How to target people on Facebook

We live in a world where people give away so much information about themselves. We use Facebook and the internet daily, leaving a trace of what sites we’ve visited and what content we’ve consumed. To some, this might sound scary, but flip it on its head; as business owners and marketers, this is a huge opportunity.

Overview of Facebook ads and targeting

Facebook is a data beast. They know more about you than you can imagine. How do they know this? Every time you’re on Facebook, you’re leaving a trace of what you’re interested in. The pages you like, the websites you visit, the content you watch and read, the posts you engage with… everything you do is tracked.

As intrusive as that may sound, think of the positives. Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm is a hugely complex algorithm which basically decides what to show you in your news feed from the data you give it.

This means two things: as a user, you are served content which is relevant to you. This means, as a whole, your experience as a user on Facebook is better than it would be, if it was just a free-for-all of content. Think about Twitter, there’s no algorithm there and look how noisy it has become?

On the other hand, as marketer and advertiser, you’ve got the ability to place your ads in front of your perfect customer. You know they’re your perfect customer because of the data Facebook collects. Again, this benefits the user because they’re seeing ads that (theoretically) should be relevant to them. I know nobody likes ads, but if you’re going to see them, it’s better if they’re relevant to you.

Why target people with a certain level of income

One of the biggest problems business owners complain about is fielding enquiries from people who simply don’t have the budget or cash to pay for their product. So, what if we could eliminate that and target people who we know have the budget for our product or service?

With Facebook advertising, you’re able to do just that. Facebook even knows your income and net worth (it won’t know everyone’s). It gets data like this through third party partners such as Acxiom or Experian. So if you go and get your credit rating checked and leave the little button unticked, your data will probably be passed on to Facebook. They’ll match your email and data with the one you signed up to Facebook with and bob’s your uncle.

As an advertiser this is great! Here are the steps on how to start targeting people by net worth or income.

How to target people with money

Let’s for the sake of this argument pretend our customer avatar is:

• Married Men

• Aged 44-54

• Lives in UK

• Earns over £40,000

• Business owner

So, this is the screen you’ll see when you’ve chosen your Facebook ad objective. As you can see below, I’ve targeting people living in the UK (Note: default setting will be ‘everyone in this location’). I’ve also targeted men in the ages of 44-54.

Now I want to target business owners, earning over £40,000 a year. To do that, we have to do to where it says detailed targeting. For choosing the job title we simply go to browse > work > job titles. Then in the box, we’ll type in every job title that would indicate the person is a business owner, like so:

To speed up this process, when you put in one or two job titles, click on suggestions, and you’ll be presented with lots more!

Now, to target business owners earning over £40,000, we want to click on narrow audience, below the box with the job titles, which brings up this box.

To find the financials, click on browse > demographics > financial > income. We said we wanted to target people over £40,000, so I simply select them. This then gives us the following targeting: Men, aged 44-54, who live in the UK, own/run a business and earn over £40,000. In this case, the audience is less than 1,000.

And there you have it; that’s how you can target people on Facebook with the money to buy your product or service. This can be a really useful way to target people on Facebook when your product or service is one of a higher price point.

I recommend you to go away and test this out and see what sort of response you get from your ad!