HOW TO USE BUYER PERSONAS TO BUILD SUCCESSFUL FACEBOOK ADS

So you’ve heard the hype about Facebook Ads. You’ve decided you want to dive in and start promoting your business on Facebook to the millions of people who are active every day. So the first step is opening up Facebook Ads manager and building ads, right?

Wrong.

It’s hard to not get ahead of yourself, because of the all the promise that Facebook Ads have, but when you’re spending your hard earned money, you need to approach ads strategically.

And that means having a clearly defined target audience.

Building buyer personas for your ideal customers is the best way to do this.

What Is A Buyer Persona?
According to Hubspot, a buyer persona is “…a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

Buyer persona’s include things like:

Demographics including sex, age, education levels
Goals and motivations
Interests & behaviors
These things should sound familiar, right? Yes, because they are similar to the targeting options available inside Facebook ads!

The best part is, you don’t need just one buyer persona, each business might have multiple buyer personas as they can attract different types of customers for different reasons.

Building Your Buyer Personas
We know that buyer personas are representations of our ideal customers. When developing your buyer personas, we need to brainstorm who exactly is our ideal customer.

Is it a highly ambitious young professional motivated by money and accomplishment, who has graduated from a four-year college and likes brand name clothing and popular music?

Or is it a middle-aged mother of two who does most of her shopping online and is highly active in her community, serving on the school board and works part time as a nurse, while supporting her family?

These are all questions that you need to ask yourself as you look at your existing customer base, and then think about who the best fit for your products or services are.

As you are developing this list of traits and demographics, it’s important to use existing data to build out the most accurate representation you can.

Here are some tools you can use to do this:

Facebook Audience Insights
Google Analytics
Customer Surveys
Internal CRM Data (when applicable)
Social Analytics tools such as Sysomos or Follwerwonk
Market data from sources like Nielsen or comScore
This list goes on, but it’s important to think of every angle when you build your buyer personas.

Perhaps the most effective way to learn more about your customer is to speak with your sales or customer service reps – or any customer facing team members and get insight into the daily troubles, concerns, and challenges that your customers face.

Once you have gathered all the information about your persona, it’s time to give them a fancy name (think “Marketing Mary” or “Stay at Home Mom Suzy”), define a clear call-to-action for each persona and organize the information in a way that makes sense for your business.

Distribute these to your team, because this information should be central to your business’ growth and everyone should be on the same page!

Putting Your Buyer Personas To Work
Now, the fun part.

After we had you put the brakes on earlier, it’s time to go full speed ahead into Facebook ads.

All that information you dug up about your ideal customers… start entering that into your Facebook Ads Audiences!

(Image Description: Image courtesy of Facebook)

Save each of these audiences with the same name that you have assigned to each persona so there is no confusion.

Now, as you build out ads, you can select your newly saved persona from the “Use a Saved Audiences” button on the targeting screen.

As you build out your ads, it will be important for you to understand what copy and imagery works best with each of your personas.

You might need to do a great deal of A/B Testing to determine which types of ad content works best with each of your defined personas, but ultimate, as you refine your strategy, your ads will become more successful.

In Conclusion
Defining your target audience, building out buyer personas, then using that information to build out highly targeted and customized ads for your ideal customer is the best way to take advantage of the many options available to you inside Facebook Ads.

Have you had success using saved audience targeting in the past? What is your story?

If you need help growing your business with highly targeted and customizable ads, contact ARCH Digital Agency for a free consultation call to learn about how we can help!