When you create a Facebook ad campaign, you can let Facebook know about the kind of person you want to see your ad. If you don't give Facebook any guidance here. Facebook will still take your money, but it will serve your ad to just a random sampling of people. So you might have a women's leggings store, but if you don't tell Facebook to target athletic women, it will start serving your ad to, sure, some athletic women, but also some 45 year old men who have no interest in women's leggings.
You'll spend your ad budget way more effectively. If you give Facebook some guidance on who should see your ad to do that, you need to spend some time getting to know your potential customer. And to do that, you just need two things, Google and the audience research doc, which you can download below this lesson. Looking at this doc, you see five simple questions about your potential customers.
Your homework is to collect answers to these questions, to do that, go to Google and search keywords related to your product, your niche, or your customer's lifestyle and keywords in the questions. Just to note here, make sure to use an incognito window for your research. Otherwise Google will serve you up search results that are tailored to your interests, and you want to get rid of that bias in your research. For example, to answer the first question for black bear bike shop, I might Google cycling accessories brand. When I do that, one of the first results is a list of cycling accessories products.
That seems like it could be a good place for me to find different cycling accessories brands. So I click into that and I browse. And here I take note of some of the brands that I see like Timbuk2 and knog, knog, knog. I think that knög let yourself go down some rabbit holes here. This is research and you want to learn about your customers, interests and lifestyle, as much as you possibly can. For example, I clicked into Timbuk2, which I assumed would sell a bunch of other cycling accessories.
And I found that actually it sells a lot of different bags. That's fine by me because I can imagine that someone who's interested in these sporty looking bags, my also be someone who's taken up cycling to commute, to work. And now they're interested in the accessories that Black bear bike shop is selling. What you ultimately do with these answers is use them as something called targetable interests on Facebook. I'll explain more about targetable interests later, but basically they're a way to tell Facebook, Hey, show this ad to people who like Timbuk2, for example, the bag company, not the African city, it's an Africa, right?
You want a broad list of targetable interests because it gives you room for experimentation. Some of these answers may yield brands or personalities or magazines that don't seem to have anything to do with your store. That's fine too. I've actually talked to a lot of entrepreneurs whose best performing ads were at audiences who liked something completely unrelated to what they themselves were selling.
Your homework is to spend at least an hour answering the questions in the audience research. And when you're done with that, you'll be ready to take the next step towards launching your Facebook ads, which I'll explain in the next lesson.
