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In one of my recent YouTube tutorials, I talked about how targeting the wrong audience might be the reason why your ads do not bring you enough customers to break even and make a profit. You can watch that video here.

So how do you target your ideal audience?
How do you filter through the millions of Nigerians on Facebook to find the kind of people who will buy your products?

Here’s how. This is game-changing information

When creating your target audience with Facebook, You’ll be asked to target based on:

1. Age
2. Location
3. Gender
4. Language

If you’ve conducted basic research on your target audience, these four criteria are easy to fill in. Where it gets tricky is in the fifth one. Facebook calls this Detailed Targeting.This part is confusing most times, even for me.

Under Detailed Targeting, Facebook Gives You The Option To Target Based On:

• Demographics
• Interests
• Behaviours

Here’s What These Three Targeting Options Help You Do.

Demographics: This allows you to select an audience based on age, gender, education, relationship status, job title and more.

This targeting criterion blew my mind the first time I saw it, but I found out not too long after that most of the information provided with demographics are only available for people in the US and I sell to Nigerians.

And so do you; many Nigerians don’t take out time to fill in all this information on their Facebook profiles. They just create their profile, add a display picture and proceed to send friend requests to family members.

The Next One Is

Interests: This allows you to choose the interests and hobbies of the people you want your ad to reach. Interests also get really detailed.

When conducting research on your ideal buyer, you should also find out the kind of businesses they follow that are similar to yours
for example, if I sell expensive wristwatches, I can go to the interests bar and search for “Gucci” or “Armani”.

Why?

Because the people that like these pages may just be interested in spending money on my N150,000 watches.

Next,

Behaviors: Select people based on their prior purchase behaviors, device usage and other activities. With behaviors, you can do things like target “engaged shoppers” and just play around with it.

Now that you understand what the interface is like and know the various options Facebook has available for you. I’ll give you the advice some more experienced Facebook Advertising Agents that service Nigerian businesses gave me when I first got started:

Let Facebook study your ad and figure out the people to show it to.

What this means is when you try to target your audience, LESS IS MORE.

So, although Facebook gives you many targeting options, it is best to do more of your targeting based on age, gender, location and language. Leave the detailed targeting as broad as possible.

For example, let’s say I sell a health supplement that promotes sleep.

This Is How I’d Target My Audience;

• Age: 35-64 (because they’re most likely to need this product other people might, but I’m focusing on the people most likely to buy)
• Location: Lagos, Abuja, PH, Calabar. (because there are credible delivery agents in these states that can handle my “cash on delivery” option and based on statistics, the people in these states are buyers )
• Gender: Male and Female (I’d use both genders here because I’m not sure which would buy more after running my ad for 5-10 days. I will check the ratio of female customers to male customers and if it’s a 7:3, 8:2, or 9:1 result, I will edit my targeting and show my ads to only the gender with the most buys).
• Language: English or whatever language your ad is written in.

Detailed Targeting:

Here, I can do either of these four things:

1. I can search for terms related to my sleeping supplement e.g. insomnia, sleeping positions, sleeping problems, etc. I’ll pick one or two.
2. Similarly, I can search ‘health and wellness’.
3. I can just leave it empty.
4. In the same vein, I can create three different ads to test the first three options and go with the that brings in the most results after 5-10 days of running my ad.

And just like that, my ad is ready to go. And boy will I get results!!

Also note that other things like your ad copy, landing page, sales copy, total offer matter. So even if you get your targeting right, you still need to optimize those.

For a detailed tutorial on Targeting, Facebook… Pixels, re-targeting, custom and lookalike audiences you can watch my New YouTube tutorial, Facebook Pixel is Your Best Friend.

I teach Nigerian SME owners how to sell more of their products with Facebook Ads.
To learn more about my Facebook training Program and how you can participate, follow this link.and subscribe to my mailing list here.