Any Facebook Ad is likely to flop unless you put it front of an audience of people who actually want what you are offering them. Creating a Facebook Ads audience of those people can be a daunting task, though. Got 5 minutes? That’s all you need, because I am going to show you how to build a rockin’ Facebook Ads audience in 5 quick and easy steps!
First of all, you need a killer tool to help you out. That tool is “Audience Insights”.
The best news is it is FREE and you also already have it! I’ll show you where in a second.
I am going to give you a very quick and dirty, step-by-step lesson on how to use it to build a great Facebook Ads audience to run your ads to.
One quick caveat.
There are entire courses out there on how to use this tool. You can also spend hours and hours using it to research just about EVERYTHING you want to know about your ideal clients. You should do that…another time. What I am going to show you is how to hop in, spend 5 minutes, build a great audience, hit the “Create Ad” button and go!
First, let me show you where this cool tool is located.
Audience Insights is located in Facebook Ads Manager under the “Tools” tab at the top left-hand corner:
When you click on it you will get a screen that looks like this:
Don’t worry too much about this box. Making any one of the 3 selections simply highlights a different starting box in the “Create Audience” section to the left. You can just close it if you want because we aren’t going to use it anyway.
What we are going to use is the “Create Audience” (#1 below) section to the left.
Specifically, we are going to use the “Interests” box in the filters section (#2) to give us key information (#3) that once we have optimized we will use to create and ad (#4).
Here is where the magic starts. Let’s do this together, step-by-step!
How to Build a Rockin' Facebook Ads Audience in 5 Quick and Easy Steps:
Step 1 – Make a list of 20 influencers, publications, sites, organizations, people, etc. that lead your market or niche.
Note: Try to stay away from HUGE stars with giant pages. It typically skews the results. For instance, if you are in the music business you probably wouldn’t choose Taylor Swift.
Step 2 – Enter each of the 20 items one-by-one into the “Interests” box. As you start typing each Facebook will begin showing the pages they have indexed. Some of the 20 you came up with WILL be indexed and some WON’T.
Select the ones that are indexed.
I’ll show you what I mean.
When I type in Kim Garst, I see “Kim Garst, Public Figure”and “boom social with…” (our company). That means these pages are indexed. I will select them both.
However, when I type in Nathan Latka (the brilliant CEO of Heyo and a good friend of ours) nothing happens.
That means that Nathan’s page has not been indexed by Facebook.
No big deal. I have found that if I can get 5-6 indexed entries I can build a really good audience. You will see why below.
Step 3 – After you have entered all 20 items, and hopefully “hit” 5+ indexed pages (#1 below), select the “Page Likes” button (#2 below).
Facebook will populate the top categories as well as the top pages in each of those categories for you (#3 above).
Page down until you see something that looks like this:
On the right hand side is where the real magic happens. Facebook has given you a list of pages and an “affinity score” for each. The “affinity score” is how likely your audience is to like a given page compared to everyone on Facebook!
So, if you build an audience of pages MUCH more likely to want what you are offering, your Facebook Ad is going to perform MUCH better.
Step 4 – Add and delete entries to your “interests” list to improve the affinity of your audience based on this new information.
Keep an eye on the audience size. You want an audience big enough to get some scale for your ad, but not too big to lose effectiveness. We are in the digital products space and shoot for audience sizes between 500,000 and 1,000,000 people. You can split test what works best for you.
Step 5 – Once you have a great audience built from pages with high affinity scores, simply hit the “Create Ad” button at the top right hand corner.
Facebook will transfer the audience you just created to the new ad you are creating for you!
The good news is that you can still filter this audience down more even after you transfer it. This Facebook ads audience has 2,000,000 people in it, a little larger than I want. I can apply age, gender, location, etc. filters to whittle it down to the size I want.
If you think you might want to use that audience again in the future for another ad, simply click the “Save this Audience” button and Facebook will store it for you.
Building an audience is just one of the 7 different components of building a great Facebook Ad. If you want to see the other 6, as well as check out the very cool system we have developed for writing high-performing Facebook Ads quickly and easily, you will want to check out this post: “The Facebook Ads Recipe Card – 7 Ingredients for Building Great Facebook Ads!”
So, that is how to build a rockin’ Facebook Ads audience in 5 quick and easy steps! What do you think? Do you want to give it a try? I would love to hear your comments, thoughts, results and additional tips and tricks on using “Audience Insights” below.
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