Building out your audiences for Facebook Ads can be difficult, especially if you don’t know where to start. It takes time to really understand your audience, but to speed up the process, we have tips and steps that you can follow!
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona (or customer avatar) is a fictional character you create based on your existing data and research about your existing customers. The level of detail and number of the personas depends on your business, but we recommend starting with at least three to five to start so you will different options when creating your Facebook Audiences.
Why create buyer personas?
The objective of buyer personas is to understand your target audience before creating audiences on Facebook. You also have the ability to know the size of your audience and how much you should budget for that specific ad set. Overall, building out buyer personas for Facebook audiences will boost campaign results (conversions, clicks, impressions by targeting, and ROAS) because you are defining them down to a tee.
Now that you know the importance of building out buyer personas for your Facebook audiences, you can start doing your research!
1. Do Your Research
Use the existing data that you have about your customers and analyze it. Be sure to utilize your social media platforms! For example, on Facebook, look to see who follows your business’s page and interacts with your posts. Go to their personal profiles and gather all the information you can get. Look for their age, gender, family life, marital status, interests, etc. Then, using this data, you can start filling in the blanks for your personas.
2. Build Your Buyer Personas
Once you have all the information you need, determine each persona’s background by filling out the list below.
Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Race
- Education level
- Occupation
- Marital status
- Household income
- Parental Status
- Geographic location
Interests, Hobbies, and Behaviors
This is where you can really start getting creative! From your research, what are your persona’s interests and hobbies? For example, who/what do they follow on Instagram? What pages do they follow on Facebook? What activities do they take part in when they have free time?
TIP: Think of real-life scenarios and determine how your persona would behave in a certain situation. For example, you run an online jewelry boutique. Based on your research, your buyer persona follows numerous social media accounts of jewelry boutiques. After your persona sees your Facebook ad of your custom jewelry, they are likely to be inclined to follow your page and purchases one of your pieces.
Reason for Buying
Figure out the reason why your persona is interested in buying your product or service. For example, you sell custom jewelry and your persona is interested in your products because he is looking for an anniversary present for his girlfriend.
Goal of Purchase
Another one of our secret sauces is to determine the goal of the purchase. For example, (continuing with the example above) your persona is purchasing your custom jewelry because he wants his girlfriend to feel special – it is a customized gift just for her.
When creating buyer personas, remember that they are actual people. These people may exist in your life – you might be describing a person you work with every day, your sibling’s best friend, or a friend you go to yoga class with.
Be as creative as you want! Consider their thoughts, feelings, appearance, lifestyle, interests, daily routines, etc.
3. Create Your Audience In Facebook
When you have all of your buyer persona data, you can create a saved audience on Facebook.
Implement the data that you found about your buyer persona and start with updating the location(s), age range, gender, and language(s).
The most interesting and difficult part of creating audiences on Facebook is determining the detailed targeting options (interests, demographics, and behaviors) that match your buyer persona. You can group together similar interests, demographics, and behaviors.
For example, you can group together the Household Income options and then click “Narrow further” to group together similar interests like Hair & Beauty Products.
When you group detailed targeting options together, this means each audience member must match at least one of the options in each group.
Warning: It is possible to get an error from Facebook if your audience is too narrow to be used in a campaign. All you have to do is go back into the audience and delete the less important detailed targeting options to broaden your audience reach.
Once you are done filling in the buyer persona information for the Facebook audience, click “Create Audience.” And there you have it – your buyer persona Facebook audience is ready to go!
In Closing
Using the above strategy, you will start to see the full picture and understand how to more effectively build your target audiences on Facebook. Just do your research, brainstorm ideas, and use the tips provided above to create effective buyer personas for Facebook!
