September Workshop Series: Targeting Buyer Personas

It’s pretty well-known now that Facebook is the biggest social media site in terms of monthly active users (last published as 845 million). And, per comScore’s study, they show how Facebook can dominate in two other ways.

Facebook Stats You Should Know

First, Facebook is the premier player among all web properties in terms of time spent—and that means engagement.

Second, when compared with other social media platforms, Facebook has achieved an even more impressive percentage of mind-share. Facebook captures 14.6% of Internet users’ time compared to a combined 2% for all other social networking sites. Facebook also captures 16% of all page views.

The rise of Twitter and LinkedIn as the second and third most visited social networking sites is evidence by another comScore graphic. Equally revealing are the rapid decline of MySpace and the ascendance of Google+ and Pinterest. (It should be noted that social sites like Twitter and Google+ likely get significant engagement through mobile devices, third-party apps and other forms of content.).

Facebook Ads

So what can the top social media network share with you about your customers? Using Facebook Open Graph database allows you to get insight into your fans through demographic, psychological and behavioral information. Facebook Ads allows you to target your posts to groups through 15 different data points:

Location (Country, State, City and Zip code)
Age
Gender
Precise Interests: These are pulled from users Facebook profile activities, interests, job titles, education, pages they have liked and groups they belong to.
Broad Categories: These are pre-organized audiences that Facebook creates by examining basically anything a Facebook user does, clicks on, or writes anywhere on Facebook.
Connections: Users who like specific Facebook Pages.
Friends of Connections: Users whose friends like specific Facebook Pages.
Interested In: This allows a business to target Facebook users according to the gender they are interested in for a friendship, dating, a relationship or networking.
Relationship Status: This allows a business to target Facebook users that are married, single, engaged, or in a relationship.
Languages: This targeting option is best used when targeting an audience that speaks a language that is different from most of the people in the targeted geography.
Education: This option enables the targeting of Facebook users that are in high school, college, or a college graduate. Businesses can also target Facebook users that went to a specific school, study a specific topic, or for current college students, their expected graduation date.
Workplaces: Targeting Facebook users by where they work can be useful in various B2B, job search, and industry specific scenarios.

Once you have created your Buyer Persona, it’s easy to use Facebook to target almost 100% to just that persona. Facebook ad campaigns can be very cost-effective. You set the amount you wish to pay based on cost per thousand impressions or cost per click, whichever you decide. The least amount per day is only a dollar. You have complete control over your advertising budget. In addition you have complete control over your ad campaign, you decide when to start, pause, or cut ads entirely using Facebook’s ad manager. Since Facebook ads can be so inexpensive, it is easy to test market campaigns cheaply.

Targeted Posts

Using Targeted Posts allows you to target your Facebook posts by a wider range of options including:

Gender: male or female
Relationship status: single, in a relationship, engaged or married
Educational status: in high school, in college, college grad
Interested in: men or women
Age: select a range between 13 and 65
Location: country, region or state, city
Language: type in the language

Using this feature you can create posts that only target certain buyer personas at once, making sure that all content seen by each buyer persona is 100% relevant to them. This will not only boost your conversion rate, but decrease unlikes and complaints from users not interested in certain types of content.

Tip: If you want to see how many people in your audience fit a certain demographic profile, you can quickly see the number when you apply different targeting parameters: