Digital Advertising is continuously evolving. As we increasingly shift into online shopping, it's no surprise that big and small businesses are turning to advertising on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The global circumstances we are currently in have only amplified this online/stay-at-home normalcy and created a demand for digital advertising like no other.

Currently, Facebook offers several different options for completing marketing objectives. Whether this objective is increasing sales or brand awareness, you can reach your ideal customer in several ways.

Finding the Ideal Customer

Advertising on Facebook can help you use ads to find people who will love your business. A great way to get to know your target audience and everything about them, such as interests, demographics, and location, is through the audience insights tool. The Facebook Audience Insights tool gives you aggregate information about two groups of people—people connected to your Page and people on Facebook—so you can create content that resonates and easily connects with more people like the ones in your current audience.

How Information is Segmented

Within the audience insights tool, you can view demographic overviews of users who may be interested in your business. You can see age and gender breakdowns, education levels, job titles, relationship statuses, etc. You can even find out what people like. Utilizing this tool will let advertisers see users interests and hobbies. 

What's great about this tool is that it allows you to learn about lifestyles. Audience Insights can even combine relationship status and location to tell you about the types of people interested in your business. 

Real-time Example

Let's say you are an outdoor apparel store that sells hiking boots and want to get information on facebook users who like Hiking. The first step is understanding who your target market is on the Facebook platform and what they look like (from a user perspective). Start off by adding the interest of hiking or hiking enthusiasts into the interests section of the audience insights tool. Once you do this facebook will give you the following demographic information

The gray area in the chart above represents all users on facebook. Whereas the blue represents the selected audience inputted in the interest section. What this information tells us is that the majority of users with interests in hiking are within the age range of 25 and 64 years of age. 

In addition, the chart above shows us the difference between Women and Men within the selected interest. 57% of users are women and 43% are Men. 

Additional Insights

As mentioned above, the insights tool provides a wide variety of background on users to help advertisers really learn who their target audience is. Above we can see information on both Relationship Status and Education Level. What this data tells us is that 65% of users within the selected interest are Married. 

Now on the other hand, it seems that there isn't a lot of variation in the Education Level section. Education doesn't seem to have a large impact on targeting here given that users have highschool, college and grad school educational experience 

What Data Should I Consider? 

When looking over data it's important to seek out what might be relevant to your overall objective. Now given our inputs it is safe to say that most users on Facebook with interests in Hiking are:

• Within 25 to 64 years of age

• 57% Women and 43% Men

• 65% Married 

• Have High School, College and Grad school Experience 

Additional Insight Considerations:

This information is not the only thing to factor in. Several things can impact the data you get from facebook. Some examples include combinations of Interests selected, interest audience size, types of product sold, marketing objective and even types of interests whether it is related to just an interest to an activity, brand, employer, job title or even Market Segment. 

Stop waiting and start learning about your customers. Reach everyone, or just a few. Adding interests or hobbies of the people you want your ad to reach—from hiking to types of food—can make your targeted ads more relevant. 

Don’t worry, if set up properly Facebook will automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. So do some research and make your marketing efforts count!