Using Facebook Audience Insights Leads to Real Business Results

The Facebook Audience Insights Tool

Perspective is always important when you're planning, executing, and monitoring the performance of marketing campaigns. Audience research tools have been around for decades to facilitate media planning and buying across various channels online and offline. Most of these include the likes of ComScore, Nielsen, and Roy Morgan, which are paid tools heavily adopted by media agencies. Major networks have since introduced their own free media planning tools such as Google's Display Planner. And with the rise of Facebook advertising, the network has also introduced their own audience insights tool called Facebook Audience Insights.

Introduced in May of 2014, the Facebook Audience Insights tool enables marketers to gather more insights about their target audience. It presents trends of your current and potential customers across Facebook. By knowing your audience better, you can develop meaningful targeting tactics, craft the perfect message, make it more relevant, and in turn, improve campaign success.

Campaign Planning Equals Effective Preparation

Some marketers make the mistake of diving straight in to marketing campaigns on Facebook with little preparation. When you jump in without laying the necessary groundwork, it's like trying to reach an unknown destination without any directions. You hope that somehow you'll end up in front of the right audience who hopefully will buy your product or service.

Successful marketing campaigns start with preparation. You need to do your homework prior to launch. This means that you:

Outline your business goal and key performance indicator (KPI)Define your target audiences and marketing strategySet up a step-by-step process to achieve your clearly defined goals

The Facebook Audience Insight tool can help build a roadmap for your campaign. You can consolidate information on demographics, page likes, locations, languages, devices used, and Facebook usage and purchase activities to build your roadmap to success.

What's more is the ability to view this information for several different groups of people:

General Facebook audiencePeople with a connection to your page or eventPeople in a custom audience you have already created

The information comes from varied sources such as Facebook profiles and external data on partner-category targeting. The latter is collected by companies, such as Acxiom and Datalogix, and may include information on purchasing behavior or household income.

With this information, you can define and adjust your target audience at scale in a timely manner. Best of all, it's a free tool. The Audience Insight tool can help you understand your current audience better. With this insight, you can create more-informed targeting and creative messaging. Doing your homework up front means you can reach your business goals quicker – whether cost per reach or return on ad spend.

Scaling Campaigns Using Facebook Audience Insights

Combining the Facebook Audience Insights tool with an ads-management platform will further enhance your ability to get your message to the right target audience at scale.

Scaling a campaign is a matter of learning from the campaign performance to date through your audience segmentation. You can refine your campaign by adjusting budgets across different audience targets, testing different messaging, and uncovering new opportunities through look alike audiences. We also mentioned earlier that you could get insights from a custom audience you have already created. The type of custom audience can be from an email list, phone list, or even your paid search data. Let's look at an example from an Adobe customer:

A leading U.S. education company wanted to expand on their current Facebook campaign to deliver incremental enrollments with cost efficiency in mind, the ultimate goal of the campaign. They used the Facebook Audience Insights tool to uncover new interest areas they could target based on their previous quarter's enrollments as a custom audience. The results were compelling: 

The new campaigns that were developed from the Audience Insights tool delivered:

30% of total lead volume—the second-most scalable audience based on lead volume28% lower cost per lead (CPL) than the client's CPL threshold20% lower cost per lead (CPL) and 82% lower cost per click (CPC) compared to non-brand search campaignsCost per enrollment was only 10% higher than non-brand search campaignsBetter enrollment conversion rate (CVR) in most state targets compared to Facebook's look alike audiences targeting

Conclusion

The key takeaway from this is that you need to prepare, plan, and organize your marketing campaigns. Tools like Facebook's Audience Insights can help you better plan and scale your campaigns, leading to more-efficient use of your social-advertising budget. Leverage different data points—from your general target-audience definition, fans of your Facebook page, and custom audiences—with the tool today and see the payoff from doing a bit of homework.

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Original source: Using Facebook Audience Insights Leads to Real Business Results.
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