Combining the right Facebook targeting strategies with amazing creative and compelling copy can mean the difference between a profitable campaign and lackluster results. Facebook boasts over 2.45bn billion monthly active users (as of Q3 2019). If you have customers, they are probably on the platform. In this post, we’ll explore the strategies we use to not only find the right people but send the right message to allow them to seamlessly become customers and raving fans.
Approaching Facebook targeting in a way that maps back to the buying intent of your customer can increase the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing dollars dramatically.
It’s not just about running ads, it’s about understanding the buyer journey (the steps customers take to purchase) and moving them along that journey to the point of purchase and then re-engaging your customer to increase their lifetime value (LTV) which will increase the profitability of your business.
Here are a few super powerful Facebook ad targeting strategies for Direct to Consumer / E-Commerce advertisers.
Know your audience
At D2C MAG, we pride ourselves not only on giving you the “what” to deploy a given strategy, we want you to understand the “why” behind it as well. Before we talk about what options to select or what buttons to press, there’s something way more vital to a successful targeting strategy on Facebook. You must get crystal clear on who you want to reach. From their age, their gender, what they like to read, down to the most important of all, what problem or opportunity they are looking to address. We recommend you do this by creating Buyer Personas.

A buyer persona helps create a crystal clear picture of who you want to reach. It will enable you to deliver the right message via targeted ad copy that speaks directly to their pain point or aspirations and promote thumb stopping creative that sends your click through rates to the moon dropping your costs dramatically. Hands down the best thing you can do to deploy an effective Facebook targeting strategy is to know who your talking to and what they want.
So before you crack open up the platform and explore all of Facebook’s targeting features, take a few minutes and create a Buyer Persona(s) to understand who you’re speaking to with your Facebook ads.
Pro Tip: Use ad copy and imagery that highlights their problem or aspiration and informs them their is a solution which will cost effectively get the click.
Facebook Targeting Strategy #1 – Target existing customers
Have you ever heard the saying “The best customer is the one you already have”? Well it’s true. They’ve already gone through the process to know, like and trust you and have voted for your product or service with their dollars. When it’s time to invest in reaching audiences to drive sales, this audience usually has the highest propensity to purchase.
With that in mind, the first strategy on our list, which is usually the most profitable, is targeting recent purchasers of your product or service. By either uploading a list of your customers or using the data contained in the Facebook’s pixel, you can create custom audiences and target buyers of your product. Here’s an example of the custom audience.
Add image of custom audience
Pro Tip: If you already have sales coming in or a list of customers, have a products you can cross-sell/up-sell and want to see a return quickly; try this targeting strategy out today.
Grab that list of customer names, emails and if possible zip codes and phone numbers or use your pixel to create the audience and cracking.
Facebook Targeting Strategy #2 – Target add to cart and website traffic
Almost doesn’t count…or does it? People have so many distractions and tend to multi-task leading to a mountain of unfinished tasks, conversations, thoughts and you guessed it, transactions. This is a massive opportunity for direct to consumer / e-commerce advertisers. With a solid nudge, you can move this group to one of the final steps in the buyer journey, the purchase.
Next up on our list of targeting strategies is targeting people who have visited your website and placed something into their cart. These people have taken the time to browse your site, select something they wanted but they didn’t take that last step. Converting this audience is one of the strongest and most consistent performers across any campaign we’ve run and is the cornerstone to any solid Facebook campaign.
Setting up Website Visitor/Add to Cart targeting is straightforward and will be one of your most profitable campaigns.
Pro Tip: Use familiar language in your ad copy when targeting this audience and when possible, offer an incentive like a discount to get them to purchase.
Facebook Targeting Strategy #3 – Leverage Lookalike Audiences
What if you could take a snapshot of all of your customers and tell Facebook to find more just like them? Well you can! So far the targeting strategies have been placed into a bucket we call retargeting. Essentially getting in front of people who have already engaged with your brand or product/service. Now we’re going to move into the budget we call prospecting.
This strategy entails finding new people who have never purchased from your or visited your website. Deploying a prospecting strategy will enable you to incrementally ad revenue to your business, reaching new prospects and starting them down the journey of buying your product or service for the first time. One of the best and most profitable ways to do this is to supply Facebook with a list of customers and create Lookalike audiences.
Facebook will search its user base, pull together all the signals it has about its audience and create an audience of people who look most like the list supplied. Some of the most profitable audiences to provide Facebook include
- All purchasers – A list of all of your customers
- Product purchasers – Purchasers of a specific product
- Add to Cart – People who have added to cart
- This can be effective if you don’t have many purchasers
- Website visitors – List of people who have visited your website via the Facebook pixel
- This is useful when you don’t have many purchasers or add to cart options
Pro Tip: For brands just starting out, build lookalikes off of which ever audience has the most signal i.e. your largest list.
Facebook Targeting Strategy #4 – Target interests based on your buyer personas
Now at this point, you may be asking yourself, why you spent all that time creating buyer personas when there were three perfectly good targeting strategies that you can deploy without knowing much about your target customer. Here’s the thing, without the ability to acquire new customers, your business is dead in the water. What has been covered so far will bring you the most profit if you have existing customers but it needs to be a part of a larger full funnel strategy.
At D2CMAG we not only want our readers to be profitable, we want you to scale to the moon. With that in mind, let’s talk about the most challenging, yet most rewards targeting strategy Facebook offers. This strategy once coupled with effective copy, creative and the right offer, can lead to massive scale for your business. It falls in the prospecting bucket and can yield incremental revenue for your business. You guessed it, it’s interest targeting.
Facebook boasts a wide variety of interest targeting options with the categories listed below. And here’s where you’ll thank me. While all these options are great because you built your buyer persona, you can now use these options to get in front of your ideal customer with the right image, copy and offer to get them to buy you product and become a customer for life.
- Business industry
- Entertainment
- Family and Relationships
- Fitness and Wellness
- Food and Drink
- Shopping and Fashion
- Sports and Outdoors
- Technology
Conclusion
- Build Buyer Personas
- Create ad copy and images that speak to customer pain points or aspirations
- Offer products or services that solve the customer’s problems or helps them achieve their aspirations
- Build a full funnel ad strategy
- Remarket – Most profitable / Lowest scale
- Retarget – Very profitable / Low scale
- Existing customers
- Website Visitors and Add to Cart audiences
- Prospect – Largest scale / Least profitable (Aim to break-even)
- Lookalike audiences – People who look like your purchasers
- Interest targeting – Use what you know about your ideal customers to target their core interests
Would you like a step by step guide and checklists to create these strategies and more?
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