The more you know about your customer the better. Having a deep understanding of your target user personas and potential customer personas can influence many facets of your business from product development to packaging and pricing, to customer service and the success of entire marketing campaigns - ultimately all impacting your bottom line. There are many tools including third party research, data and monitoring companies and platforms that can be used to acquire information to support business and marketing strategies, but many of them can cost a pretty penny.

Facebook Audience Insights is free and serves as a great tool to do some initial digging, glean awareness and apply findings to strengthen brand engagement efforts. Facebook Audience Insights is like a playground for marketers. You can go there to access information that can help you build out customer personas, identify relevant pages your customers visit and engage with and generally learn more about your target customers helping to refine your marketing efforts and achieve better results. Let's go over a few specific ways you can use Facebook Audience Insights.

Create Customer Personas

Creating customer personas is so important to any successful business and marketing strategy. How can you have a successful business or market your business to the right people if you do not know who your target customers are? Every business really should have documentation detailing their target customers are so that all people within the organization understand who these audiences are and what their needs/wants are. There are many tools we use at Rhythm to develop customer personas, with one being Facebook Audience Insights. Reminder, worldwide there are more than 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook, with the majority of active users in the U.S. Basically, we can't ignore the data Facebook has - it is a pretty accurate sampling we can apply to understand the populations we are trying to reach. Using Audience Insights, you can understand the basic demographics of your target customer - their age, gender, lifestyle categories, job titles, income, relationship status, etc. You can also uncover their interests and behaviors including purchase behavior, gifting, savings, etc. With all this information, you can create customer personas that can help you develop your business and marketing strategies.

Better Ad Targeting

By using Facebook Audience Insights, you can use the data provided to better understand your targeted customers and create your ad campaigns using this data. If you are a business with physical locations, you can drill down into specific locations of where your audience is and may want to use this data to create unique ad sets targeting those specific locations. Under Activity you can see device usage to understand which devices are most used by your target audience and this too can help determine ad placement. Page likes are huge considering that you can target your ads directly to those who like these pages, making the ads that much more relevant to those potential customers when they are in their news feed. How about looking at Purchase Behavior? You can get ideas here around where your target audience is spending to provide more ideas on incentives for your ad copy, creative for ads, etc.

Support Content Marketing Strategy

With Facebook Audience Insights, no one should be guessing what type of content they should be creating and sharing. Knowing the age of your target audience, their interests, their behaviors, page likes, purchase behavior, etc. can all provide direction to support your content marketing strategy. For example, let's say you sell running shoes and you discover that your targeted audiences like many different travel pages - you may want to share content around the top destination running adventures. Or, you look into purchase behavior and uncover that your target audience spends a great deal on food and beverage - maybe consider a content strategy focused on Chefs on the Run featuring top chefs cooking up meals geared for athletes. Basically, take what you learn from your audience insights (look at your page insights too) to brainstorm some content ideas.

Bottom line, there is a ton of valuable information that can be distilled from Facebook Insights. How are you using Facebook Insights to create more effective brand experiences for your customers and prospective customers? If this all seems a little daunting, Rhythm can always help. Reach out to us today.

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How To Use Facebook Audience Insights For Better Ad Targeting