Everybody knows that Facebook is a great advertising platform. But how many people do know how to target the right audience on Facebook?

Well, not a lot. And that’s sad.

Now here’s a fact:

Learning how to find your target audience on Facebook makes you unstoppable. Why? Because doing so allows you to…

• Create the kind of content that resonates with them.
• Craft an offer that they’ll be interested in getting.
• Encourage more sharing.
• Increase the number of referrals to your business.
• Lower your Facebook ad costs.

You’re about to become a winner today, because I’m going to share with you these five easy and actionable strategies.

Dig in.

How to Find Your Target Audience on Facebook

Follow these tips to improve your Facebook advertising targeting:

1. Build a buyer persona.

A well-defined buyer persona does one thing: It allows you to personalize your ads. And when your ads are personalized, people will value your business more.

If you already have a business, by now you should have a simple idea of who’s buying from you or consuming your content.

But of course, you need to dig deeper. To create a representation of your ideal customer, do these:

Find commonalities among your audience.  

Try to identify similarities with the audience you serve. Are most of them male or female? Do they respond more when you talk about a certain topic? Are they professionals? Where are they from?

Conduct surveys.

What better way to learn from your audience than to survey them?

You can ask for feedback in your welcome emails. A unique (and fun) way to do surveys is to make them part of a giveaway campaign.

Learn from your competition.

What’s working for them? What are they up to? What kind of problems do they solve? Visit their blog or Facebook page to check how people are interacting.

2. Get started with Audience Insights.

Facebook Audience Insights is a GOLDMINE.

Here’s why:

It gives you quantitative data about Facebook users in general, and people who are and aren’t connected to your page.

Head over to facebook.com/ads/audience_insights. You will be asked to select an audience to view:

While Audience Insights doesn’t show you everything, you can steal a lot of details about your Facebook target audience.

• Facebook audience demographics (age and gender, relationship, job title, etc)
• Page likes
• Location
• Activity

Let’s try a simple example.

Say you’re in the meditation niche and you’re targeting people in the United States. By just choosing “Meditation” for Interests and “United States” for Location, you get a lot of information:

Here, we see that in the United States, more women than men are into meditation. Furthermore, a large percentage of your audience are married and have made it to college.

Feel free to refine your searches, play around, and watch the graphs change.

Do this until you hit the sweet spot that allows you to run highly targeted ads.

3.  Find your email list on Facebook.

Here’s the deal:

Emailing your subscriber list is a good engagement strategy. But sometimes, it’s not enough.

Since people register their email address to Facebook, Facebook will be able to match your current list with their users.

Here’s why this is great for finding your Facebook target audience:

• It reinforces your message.
• A warm audience is more likely to convert.
• You can create a Lookalike Audience.

Head over to your Ads Manager and create a Custom Audience. Next, upload your CSV file of subscribers (from your autoresponder). Don’t forget to name your audience.

Finally, wait until your audience is ready.

Related: The Complete Guide to Email Retargeting

4. Experiment with different posts.

Maybe you’ve never tried running Facebook ads yet.

If that’s the case, it’s easy to feel discouraged and think that you’ll never be able to get a good audience.

The truth is, you can.

Now, do these:

Step 1: Be strategic with posting.

You want to make sure that you put out different kinds of stuff – Video posts, inspirational messages, the latest blog content, and memes.

Without a wide variety of posts, you won’t have enough data to work with.

Step 2: Analyze the performance of your Facebook posts.  

If you already have a ton of posts, head over to the Insights section of your page. This section gives you a clear picture of how your posts are performing.

You’ll be able to see the engagement level for different post types and individual posts. You may notice a pattern with your posts.

For example, live videos where you’ve shared tips got more comments than other posts.

Bottom line?

Testing organic posts helps you understand what motivates people to engage with your brand. By the time you run an ad, you’ll rest easy knowing that you can reach more people with the right message.

5. Go for people’s interests.

Interest-based targeting is great.

It allows you to capture cold audience – people who’ve never interacted with your business yet.

Now, most marketers use Ads Manager as an intuitive way of searching for interests. That’s cool.

But here’s the thing:

That method is overused.

Not just that… a lot of interests inside Ads Manager are highly competitive. And sometimes, you’ll also realize that some interests do not work well for your campaign.

In the video above, I reveal 5 mistakes with interest-based targeting.

But more than that, I share a free tool – Facebook Ads Keyword & Interest Search. With this tool, you can get a bigger list of Facebook ads interests than you’d normally get inside Facebook Ads Manager.

All you need to do is type a keyword of your choice.

Here’s the free tool.

Finally, for a more effective targeting, follow these tips:

• Instead of targeting one interest, target overlapping interests.
• Split test your interests.
• Ask yourself, “What else does my ideal customer want?”

Wrapping Up

Knowing how to find your target audience on Facebook should be easy with these tactics.

Start by creating a buyer persona.  

Use Audience Insights.

Consider your email list.

Once you have a sizeable list of organic posts, find a pattern.

Target people’s interests. 

Ready to put these tips into action? Write your thoughts in the comments section below.

Before you go, don’t forget to check out our free Facebook Ads Keyword & Interest Search tool. ?