When you’re trying to improve your digital marketing efforts and make your content marketing strategy more successful, you need to gain insight into your audience. You need to understand what they like, need, and expect from you. Although you have a general idea about who your audience members are and what type of people will engage with your brand, a simple assumption isn’t going to work for you. You need to dig deeper.
Luckily for you, social media is one of the most powerful tools for digital marketing and audience targeting. Facebook has more than 2 billion active users globally, and you can use this social media platform to research your audience and learn how to communicate your message to them better.
If you’re interested in how Facebook can help you research your audience, just keep reading.
- Facebook Audience Insight
If you’re thinking about researching your audience using Facebook, the precondition you’ve hopefully completed is to have a Facebook Business Page, already up and running.
If you’re already a business user and have your page ready, you can access the business tool called Facebook Audience Insight.
The name itself tells you the tool can help you:
- research different types of audience
- learn about the people you want to reach
- improve your ad targeting and overall marketing campaign
So, how does it work?
Let’s have a quick tour of Facebook Audience Insight, and how you can use it to research your audience.
- Selecting and Building the Audience
This tool gives you a choice between three types of audiences you can research:
- Everyone on Facebook
- People connected to your page
- Your custom-made audience
The first option allows you to insert the audience characteristics you believe belong to your potential audience, and the tool shows you how it compares to the general Facebook audience.
You can change and explore the following options:
- Location
The location is set to the United States, but you can adjust it according to your needs. Add or remove a city, or a specific location, and watch as the percentages on the right side of your dashboard change. - Age & Gender
Change the settings based on your own assumptions or leave it set to default if you have no insight about your actual audience. - Interests
Choose the options from the drop down menu and watch as the magic happens. For example, if you choose “Entertainment” and add “Action games” as the interest, you’ll learn that 72 percent of that audience are men and only 28 percent are women.
So, let’s say you’re running a gaming center in New Orleans. When you add that location, the percentages change again, with men being 62 percent of your audience and women 38 percent.
So, you’ve learned a lot about your audience and their demographics.
- Advanced
You can further explore your options by adding information about the relationship status, education, life events, and other specific details about your assumed audience. The charts will keep changing.
- Audience Likes
Now that you’ve set your audience and chosen their demographics, you can learn about their current likes and the things they’re most interested in.
All you need to do is:
- go to the Page Likes tab
- take a look at the Top categories and Page Likes
The information you find here will let you know what does your target audience like, and what pages it engages with on Facebook. You can use this information in the following way:
- if your gaming audience also likes drinking coffee, you can create an add incorporating an image of a morning video game session with a cup of hot coffee.
- you can go back to the Demographics tab and type the names of the pages you’ve just learned about. This will give you insight into the demographic information of their audience.
Make the additional changes based on what you learn from your competitors, and save the audience you’ve created.
You can keep on playing with the Audience Insight tool, making your target audience more and more narrow. Each time you make a significant change, save it as a separate audience.
Finally, create ads for two different audiences and test them to see which gives you the best ROI.
- Facebook surveys
There’s another way for you to research your audience using Facebook.
You can simply create and publish a survey asking your existing Facebook audience to answer the questions.
Keep in mind:
- the survey needs to be short, no one wants to spend more than a couple of minutes on things like that
- the questions need to be wisely put together, to provide meaningful data
- the questions need to be written professionally and without any mistakes. If you need help with that, check out these best writing services reviews.
To create a survey, just go to the Surveys for Pages app and start filling it out with questions and other information.
In addition, you can simply create a new post on your business page, and select the “poll” option. This is a bit simpler type of research, but it can be immensely helpful and let you know a lot about your audience.
Once the survey or the poll is finished, analyze the answers to get the information you were looking for.
Make sure you conduct a detailed analysis of the results, so as to:
- learn about your audience’s opinions, likes, and preferences
- gain insight into their habits and characteristics
- learn who they are and what they expect from you
Use that information to create better ad campaigns and reach even more people.
Final Thoughts
Facebook is such a powerful business tool and can help you improve our business, increase your profit and expand your audience. All you have to do is use the tools it gives you and learn more about your audience and your business potential.
Hopefully, we’ve helped you learn about the tools you can use on Facebook to research your audience. Now it’s time that you take action, and start using them for your business.
Author’s bio.
Daniela McVicker is a passionate digital marketer. Daniela is interested in everything related to SEO and blogging. She collaborates with RatedbyStudents and other websites where she shares her experience and helps marketers make their name in the online world.
To learn more about Facebook advertising, check out a paid ads agency.
