Reaching a broad audience with your Facebook ads is crucial for getting the most out of your ad spend and maximizing your campaign results. With over 2 billion active monthly users, Facebook offers an unparalleled opportunity to connect with a diverse range of target audiences across demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through the key steps and strategies to effectively expand your Facebook ad audience for improved campaign performance.
Define your marketing objectives
The first step is clearly identifying your campaign goals and what you want to achieve with a broad audience approach. Common objectives include:
- Increasing brand awareness or reach
- Driving traffic to your website
- Generating leads and conversions
- Boosting engagement and community building
Defining your goals upfront will help guide your audience targeting strategy and Facebook ad creative.
Leverage detailed targeting options
One of the best ways to reach a broad, diverse audience on Facebook is taking advantage of their detailed targeting capabilities. Here are some of the main options to consider:
Demographics
Target your ads by age, gender, relationship status, education level, home ownership, and more. You can choose fairly broad ranges (e.g. anyone 18 and older) or narrow it down by specific subgroups.
Locations
Target by country, state/province, city, postal code, location radius, or within a customized region on the map. You can go as broad as targeting an entire continent.
Interests
Select interests related to your product or service like hobbies, entertainment, food & dining, sports teams, and more. The broader the interest, the larger your potential audience.
Behaviors
Target audiences based on purchase behaviors, business roles, job titles, mobile device usage, and other actions. For example, reach people who have purchased online recently.
Combining multiple targeting options allows you to reach a very wide audience from all angles. You can also exclude specific subgroups to avoid overlap.
Leverage Custom Audiences
Custom Audiences allow you to target your existing customers, prospects, email subscribers, or website visitors with relevant ads. This ensures you are efficiently reaching people who already know your brand.
Some ways to build Custom Audiences include:
- Website Custom Audiences – Target people who visited specific pages on your website.
- Customer File – Upload a list of existing customer details to target.
- Engagement Custom Audiences – Create an audience based on people who have engaged with your Facebook content.
Including Custom Audiences along with your broad targeting makes your ads relevant to those who matter most. This helps improve conversion rates from your broad targeting efforts.
Test different placement options
Facebook offers several ad placement options that can help expand your audience reach:
Facebook News Feed
The default placement – allows you to reach the broadest Facebook audience who actively engage with the News Feed. Best for brand awareness and video views.
Facebook Right Column
Appears on desktop in the right side column of Facebook pages. Effective for lower-funnel goals like website clicks.
Facebook Instant Articles
Your ads appear within Instant Articles on mobile devices. Broad reach potential to article readers.
Facebook Audience Network
Extends your ads beyond Facebook to partner websites and mobile apps. Expands reach to relevant audiences off of Facebook.
Testing different placements can reveal which options provide the most cost-efficient results towards your campaign goals.
Optimize for different ad objectives
Facebook offers several campaign objective options that are optimized to help you achieve your specific goals:
| Objective | Best For |
|---|---|
| Awareness | Broad reach for brand building |
| Consideration | Driving traffic to your website |
| Conversion | Conversions and lead gen |
| Catalog Sales | Promoting product catalog items |
| Reach | Reaching the maximum audience in a short time |
| Traffic | Increasing website visitors |
| Engagement | Boosting posts engagement and community |
| Video Views | Increasing video views |
| Lead Generation | Collecting leads and conversions |
| Messages | Increasing conversations for sales |
Select the objective most aligned with your goals to have Facebook automatically optimize targeting and placements for broad delivery.
Retarget engaged users
Retargeting allows you to keep your brand top of mind by serving ads to people who have already shown interest. For example:
- Remarketing to past website visitors
- Retargeting people who watched your video ad
- Targeting people who engaged with your Facebook page or posts
This helps turn new visitors into leads and customers. Pairing retargeting with your broad targeting provides a full funnel approach.
Continually test and optimize
The key to successful Facebook advertising is continual testing and optimization. Here are some best practices:
- A/B test different ad creatives and messages
- Try narrowing your audience to see if it improves results
- Adjust your placements and budgets between placements
- Monitor performance by age, gender, location and interests
- Review analytics to identify your best performing segments
- Kill underperforming ads frequently and scale winners
With ongoing optimization, you can refine your targeting approach and improve the overall performance of your broad audience campaigns.
Use Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences allow you to reach new people who are similar to your best existing customers or prospects. Here’s how it works:
- Upload customer data or select a source audience like an engaged Custom Audience.
- Facebook analyzes their demographics, interests and behaviors.
- You receive a new audience of people with a similar profile to target.
Lookalikes are a powerful tool for audience expansion. Just select a source audience relevant to your goals to unlock new potential customers.
Conclusion
Expanding your audience reach is crucial for getting the most value from your Facebook ad campaigns. By leveraging detailed targeting options, placements, objectives, retargeting, optimization, Lookalikes and more – you can implement a comprehensive broad targeting approach.
Define your marketing goals, test different options, analyze the data, and refine your audiences over time. This will enable you to connect with the right people, drive cost-efficient results and get the most out of your ad spend.