How to Target Your Competitors' Audience with Facebook Ads
As technology continues to advance, so does competition. Therefore, for your business to stay ahead of the curve, you always have to develop ways to target their audience and effectively steer them to your business. That's where targeting your competitor's audience using Facebook ads comes in.
Facebook advertising is an effective tool that will improve your sales, grow your business and eventually create your brand awareness. What's more, the huge market on Facebook and targeting options make this platform the ideal space to get organic reach.
Unfortunately, it would help if you always remembered that with all the Facebook advertisers, there's bound to be a couple of competitors. And in such cases, you should know what assets your competitors are using. When you apply this principle to your Facebook ads campaign, you'll easily target your competitor's audience and drive them to purchase from your business.
So, how do you tell that these are your competitor's audience? Or better yet, how do you target your competitor's audience after identification?
Tip 1: Find the Specific Competitor Facebook Pages You'd Like to Target
To kick off your Facebook ads targeting gameplay, you need to create a comprehensive list of the specific competitor pages you'd like to target. But how exactly do you do that?
Well, it's pretty simple. Note down the page names and URLs as you do your research. Some tried and tested strategies for finding the right competitor pages to target with your Facebook ads include;
i. Facebook Pages of Your Competitors
If you know all your main competitors, a great place to start is to find their Facebook pages. Make sure you have their business Facebook page or the business founder's profile.
ii. Facebook Pages of Public Figures and Household Brands
Most marketers skip this part, but it's equally important. Adding the public figures and household brands in your industry is a great strategy. So, locate their Facebook pages and add them to your list.
iii. Liked Facebook Pages
Is there a Facebook Page in your industry you've liked? If yes, then you should add it to the list as well. The fact that you liked the page means they're doing something right. Analyze your personal Facebook profile and identify other pages in your niche you've liked in the past.
iv. Navigate Facebook Pages in Search
A fail-safe tactic for identifying the relevant Facebook pages in your niche is typing keywords in the search bar. Browse the list of available pages and select the most relevant ones. You will also find additional pages that might be related to your industry.
v. Pages Liked By
Once you've identified a few Facebook pages in your industry, you'd like to target, go to their profile and navigate other pages they've liked. This option will help you uncover competitors in the industry you never thought you had.
vi. Top Page Likes by Top Fans in the Community Tab
The community tab on every Facebook page showcases its top fans. Tap on the individual fan profiles and type '/likes' to their URL. That will allow you to explore other pages your competitors' top fans like.
vii. Facebook Pages For Top Youtubers in Your Industry
To stay on top of the game, you need to take things up a notch. Type your most relevant keywords into the YouTube search engine. That will allow you to see channels with top-ranking videos in your niche. Find their Facebook pages and add them to your list. They're likely to have a valuable loyal audience on Facebook.
viii. Use Facebook Audience Insights
The Facebook Audience Insights allows you to add interests relevant to your business. On the Page Liked tab, you will see a list of pages people with similar interests have liked. The Facebook algorithm sorts the list per affinity score, so you need to look at the pages with a higher affinity score closely.
With all these tips up your sleeves, you should have a comprehensive list of the most relevant competitor fans you should target with Facebook ads. While finding your competitors' fans may seem easy, many workloads are required.
But at the end of the day, this is a crucial step that you shouldn't overlook. Otherwise, targeting your competitor's audience without this knowledge may water down your efforts. It would be unfortunate to get minimum ROI after inputting many resources into your Facebook Ad campaign.
Tip 2: Split Testing to Find the Most Profitable Audience
You can easily identify which strategic campaign delivers the most from ads through split testing of your audience. Typically, to mount an effective Facebook ad campaign, you will have to amass valuable data on your competitor's audience and interests. Thankfully, you can test your campaign on a specific audience through Facebook's split test.
Typically, split testing divides your audience into different groups that are random and non-overlapping. The idea is to acquire valuable statistical information on the audience and use this data to target the same audience strategically. In this test, you can have as many as five different variables to test with five different audiences. After that, Facebook's algorithm helps you calculate and compare the cost for each set and its results.
The advertisement with the least ad set will take the win. The algorithm uses several factors to determine the ideal choice, for instance, confidence level, and reports the results in percentage form. Therefore, you will likely get the same results if you run the test again. This form of the campaign can be used to determine the least cost for every video view.
Steps to create a split test campaign
· Go straight to the Ads Manager page and click on the create button
· The next step is to create the 'Quick Creation Workflow' option
· Navigate to the campaign objective dropdown tab and select your ideal choice.
· Then toggle on the split test. This will reveal a variety of selection boxes.
· After that, select 'audience' and then determine the number of audiences you'd like to do this test on.
· Ideally, depending on the number of audiences you've picked, you can name your audience in a way that's easy to remember. And since the only change here is the audience, you can use the same campaign throughout.
· The next step is to go to the Select Level and ad sets located in the top right corner. You can view both ad sets by clicking the edit to view the edit window.
· After that, you can set your campaign's daily budget depending on how much you are willing to spend on the campaign. Ensure you've split it evenly between the ad sets in your test.
· You can now set up a schedule to monitor your campaign. Begin this campaign within the 7-day timeframe. That will allow you to gather enough data without wasting your budget. The last step is to create an ad that your audience will see, and you can do it at the Ad level campaign section.
Once a winner is determined in the ad campaign, Facebook's algorithm will immediately end the campaign. You can easily use split testing across all your tests in the sales funnel. That should help you determine your competitor's audiences and ideally find the right audience for you to focus all your resources on.
Tip 3: Analyze the Content That Resonates with Your Target Audience Using Facebook Page Insights
While on the Facebook insights page, click directly on your competitor's Facebook page. Here, you'll discover lots of research information and content inspiration. Look through these pages and take note of the available content and user engagement.
You'll see direct links that help filter your searches on the left side of your competitor's Facebook page. Content is filtered based on category, including
· Communities
· Photos
· Posts
· About
· Videos
Check out each link to help you discover the kind of engagement each of these categories gets. With numbers on the attention your competitors get on their Facebook page, you'll know how best to formulate your Facebook Ad strategy.
Identify the specific ways your competitors interact with their audience to help them convert sales. These insights will help you formulate the ideal targeting strategies that will siphon some of the traffic from competing businesses. It's one of the most effective strategies as it retargets an already interested audience with just a bit of your brand's personal touch.
Tip 4: Create Ads that Specifically Target Your Competitors' Fans
The way Facebook works, it doesn't specifically allow you to target your competitors' fan base. However, the campaigns will enable you to target people with similar interests. So, once you've identified the kind of content that resonates more with your competitors' audience, you're guaranteed to provide more value with the ads.
While there's no exact formula for targeting competitors' audiences with similar interests, there are a couple of tricks we'll discuss here that will come in handy. In such a case, you can target users who have shown interest or liked leading pages in your niche. Analyzing the customer's interests will help you build a highly targeted audience.
The information you gather on common interests will help you create custom audiences that target users with similar interests as your business and competitors. All in all, you have to keep in mind that interest-based targeting is more about mapping to the interests of your competitor's audience and less about targeting your competitors' page fans.
Your Facebook ad capabilities will exponentially grow when you have relevant tips. If you want to see the limits of your Facebook AD Campaign, it's worth testing what optimizing Facebook ads for your competitors' fans can do for you.