Facebook Ads targeting can be a great way to reach your target audience, but it’s important to make sure your targeting is accurate. If you’re spending money on Facebook Ads but you’re not seeing the results you expect, it might be because your targeting isn’t quite right.

In this post, we’ll explore three steps to finding the perfect audience for your Facebook Ads that are also immune to the challenges created by iOS14 Let’s get started!

Why Proper Targeting is So Important for Facebook Ads

It wasn’t long ago that those big yellow phone books were considered a great way to reach potential customers. Billboards were a common line item on a company’s marketing budget, and even radio spots were all the rage.

What do these three old-fashioned marketing methods have in common? They lack real targeting. You’re paying for eyeballs on your advertisement, but there’s no telling whether they’re the right eyeballs for your brand.

The digital era changed all that, bringing us highly granular targeting options that are dialed down to things like the zip code your market lives in, whether they have an upcoming birthday, or whether they’ve recently visited your website.

Suddenly, with the emergence of marketing based on third-party data, ad costs — and company’s cost per acquisition — plummeted.

But it wasn’t meant to last. Apple’s iOS14 update coupled with a culture that is concerned with data privacy has ushered in a new era of targeting. It may not be as granular or hyper-targeted as it used to be, but it’s still a far cry from the days of the Yellow Pages.

Using targeted advertising like Facebook ads can help lower your cost-per-lead (CPL), cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-acquisition (CPA), cost-per-mille (CPM) and just about every other cost-per metric out there.

But using Facebook’s built-in targeting options alone isn’t all there is to it. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, a great audience takes time to curate. Read on to learn three ways to build an audience that is sure to keep your leads pipeline full.

1. Cast a Wide Net with Brand Awareness Ads and Broad Targeting

Brand awareness Facebook ads are exactly what they sound like: ads that increase awareness of your brand.

These ads don’t necessarily need to be about your product or service. In fact, many times they shouldn’t be. The goal of these ads is simply to get your name in front of as many people as possible in the hopes that when they do need your product or service, you’ll be the first one they think of.

The beauty of brand awareness ads is that they can be very inexpensive because you’re not paying for clicks or conversions. Instead, you’re paying for impressions, which means you’re only charged when your ad is shown to someone.

But the key to making really them work for you lies in your choice of targeting and your ad creative, as well as your plan for following up with users who interact with your ad.

When setting your targeting parameters, keep them as broad as possible. You’re looking for top-of-the-funnel Facebook users here. You’ll also want to be sure to use an ad creative that encourages engagement. The easiest option is to use a video that is at least a few minutes long.

Before launching your ad, head over to your Audience area in Facebook’s Business Manager. You’ll want to set up an engagement-based retargeting audience using custom audiences. Your data source will be the video you just used to create your brand awareness ad. Create retargeting audiences for users who watched more than 50% or 75% of your video.

This audience building technique, sometimes called social prospecting, allows you to cast a wide net and get your ads in front of people who otherwise might not have seen them had you been using traditional hyper-targeted audiences. It gives them a chance to raise their virtual hands and signal that they’re interested in what you’re offering. Once they’re part of your newly built retargeting audience, you can follow up with more conversion-focused ads.

2. Focus on Engagement-Based Retargeting Audiences

We’re predicting this will be a brand’s biggest resource for 2022. A lot has changed over the past two years concerning how brands reach users who have engaged with them online. With iOS14 and other data privacy concerns, it’s become harder than ever to remarket effectively.

Brands that have relied on omnichannel marketing, especially when it comes to cross-platform remarketing, have been left hanging by these changes. Fortunately, they have an ace in the hole. Just as you created a new audience based on video views above, you can also create an audience based on users who have engaged with your Facebook and Instagram pages, ads, and organic content.

This is a powerful tool for any brand, but especially brands with a longer sales cycle like B2B healthcare brands, for example.

Targeting users who have checked out your content but who don’t yet follow you allows you to reach those middle-of-the-funnel lurkers who are in the decision-making process just as you could once effectively reach Facebook users who spent time on your website.

3. Go Organic (and Feed Your New Audience!)

In step one and two you created several different engagement-based retargeting audiences to help you target your ads more effectively in 2022. But it’s not enough to rest on your laurels. These types of custom audiences require people engaging with your content in order to work.

While your low cost, low CPM (cost-per-mille, or the amount you pay for every thousand impressions) brand awareness ad will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, focusing on engaging organically with your target audience on Facebook and Instagram will help get your profiles and content in front of even more people, who will then be looped into the custom audiences you created.

A great way to do this is to purposefully engage with followers of your biggest competitors. Comment on their content, watch their stories, like their posts. Have meaningful conversations on their own channels, boosting their engagement, and watch them return the favor!

Final Thoughts

Sometimes taking a broader approach to audience-building beats laser-focused targeting. As the social media landscape changes, social prospecting and engagement-based retarteting are future-proof strategies that will serve brands not only in 2022, but for years to come.