Are you a digital manager struggling with micromanaging? Are you a marketing team leader worried about new strategies? Are you a Chief marketing officer looking to increase efficiency and reduce costs?
Well, well, well, Facebook is here to save the day.
The brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg with 2.32 billion monthly users has emerged as a marketing leader in the past decade, moving from just a social media platform to an all-around digital services provider.
Facebook had garnered $ 16.6 billion advertising revenue in the last quarter of 2018, a 30% YoY increase. Why do you think that happened? Nothing but a worldwide realization to leverage the massive user base that Facebook boasts, happened!
Facebook Ads is the marketing division of the company, which caters to a vast range of marketing features like leads, reporting, remarketing, and even carousel ads. Everything you need, in just one place.
Yet, the best feature isn’t anything mainstream or trendy that primarily focusing on digital trends. In fact, what sets your firm apart from the rest is the use of Facebook Ads as an old school market segmentation tool to understand your audience better.
Read: The Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Market Segmentation – Jargons explained
It might seem like a very fancy word, but at the end of the day, it means exactly what it says, no loopholes whatsoever. So, a market, in physical terms, is the place where buyers and sellers interact, which has also turned online or social in the modern world. On the other hand, Segmentation means to divide or to segment into different small components, making it easier to understand or work with a large group.
When you combine these two words, you get the process of segmenting/grouping your overall market (consumer base) into different parts based on a plethora of criteria to ease your journey as a market seller.
Segment and conquer
Market segmentation is a different process for different companies depending on factors like scale, size, operations, genre, and mainly, customer base. Take a look at a few options that you could consider –
1) Demographics
This is where you divide your customers based on factors like their age, income, marital status, gender, culture, or education. A very vast range, it gives you a compact idea about each user via their profile information. For example: – If you are a company catering to home furnishing, your plan of action will vary according to the age or the marital status of your users. A young customer will be attracted by a different kind of discount or would prefer online newsletters while a married couple might look for something highly authentic and a physical store. Similarly, if your brand only caters to high-end customers, demographics on income is the best way to know exactly who to conquer.
2) Geographic
For brands with multiple branches or store ranges, especially in a diverse country say, India, Geographic market segmentation works quick and easy. You divide consumers based on their country, state, zip code or even districts to analyze their problems as a group and work towards solving them. For example – You could be a clothing store range with a national presence, yet your style of clothing collection, the behavior of employees and offline marketing strategy will be only fruitful if it varies as per the location. I mean, you cannot have a billboard in say, the Bengali language while you are in Dubai.
3) Psychographics
Lastly, you could also look at ‘who a person is’ to group them better. Covering all aspects of any individual personality like interests, hobbies, opinions, and values, this segmentation process has evolved. Using the concept of behavioral economics as well, it allows you to market your good to those who will buy it. For example, – If you are a company that sells coffee online, you would not want to be targeting individuals who dislike caffeine or if you are a sports store, targeting art enthusiasts makes no sense.
Just letting you know, using market segmentation for your marketing emails can increase your clicks by 100.95% as compared to zero segmenting.
Now that we are clear, let’s try to understand how Facebook ads help you do all of the above, hassle-free and extraordinary.
Read: The Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
Geographic comes up quick – Facebook ads has the feature of Audience Insights, which works like a charm for any marketer in the 21st century. Take our previous example of having a clothing store and want to use your online data to revamp your marketing model in different locations.
1. So, Go to Facebook ads manager.
2. Select the Audience Insights tab
3. Choose the ‘Everyone on Facebook’ option.
Now, say you have a store in London and another in India. So first, you select London, and you can get demographics for the individuals located there like age, education and gender details. Now you choose India and go through similar data. Furthermore, you can be more specific or filter out data by using the side panel on your left for various divisions like age or gender. For example, You are a female clothing store, so you choose the female gender option as well for a cohesive approach.
With Facebook Ads manager, it not only fetches you geographic data immediately, but it also becomes easier to compare and analyze them for conclusive results.
Demographics all the way – Again, the audience Insights tool is here to save the day. You can log in to
Facebook ads and find all sorts of demographic data available. Say, you are a fast-food restaurant planning to introduce a new advertisement targeting the young adult crowd, so you would need a number, age or education details to understand how to market your product better among such a vast group of customers. Here, Facebook ads give you options to select, get as many demographics details you want and even allows you to use past customer emails to find similar potential customers. Facebook adds 500,000 new users every day; 6 new profiles every second, which makes the amount of information available on the platform, too vast to fathom but amazing to utilize.
Psychographics changing the game – Once again, all you need to do is filter out the Audience insights tool by adding a few specifications to find psychographics of your users or potential users. A separate interests option is available with multiple opinions to filter and a behavior option to what marketing schemes would attract what kind of prospects. Say, In case you are looking to target customers via marketing via discount coupon schemes on a website, you can search for ‘Discount coupons’ to know where to go about it. Over 2 billion people being reached with Facebook ads, you do not want to miss out on the opportunity to select your potential customer groups amongst them.
Go beyond with Custom Audiences – There is a reason why Facebook is preferred by 62% marketers and it isn’t just the basic features mentioned above. It’s the knowledge and tools available to you once you have mastered those basics. Use the custom audience tool to understand your existing customer model better and accordingly predict your potential consumer market segmentation. A couple of pointers to help you navigate –
1) Website Traffic
If your business has an online presence, a blog, or an official website, you can use the data collected there via Facebook ads. Create segments for the people who have visited your site in the past few months, people who have visited a specific page like a particular article or product, people who have been inconsistent with their visits and so much more. This way, you get a whole different mode of market segmentation by putting in zero additional efforts.
2) Customer files
You might not have a website in place, but high chances are that you register your customers before purchase, even in offline mode. So, why let all that information stay unused? Add the data to the customer list section here and map out your audiences based on various segments. To help, there are various identifiers like Email ID, City, Gender, Age or Name which help in inputting data and narrowing down segments.
3) Engagement strategy
A new feature by Facebook ads that hits really close to home. It stands on Facebook‘s own social media platform as a base and uses the data collected on it to help you with market segmentation. The tool divides viewers of your Facebook content, posts or Ads to help you understand their level of interests and the need for improvement in your game plan. You can segment users in categories like, people who watched 50% of your videos, people who stopped watching within 10 seconds and so on. With people spending an average of 35mins per day on Facebook, you would want to know how much of that time is being spent on your brand.
Quick pro tip – Once you know your approach and you understand the importance of Facebook ads for market segmentation, you should opt for A/B testing.
The benefit of A/B testing is that it allows you to use the segmented data collected via Facebook ads to incorporate the best on your blog, website or advertisements. It allows you to test two different approaches (A and B) as an input (say a website article title) and use the statistical analysis to find what works best for your user base (number of likes, clicks, and hits).
There are various ways to perform it. The easiest way to do it by capturing screenshots of your different input versions. And the best part is you don’t have to do it manually. Use automated tools like Stillio to help you decide what works best for you.
Facebook Ads allow you to find needles in a haystack, customers among billions of people and solutions among tons of problems. So, don’t forget, Market Segmentation via Facebook is feasible and fruitful.
Business resources:
- The Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation
- What Is a Business Model? 30 Successful Types of Business Models You Need to Know
- The Complete Guide To Business Development
- Business Strategy: Definition, Examples, And Case Studies
- What Is a Business Model Canvas? Business Model Canvas Explained
- Blitzscaling Business Model Innovation Canvas In A Nutshell
- What Is a Value Proposition? Value Proposition Canvas Explained
- What Is a Lean Startup Canvas? Lean Startup Canvas Explained
- Marketing Strategy: Definition, Types, And Examples
- Marketing vs. Sales: How to Use Sales Processes to Grow Your Business
- How To Write A Mission Statement
- What is Growth Hacking?
- Growth Hacking Canvas: A Glance At The Tools To Generate Growth Ideas
The post How To Perform A Market Segmentation By Using Facebook Ads appeared first on FourWeekMBA.
