Facebook has spent over 10 years finding new ways to gather a wealth of information about its users, which marketers can now take advantage of with Audience Insights.
As a platform, Facebook's making it easier than ever to develop the most targeted content campaigns and advertisements possible based on your audience's actual interests, behaviors, and needs.
If you want to maximize your use of the data Facebook has to offer, here are four tips for getting the most out of Audience Insights.
1. Dive Deeper Into Interests and Target Demographics
Audience Insights makes it possible to explore the most important characteristics of people you want to reach with your advertising.
Say, for example, I want to target users 21-35 years old who are interested in adventure travel and fitness and wellness.
I can create a new audience based on these metrics - and then get valuable information about age and gender, top categories of page likes, location, and more.
Together, this data makes it easy to answer many of the basic questions you might have about your target audience, like:
- What's the ratio of men to women?
- What are their major interests?
- Where do they live?
- How much money do they make?
- How big is their household?
- How do they usually spend?
2. See How They Engage With Facebook Content
Another important data set you can use to get the most out of Audience Insights is your audience's activity data.
This allows you to see how your audience interacts with Facebook content compared to the rest of the users on the platform.
My example target audience is about twice as likely to click on an ad than the general Facebook population. It also has high engagement in terms of page and post likes:
I can use this data to inform the kinds of targeting campaigns which'll work best. For this audience, traditional advertisements are a valuable option, while a campaign encouraging content engagement could be equally effective.
The activity tab also offers useful information about the devices used to access Facebook. For this audience, mobile and desktop are important, making it imperative that all my content be optimized for multi-platform readability, engagement, and overall user experience:
Say instead that I'm targeting people aged 50+ interested in sports and outdoors. In this case, cross-platform compatibility is much less of a concern:
3. Explore Purchase Behavior
Taking a look at your target audience's purchase behavior is an incredibly helpful way for you to brainstorm the most targeted advertisements and highest quality content possible.
Let's go back to my original audience (21-35 year olds interested in fitness and wellness and adventure travel). The "Purchase" tab reveals a lot of third-party data I can use to inform my campaigns, such as:
Estimated retail spending compared to income:
Online spending compared to other consumers:
Specific categories of purchase behavior compared to other consumers:
And data from Datalogix about this audience's automotive purchase behavior compared to other Facebook users:
While this particular dataset doesn't reveal too many differences between my audience's purchase behavior and that of the general Facebook population, it does offer some key insights that could be valuable for specific brand targeting.
For example, this audience is more likely to be in the market for a practical/family vehicle than a luxury car. This tells us they might be family-oriented and therefore pragmatic spenders.
4. Create Your Buyer Personas
Developing buyer personas can be one of the most time-consuming aspects of content marketing or targeted advertising. You need to ask yourself a multitude of questions about what kind of person makes up the bulk of your target audience.
Luckily, you can get a serious assist with Audience Insights.
For Facebook users based in the US, Audience Insights uses interest data, purchase behavior, brand affinity, and other behaviors to create personas for you.
So - while you should spend some time teasing apart these reports yourself and making your own inferences - you can use the "mini-personas" Facebook creates to really figure out your target audience(s).
In the "Demographics" tab, just scroll down to the "Lifestyle" section to see how your audience measures up to the personas Facebook has put together.
My audience compares well to "Children First," "Spouses and Houses," "Career Building," and quite a few others.
The "Lifestyle" labels are only nicknames for the fairly complex personas Facebook has created. Just hover over one of them to see the information icon to get more details:
You can use these lifestyle categories, as well as your own insights from their demographics, engagement, and purchase behavior to create your own ultra-targeted primary, secondary, and tertiary personas.
Facebook Audience Insights really does have a wealth of valuable audience data that you can't really get anywhere else.
Ever wonder what lifestyle persona your target audience definitely does NOT identify with?
Just click the "Compare" button to reorder the list and see:
Just playing around with Audience Insights can help you discover unique characteristics about your target audience that you might never have found without the tool.
These four tips will help you get a holistic understanding of who your audience is, what they like, how they behave, and more. But most importantly, spending some time exploring the data and breaking your audience down into more precise groups will help you get the clearest picture of how they differ.
From there, you can brainstorm content and ads that will resonate the most with those groups - and drive the results you're looking for.
Know any other helpful tips to get the most out of Facebook's Audience Insights? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.