Facebook Ads Targeting for Lawyers, Dentists, Real Estate Agents, and Other Small Business Professionals
--
Content aside, let’s talk about the burning question that everyone’s wondering about, “how do I actually target my ideal target audience?”
Well, that’s complicated. But let’s take a quick walk through some ideas, how you can implement them, and how they can quickly become as asset to your business — while generating increased leads.
Examine Existing Analytics
We regularly chat with small business about who their business is serving, while looking at the data and analytics to identify most profitable target audiences.
Break out your data, Google Analytics, and data archives to get a baseline of who your primary customer is, and what their conversion behavior is. Go there (now!), and figure out by demographic who is engaging with your business and purchasing your product or service.
Define Your Ideal Customer Segment
Based on your current data baselines, identify the customer segment you want to market to, engage with, and attempt to convert.
If you’re too broad, you may not resonate with customers, and if you’re too specific — you may exclude potential customers.
Ideally, the sweet spot is to build custom or saved audiences within the Facebook Ads manager to fit different audience types, as well as for different purposes.
For example, we may build a saved audience targeting owners and/or partners at law firms within the US — in order to build ads specifically targeting that demographic. We don’t want to target everyone that works at law firms, as not everyone are decision-makers, and therefore, not convertible.
Layer Demographics, Behaviors, Life Events, and Customer Interests
Layering demographics, behaviors, et cetera is a complicated and time consuming investment — but it also allows you to (almost) exactly define who you want to target.
Due to privacy issues and non-usage, Facebook regularly changes and/or removes the targetable demographic traits available to saved audiences.
This is as simple as combining your ideal customer segment demographics, locations, behaviors, and interests together in a meaningful, targetable way. While there are potentially billions of combinations, we’ve created some examples below for you to look at.
Common examples are by geolocation (+/- radius of location), people living within a certain location (not passing through), income demographics (by percentile), education level, business ownership, life events, or specific interests.
Specifically narrow the audience by each added trait, otherwise the Boolean logic will include multiple traits (income percentile OR small business owner) instead of layering and narrowing traits (income percentile AND small business owner.)
Action Step: Create 2–3 saved audiences based on your ideal customer audience segment.
Facebook Ad Targeting for Photographers
Photographers are able to target efficiently around location, income, and life events. We recommend targeting life events, specifically engagements, anniversaries, and by births.
This example highlights targeting recently engaged couples, within Seattle, who are in the top 25–50% income bracket within the US. I’m from the Seattle area, so I thought I’d show it some love! This provides an audience size of 4900 people within or around Seattle that meet this criteria. This may be a little too small of an audience size, but it is also extremely defined for relevance if you tailor content appropriately.
Facebook Ad Targeting for Real Estate Professionals
Real estate agents, home inspectors, and other professionals can effectively target based around life events of moving or graduation of an advanced degree. Facebook still maintains the first-time home buyer interest, which can be an ideal starting point. Facebook removed targeting via zip code, however, you can still add geographic inclusion areas (see geo-fencing below).
If you’re an agent vying for business from a recent doctoral graduate, you can target that specifically as well!
This example high-lights targeting people who have expressed interest in being a first time home buyer, who living in or around Seattle, in the top 25–50% income bracket — with an audience size of around 15,000. You can further refine based on the type of home buyer (first time home buyer, investor) and other factors.
Facebook Ad Targeting for Lawyers
If you’re a personal injury lawyer (or any type of lawyer), get hyped for the geo-fencing section below. Long are the days over, when a tactless personal injury billboard will suffice. Now, firms are geo-fencing advertising around emergency rooms, jails, automotive body shops, competitors, et cetera.
Facebook Ad Targeting for B2B
Business-to-business is fun and can be intimidating for some people. Most small businesses are utilizing most likely already using some paid services, so will need to tailor your call-to-action specifically to meet an unmet need (like all advertising).
We recommend targeting by behaviors that the target audience either is a small business owner, manages a business page on Facebook, or has accepted Facebook payments within the last 90 days in conjunction with specific interests.
The example below shows a target audience that are Facebook Page Administrators, living within 50 miles of Seattle, in the top 25–50% income bracket, who also have an interest in advertising. The potential target audience reach is 4,700, which would be around 12,000 if you removed the interest of advertising.
Geo-fencing and Location-Based RTB/PPC Advertising
Geo-fencing is the art of geographic inclusion or exclusion around a particular area. While this can be a pain to set-up, it can also be highly effective for micro-targeting.
Micro-targeting or regular advertising can be accomplished through defining a target audience based on location. As mentioned before, this can be medical practices/hospitals, your competitor’s store or practice, or a location linked to an event. Keep in mind that Facebook (and other platforms) have minimum target audiences.
Action step: Try a geo-fenced advertising campaign during a conference or event that is related to your business vertical.
Pixel Installation and Retargeting
Install the Facebook pixel and retarget the “warm” audience that made it to your website, but didn’t end up converting.
If you’re wondering how to install pixel, Facebook has a tutorial here. Pixel is one of the most crucial business assets you can work with, as you’re identifying and remarketing to an audience with an identified search intent.
Action step: Install pixel, and implement it into your advertising tool-set.
Implement Custom Audiences
While Facebook has pushed transparency on custom audiences and how data was initially collected and shared — custom audiences are still one of the most valuable methods for creating high conversion audiences.
Custom audiences let you upload customer information and emails for remarketing. Additionally, you can create audiences from people who have engaged with your content on Facebook. This is particularly important in regards to content strategy, building “ever-green” content, and regular consumer engagement.
Action-Step: Make sure your email funnel is working, and well!
Get With Us!
Want all the of these strategies and more implemented for your business? Get with us for a risk free strategy call!
