How Do You Find the Right Audiences for your Instagram Ads?

Before you go ahead and put money behind your posts, you want to be sure it's going to be seen by the people who are mostly likely to hit that magic call to action button.

Having a clear idea of who you're targeting is going to save you money, and when done right, return more money than what you spent. 

So, how do you find your people on Instagram? 

First up, write down your Ideal Customer Profile (aka buyer persona)

If you've already been in a business for a while, then you can create this profile based on your existing best customers, or create a fictional persona based on your dream client.

Give them a name?

Age? (and no, it's not 18 - 65, choose one age eg. 35 years old)

Gender?

Location?

Interests? (Get super specific about interest and keep it related to your category. For example a competitor brand they might already like, a specific market or event, a blog or media brand that covers your field.)

Now, you want to go into Facebook Business Manager, and select "Audiences" on the homepage.

Now, this is where a lot of people get stuck. What kind of audience should you go after? How big or small should your audience be? How do you know if they audience you chose is a good one?

Facebook offers 3 Primary Audience Types that you can target on Facebook and Instagram.

1. Saved Audience

2. Custom Audience

3. Look-a-like Audience

Saved Audiences let you target people based on demographics (age, gender, language), interests and locations. 

For interests you can target people who interested in things your targeted customer is interested in, and are related to your business or product. For example, you might target people who are interested in your competitors, or blogs and podcasts covering your market.

Tip: when you type in an interest, Facebook will provide you with targeted suggestions that you can choose from.

For location, you can get very specific, down to a street address.

Custom Audiences let you retarget people who have engaged with your website, content or app. Because they have shown interest in your brand already, you can see the best returns by retargeting them.

There are a couple of ways you can create a custom audience:

Email List: eg. blog subscribers

Website Traffic: people who have engaged with your website. To create audiences based on website traffic you will need to install the Facebook Pixel on your website. The pixel can track when someone visits your website and when they take an action like buying something, and it lets you target people based on those actions.  

For more on how to install the Facebook Pixel, click here.

Engagement: you can target people who have engaged with your content on Facebook or Instagram. Maybe they visited your page, liked a post or ad, or interacted with one of your Facebook events.

Finally, let's talk about Look-a-Like Audiences.

Look-a-Like Audiences let you target people who look like your existing customer database. To create this type of audience, you need a create an audience that you want them to look like. You can do this by creating a custom audience first. Once you pick a custom audience to base your Look-a-Like audience on, Facebook will ask you to pick a location where you want to target a similar group of people.

As you're creating these audiences, you want to make sure that you're not going too broad if your goal is leads. An audience size of over 1 million is probably too much, so try to keep it below a million, and as narrow as possible.

Broad audiences are more for brand awareness campaigns, not lead campaigns.