gets to the right target audience? How are they able to offer so many choices as we set up our audience? Well, there are a variety of different data sources that Facebook uses in order to match you with the right audience. When a user on Facebook sets up a profile, they typically fill out basic information like age, gender, location, education level, relationship status, and occupation. And Facebook uses this information to determine their demographics data. Audience interests are gathered based on what people interact with on Facebook or Instagram, like what pages they follow, what posts they like, what they shared, and what links they clicked on. Location information can be based on the location someone updates from their profile or from where they check in or from where they are connected to the Internet. The Facebook pixel can also give you a lot of insights about your audience's behaviors as well, which you can use to refine your targeting. The pixel is a piece of code that you drop into your website and then that tracks your audience's interaction with your website, app and Facebook. We'll learn more about the pixel in the upcoming video, but it will be helpful tool to help you optimize your advertising for them and to build new audiences. If you're curious to see how you personally have interacted with advertising on Facebook or if you want to alter or your information or settings head to facebook.com/ads/preferences. Also be aware that just as you are targeting characteristics of your audience and not specific people, Facebook targets characteristics of their users and never gives names or personal identifying information back to the business. Finally, the most important thing you can do as a business is to get the right products or services to the customers who need them. And by thoroughly understanding your target audiences and by utilizing the options on Facebook ads manager to create that target audience will be making it a lot easier for your products and services and your customers to match up.
