Is Your Facebook Ad Targeting Really the Problem? | 143
If you’ve run Facebook Ads before, I have the sneaky suspicion that you’ve gotten caught up in your targeting and audiences. I hear all the time, “My ads would do better if I could just find the right audience.” But I have a hot take on this one: your targeting may not be the issue. 😱
Let’s chat about why your ads might actually not be performing and how to turn them around!
How to Set Up a Facebook Ad Audience
When you head to your Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll find four audiences: custom, lookalike, saved, and custom list.
When making a custom Facebook Ad audience, you are pulling from a warm group of people who have already shown interest in you, your content or your offer.
Custom Audiences include:
→ your website traffic
→ TPT store traffic
→ Instagram and Facebook interactions
→ your email list
The next step is to make a lookalike audience from the custom audience. A lookalike audience is when Facebook takes all the people in your custom audience and says, “Okay, these people have ABC characteristics. Who else is like them?” It will then find a million or so people with those same ABC characteristics. These are (most likely) cold people, so it’s a great way to expand your reach.
Is the Problem your Audience or Messaging?
To be completely honest, 9 times out of 10 the audience isn’t the problem… More often, the issue is the messaging.
When messaging is the problem, your ad copy, image, and call to action may not be resonating or capturing the attention of your audience.
The first step is to look for new angles that may resonate better with your audience. Dig deep and look at the challenges and obstacles your audience is facing. How can you reframe the struggle? What other struggles could you identify?
Making a Facebook Ad is about playing around and testing out different messaging, until you find what works. This can include testing different images, headlines and ad copy hooks.
Want to get ads up and running before Black Friday? I have spots available for Facebook Ad Sprints! We’ll not only set up the ad for you, but help with the copy, images, testing, and more. Learn more about Facebook Ad Sprints.
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
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Episode Transcript:
Welcome to Market Scale Grow. I'm your host, Jenzaia, and this is a Saturday Strategy Session where my goal is to bring you practical marketing strategies that you can implement into your business right away. Let's jump in!
I'm super excited! You might have noticed that we have got an update, a makeover, something super exciting happened on the podcast. I'm so pumped about it. Not only did we get new cover art, but we've re-recorded the intro, outro, new music - total rebrand! I love it! I hope you like it too. Send me a message on Instagram, I'd love to hear from you what your thoughts are.
Market Scale Grow has been around since April of 2021, and it is now, well, I'm recording this in September of 2023, so we are over two years into Market Scale Grow, and I just thought it was time to pizazz things up. So a huge thank you to Lydia Harris who helped me with the branding. She was amazing to work with. I think she and I connected like way back in 2021. We have kids that are about the same age and started our businesses about the same time. So it's been cool to watch her journey grow. Having her be able to be the one to walk me through this rebrand has just been really special. So, thank you, Lydia. And if you need to rebrand, I highly, highly recommend you check her out.
And then also, of course, a shout out to Brittany, my podcast manager, who helped with the rebrand of the music and redoing the intro and the outro and all of that. So thank you so much.
And then what you're going to notice going forward on the podcast is every month we're going to do a Jenzaia's hot take or like tea time with Jenzaia where I go into a hot take of mine that might be a controversial opinion in the marketing world or it might just be where I get kind of ranty. But yeah, so I'm super, super excited about that.
And then I'm going to be transitioning (fingers crossed we make this happen) to a guest episode every month on a special day. So not as a Saturday strategy session, but as a bonus episode for you. I'm not 100 percent sure if that's going to be starting in October, but we'll be bringing in those bonus guest episodes for you. And I'm really excited about that too.
Okay, enough about the changes. Let's dive into the first Tea Time with Jenzaia!
My hot take this week is that targeting is not your issue.
And so when I'm talking about targeting, I'm specifically talking about Facebook ad targeting. So often people say to me, Oh, well, if I could just find the right audience…
I have two things that I want to rebut there. The first one is, way too often people are not taking advantage of their warm audience and lookalike audiences, and we'll dive into exactly what that means in a second.
The second piece is most of the time it's actually a messaging issue and not a targeting issue, not an audience issue. You're just not resonating with your people. So let's dive a little bit deeper into possibility number one, which is you're not taking advantage of your warm and lookalike audiences.
On Facebook ads in the ads manager, there's three types of audiences that you can leverage. The first one is custom audiences.
The second one is lookalike audiences.
The third one is saved audiences.
So when I say your custom audiences or I say your warm audiences, those are the same thing. When you create a custom audience on Facebook, you are pulling a group of people who are warm to you already. And so, the four that I like to use are, number one, your website traffic. I often separate this, like a blog and website, that traffic is separate from a TPT stores traffic.
And then the second one would be your Instagram engagement audience. And then the third one is your Facebook business page engagement audience. And for both the Instagram and the Facebook engagement audiences, we keep those really broad. It doesn't need to be someone who's following you.
It doesn't need to be somebody who is really, like, engaged in the way you're thinking. Like, if they've liked or shared a post of yours. When the ads manager is creating that Instagram engagement audience or the Facebook business page engagement audience, it's really anyone who has interacted with your account in any way. So maybe they clicked on an image and that's all they did. They just like double tap, like not even double tap, just single tap to make it bigger or whatever. They clicked on your name to go to your profile. They click the read more button. They could have also liked, commented, shared those kinds of engagements.
Maybe they watched a story. Maybe they're following you. Maybe they clicked on that send message button, but they never actually sent you a message. Literally any type of interaction with your Instagram business profile or your Facebook business page will put them into that audience. And so it can be a really wide range of people in their warmth, if you will, because somebody who clicked on your name to look at your profile and that's all that they've ever done is not going to be very warm. Whereas someone who likes every single one of your pictures, who sends you messages on a regular basis, who comments, and Interacts with your story polls and all of the things that's going to be a very warm person on your Instagram and your Instagram engagement audience.
But the good thing about all of these people is that they have interacted with you already at least once. Same with the Facebook business page. They've already interacted with you at least once. And so that's a great thing. We'll come back to that in a second because there's the fourth custom audience that you can create and that is a customer list. And typically this is going to be your email list, whether or not they are paying customers of yours. Facebook calls it a customer list. It's just that list of people. And you can upload that onto the ads manager platform and create an audience of those people. So once they're on your email list, then you can retarget them with additional ads or use it.
And this is what I like to do is all of these custom audiences you can use to create lookalike audiences, but we'll come back to that in a second. If you are not using these warm audiences, your website and TPT traffic, your Instagram engagement audience or Facebook business page engagement audience, and your customer list or your email list.
If you're not using these people and targeting them with ads, you're missing out on, like, a huge group of people who have already interacted with you, and that means, for the most part, that they've said yes already. I've talked about this before, but like, every single time that someone says yes, they're more likely to say yes again. And so, in just having interacted with you once and saying, yes, I'll go to their profile or yes, I'll like that image, makes your job a little bit easier and will hopefully make your ads do better.
And so that's the first audience that you should be taking advantage of. And I know some people have a little bit of a problem paying to show someone an ad if they're already on your email list. And that's fine, you can exclude your email list from that. But I highly recommend that you don't exclude your Instagram followers or Instagram engagement audience.
You don't exclude that website traffic, those TPT visitors, because they're showing an interest and the ads are going to keep you top of mind. Now, I already said that you should be creating a lookalike audience of all of those custom audiences. So once you're done creating the audience in the ads manager, it will pop up and give you the option.
There's like three options there. And the first one is to create a lookalike from this custom audience. And I always recommend that you do that. A lookalike audience takes that custom audience. So let's just say it's your website traffic. So it takes all of the people who have been to your website and the algorithm figures out, okay, they have ABC characteristics. And then what a lookalike audience does is it goes and finds a million more people with those same ABC traits. And then you do it for your Instagram engagement audience and they have XYZ traits and it goes and finds that too.
And so it's taking these people who have already said yes to you, who have already engaged and have shown an interest in you and your business, and then it goes, here's some more of them. Let's do it. And typically the lookalike audiences are cold people, so that means they've never heard of you before, they've never interacted with you before, they're a cold audience.
But, they're like warm-ish in that they have those characteristics that your warm audience also has and you're not guessing. The algorithm is really, really smart and really, really capable. And I find that look alike audiences tend to do extremely well. And so, if you're not taking advantage of those custom audiences, your warm people, and the lookalike audiences, then your targeting might be part of the problem.
I often find when I'm doing strategy sessions with people that our image of Facebook ad audiences is the saved audiences. The interest based ones where we go in and we say, I want a whole bunch of teachers who are interested in math and upper elementary or whatever your niche is. And you're pulling in those keywords and you're trying to figure out what ways the demographic information and the psychographic information to target them. And actually I find those audiences tend to do the worst because it's us just guessing. It's just there's so much guessing involved.
So if you feel like you're targeting is an issue and you're really just using those saved audiences, I highly recommend that you go in and work with the custom audiences and the look like audiences. The second, and this is probably the more common issue that I would see, especially with people who are experienced with ads and potentially have worked with somebody else in the past who have done ads, and so we know that the warm and lookalike audiences are set up properly, would be the messaging.
And this is kind of where my hot take comes in. That targeting isn't the issue, it's probably your messaging. What you're saying isn't resonating with your people. And time and time again, I find this happening where we really feel like the images are going to be great and then they fall flat or the ad copy is really going to be great and it falls flat.
And then we switch the angle or we brighten the images and we just make a little tweak. To what we've been doing in the hard work that we've already put in. And it just changes everything. And so this is where looking at the numbers and the data really can be helpful and knowing, for example, when I look at an ad campaign that's not working and the click through rate, specifically the link click through rate is low.
Then I go and look at the click through rate for all, and I want to see, is that also low? And when that's also low, it tells me that the images might be, and the headline might be a bigger problem. Once we get the problem solved, we change the images, we brighten them up, we do a little bit more of a call to action in the image themselves, then we can go and look, is the ad copy now working, or is it still not working?
And those are a couple that I would say the two things that I do most frequently with images is I try to brighten them if they're dark and make sure that the call to action is very clear on the image. Or, if we're going the opposite direction of like, organic y kind of images, making sure that they really do look organic and not like an ad.
And so one of the best ads I ever ran, we used an image of the business owner sitting, I don't know if it was Walmart or Target or HomeGoods or HomeSense or like, where it was. She was sitting in the middle of the aisle and just like, cross legged on a little carpet. And it did so well because it really just, there were no words on it, there was nothing, it was just her sitting on the floor in this store.
It did so well, if I remember correctly, it was back in like early 2021, so it's been a while, but it was just so organic. The image just looked so organic that it could have just been like your sister posting a picture on Instagram, like, haha, look at me. And people were clicking on it like crazy.
And so, you either want, in my, what I've experienced, something that really looks like an ad, or something that really looks organic, so that people kind of, their brain can immediately go, Oh, that's a, even if they're wrong, like with that super organic image, they might be wrong, but their attention gets grabbed in, because they're not like, Ugh, that person's promoting to me like slyly, under the counter kind of way.
Whereas when it looks like, really, really looks like an ad, then they're like, oh, this is an ad and it's something I'm interested in, and they don't feel tricked. People don't like being tricked. There's a huge lack of trust in the online space right now. So that's a whole nother conversation that I've had before and I'm sure I'll have again.
But we don't want to be tricking people. So those are a couple things for images. And if the images that click through all rates are doing well, but the link click through rate isn't, then That is a little bit more indicative of a problem with the ad copy. And that's where we want to look at angles. And when I say angles, I mean, like, how are we attacking the problem?
So if we think about a primary teacher who is teaching math and their classroom, and we have like math centers or like a morning work for them. I'm specifically thinking of one of my own TPT products right now. So I have this spiral number of the day worksheet package or whatever. And it grows through the school year so that the kids are kind of building on their understanding.
There's a few different ways that you can come at this. Just off the top of my head, I don't have this written down. I usually do really detailed notes and this I didn't, so I am just spitballing. Some of the angles or pain points or directions that we can come at the ad copy would be, calm your morning down with spiral math review. Or I have had clients who really like to say things like, drink your coffee hot and get attendance done while your kids are being productive.
They're kind of the same thing, but they're just set in different ways. And so those are two different angles you could try. You could also try like 100 plus math work pages for grade one, or whatever it might be, and be very specific about what it is. Another one would be like, download this bundle for free or for 7.99 or whatever it is, coming at it from those different angles. So there's a whole bunch of different hooks. They're all kind of different angles, and just trying to figure out which one.
You can start your ad copy either with a positive spin or with a negative spin, but I do highly recommend that through the ad copy, if you start negative, you twirl to positive. This is the same on a sales page, with your emails, Instagram copy, anything. Like, if it's not working, it probably isn't your actual offer. And when I say offer, I mean the freebie that you're trying to get people to download or your course program, the webinar that you want people to watch, like whatever it might be, probably isn't the actual problem. It's more likely your messaging. And that's the same thing with your targeting. Your targeting probably isn't the problem. It's much more likely that it's your messaging that's not resonating with your audience.
I hope that this was helpful. I do have a free download. It's Facebook Ad Targeting for Teacherpreneurs. It's just a list of all the different audiences I highly recommend that you use, that you make sure you have created. There's some brainstorming pages and some tips and tricks for creating those saved audiences.
I will be back in your ear next week with another Saturday Strategy Session. Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. Every week on Saturdays, we release a new Saturday Strategy Session, sometimes with amazing guests. AI'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey.
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Thank you so much for listening and I'll be back in your ears next week with another Saturday strategy session.