Short story: Facebook and Instagram have some of the best targeting options for advertisers. In fact, the platform allows businesses to reach over 1.5 billion people! But with such a large audience available, there are plenty of ways your targeting can go horribly wrong if you don't develop airtight targeting tactics to boost your social media advertising efforts.
Targeting the wrong audience can drive the cost of your campaigns to staggering levels. And when that happens, you're probably wasting a lot of time fixing your mistakes instead of making money from your ads. Rather than allowing that to happen, it's much easier to take the time to set up your targeting right from the start.
Leveraging your competitor's audience can be an extremely effective strategy to help you scale up your social media efforts and exceed your goals. If you can target the right custom audience, you can amplify your results and run cost-effective campaigns multiple times. If you learn how to target your competitors' audiences well, you might even be able to steal market share from them and beat them at their own game.
So how do you optimize your social media ad campaigns and reach your competitor's audience? Keep scrolling to find out!
Content
Why should you target your competitors' audiences?
If you haven't started using Facebook Ads Manager yet, it's time to learn! Of course, you can hire an expert or agency to do this, but sometimes it can be more cost-effective to do it yourself. You decide. In any case, it's imperative that you understand exactly what kind of abilities this magical platform contains!
Facebook Ads Manager is free and part of Facebook Business Manager. If you haven't yetSet up a business account on Facebook and Instagram, you must configure this first. If you want to learn more, you can take a series of short courses inmetaPlano,and learn the fundamentals of social media advertising.
If you're ready to rock then let's get started! Targeting your competitors' fans can be very helpful depending on your business and your competitors. After all, you know that this is your competitor's target audience.already interestedon products or services like yours, and they may have heard of your brand. Unless your products or services are very different from those of your competitors, you can bet that their audience will be just as interested in what you're offering.
To remember; Social media targeting is all about efficiency. Better targeting will help you boost your campaigns so you can connect with agreater number of people at a lower price. Whether your goal is to get more Instagram followers, increase your leads or get more conversions, optimizing your targeting will help you increase your bottom line and improve cost efficiency.all your ad sets, no matter what the goal is. So it's definitely worth a try.
Of course, not all target groups are interested in your brand or your products. And it's not just about targeting. Unless you are targeting people with relevant contentshe really cares, you still won't be able to establish yourself and improve your results.
A competing audience's interest in your company or specific products and services depends on a number of factors, which we'll explore below!
How to approach your competitors' target audience
Ready to improve your social media ad targeting and boost your results? Hold on to your hats and get ready to dive in!
1. Define your competitors
First of all, you need to understand exactlyWHOYour competitors are and who your target audiences are. Keep in mind that your competitors may be doing this.verlike they're doing well on social media but may have a huge international audience or even reach an obscure subset of audiences you may not even know about. You can get high retention rates and then struggle to actually convert them into leads or sales. Your target audience might be highly engaged with your content but less interested in your actual products or services. These are all important when considering targeting your competitors' Instagram followers and Facebook fans.
Also, keep in mind that your competitors' target audience may be different than theirs.in truthCustomers, therefore, there may be a gap between the content and the audience. They may get most of their customers through other channels like email marketing or Google Ads, but they're just trying new things on social media to reach new audiences. Don't assume they monetize from social media alone, because that might not be the case.
So who are your competitors? You must have at least a few. Keep in mind that they don't necessarily have to be affiliated with your company or sell the exact same products. If you are a vegan skincare brand, your competitors might include natural skincare brands, vegan makeup brands, or even other skincare brands sold in your country.
How to find your competitors:
- These are brands in your industry that sell the same (or very similar) products as you. Ideally, they also work in the same country as you. Chances are you've identified these competitors in the past.
- These companies may not be in your direct line of business. However, they may have very similar targeting based on your audience demographics. So if we go back to the example above, the skincare business can have an audience much like a makeup brand or even a clothing brand.
So how do you research your competitors?
If you're a new brand and have no idea who your competitors might be, this can be a little more difficult. Do a search on social media using different keywords and hashtags or just use Google to search for brands near you.
If you started doing some initial research when launching your brand, you should already have a good idea of where to start. If you already have an established business and have customers to talk to, why not ask them where they shop?
Also, keep in mind that your competitors may not just be companies. They can also be influencers, thought leaders or public figures. They may not be competing for your brand's revenue share, but they are still competing for your audience's attention.
2. Find your competitors' target groups
From here, you can explore your competitor's audience with Facebook Audience Insights. Keep in mind that since both social media platforms are owned by Meta, this information also covers the audience on Instagram.
First, simply select Audience Insights under Meta Insights in your Facebook Business Manager profile.
After logging in, you will see the main dashboard with your potential audience on Facebook and related platforms. Click the filter button here. Add your audience details, including the country you're targeting and any important details about your audience's demographics. However, the most important filter to focus on here is the Interests tab. If you search for different interests, you might even find your competitors, especially if they are big brands. For example, if you're a baby food brand, you might look at a baby food company called Bellamy's Organic. Or, if you're a skincare brand, as in the example above, you could use search brands like Dove and Nivea.
If we take Nivea as an example and look only at the United States, we will see that the majority of its audience is female (85%). More importantly, we can also check what other interests these users have on social media. This can tell us a lot about who the audience is, where we can find them on social media, and most importantly, how to engage them in different types of content on social media.
From Facebook Audience Insights, we can see that Nivea fans are also interested in Tasty and Delish, two news media companies that focus on recipes and food-related content. They are also interested in Walmart, Target and Macy's. If you want to leverage Nivea's audience, you can use this information to create buyer personas or even create content and shape our social media strategy.
But luckily, there's an even easier way to engage our competitors' audiences on Facebook and Instagram. To target a competitor's audience, simply paste their name into the Interests tab, add their location and any other details, and click Create Audience. From there, you can access this saved audience when creating Facebook or Instagram ads in Facebook Ads Manager. The only difficulty with this is that only big brands are saved in Facebook Ads Manager. So while you can find big brands like Nivea and Target, it can be a lot harder to find lesser known brands.
If you can't find your specific competitor in Facebook Audience Insights, you can always look for another similar brand or move on to some of the other tactics below.
3. You deeper
Once you've made a list of your main competitors and know their basic characteristics, it's time to dig a little deeper. You want to know everything about your competitor's audience, including where they're coming from, their basic demographics, and their interests. This will help you figure out how to approach them. And before long, you'll be connecting with more Facebook and Instagram users in meaningful ways.
In addition to Facebook Audience Insights, there are many other social media marketing tools you can use to find out who your competitors are targeting and what they are interested in.
- You could just do some good old fashioned social media stalking. That's right - go to your competitor's Instagram profile or Facebook page and read the post's comments. You can find out what your audience likes, learn about their pain points, and even see where they're coming from and who they're from. Of course, searching the Instagram account can take some time, but it will give you information that can help inform your targeting.
- Your competitors are likely to be companies that your customer base has purchased from before. In fact, they can still buy from these brands. So you could even conduct a survey of your existing customers and offer a prize as an incentive to learn more about your competitors. For example, do your customers also buy from your competitors? If yes why? You'll likely find that once you start researching, you'll start to build a bigger list of competitors that will only help you in the long run.
- our advancedInstagram reporting analyticscan provide you with valuable information about your competitors. It can tell you when your competitors are posting, what type of content they are posting and how often. That way, you can see which strategies are resonating with your audience. You can see which post types like videos, link posts, or carousels perform best. They can also see which topics resonate best with their audience. You can only check how their content differs and if they post different things on Instagram and Facebook.
4. Refine your targeting
After digging deeper into your competitors, you should have a good idea of how to reach a similar audience.
However, there are some simple, tried-and-true ways to structure your targeting and organize your audiences. Here you are:
Once you've created your audiences, you can start creating your ads. Let's see the best way to do this.
5. Realize testes A/B
When you are just starting out with Facebook and Instagram ads, you need to do a lot of testing to learn more about your audience and what they like. You need to test different audiences, different copy and motifs, different placements and even different social media platforms. A/B testing is like conducting a science experiment. You have your only control design and need to split test different items. Over time, you'll adjust various aspects of your ads to get the best possible result. This is called optimization.
The result? Affordable and relevant ads that help you reach your social media goals faster than ever.
To start A/B testing, you should test all of the audiences you just created. Test all of your different audiences, but keep the other aspects of your ad exactly the same, such as: B. your ad design, budget, and placements. Ideally, you should test all of your audiences at the same time with different ad sets, otherwise you won't know if variations in your results are due to audiences or simply the time your ads ran. Test different themes, but make sure you test the same themes for each ad.
You may find that different creatives work better with different audiences, which in itself can be valuable information. Some audiences may prefer video, while others prefer a still image. Gather as many insights as possible.
However, the most important result to note is the cost-benefit ratio. Ideally, you want to focus on the most cost-effective audiences to maximize your long-term results.
The importance of informing
Building the right audience on social media is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to comprehensive social media advertising. Even when you find the right audience, you need to make sure you're doing ongoing reporting and optimization to keep costs down and ensure ongoing cost effectiveness. Because if the cost of your ad sets increases, you could be targeting the wrong audience or using the wrong creatives for that group. Let's face it - you might even be using the wrong social media platform!
Either way, unless you implement a comprehensive social media management tool that provides the necessary insights for your digital marketing strategy, you'll never know.
Before launching your ad campaign, take the time to define your social media goals and decide on the metrics you will use to measure your campaign. After completing the advertising campaign, do a thorough post-campaign analysis. Calculate your ROAS (return on ad spend) and find out which target group is the best value for money.
Are you ready to improve your Facebook and Instagram marketing strategies? The wrong social media targeting can increase your costs exponentially. Optimizing your targeting can help reduce the cost of your ads and increase your results. But it's critical that you have the tools to make it happen and the insights to help you continually improve your ad sets and ultimately see results.
Powerful social media planning tools like Sked Social can give you unique insights into your competitors and their audiences. Not only does it have advanced reporting features, it also includes a social media scheduler to automatically schedule and save social media posts for your Instagram page as well as LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook and many other social networks like you for hours a day. week ! You can even add location tags, Instagram hashtags and Instagram shopping tags.
Sked Social is an all-in-one Instagram analytics tool with powerful scheduling features and advanced reporting features that can help you identify key audiences and continuously optimize your campaign performance. Reporting features allow you to generate automated reports for each campaign to identify trends that will help you transform your campaigns and refine your social media marketing strategy. Start by subscribingSked 7-day trial.