Want to reach warmer leads with your ads? Looking for ways to improve your audience targeting? In this blog post, you’ll discover five high-intent audience types to target with Facebook and Instagram ads so you can improve lead generation and conversion rates.
Alignment between campaign objectives and audience intent is crucial for runniAng successful Facebook and Instagram ads. If these two elements don’t match, you’re likely to waste your ad budget on reaching the wrong audiences or delivering irrelevant messaging. But when these two elements do align, your campaigns can achieve goals like:
- Reaching the right audience with the right message at the right time
- Delivering more personalized ads without appearing intrusive
- Guiding prospects to the next stage of their customer journey
- Improving conversion rates without increasing ad spend
- Boosting return on investment (ROI)
When factoring audience intent into your Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, keep in mind that people with a higher level of intent are typically closer to making a purchase decision. So as useful as they can be, they aren’t a great fit for top-of-funnel (TOFU) objectives like reach or brand awareness.
Instead, high-intent audiences work best with campaigns that target bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) objectives like leads or sales. In many cases, that means retargeting using Facebook custom audiences. Yet custom audiences aren’t always the best fit and retargeting isn’t always necessary.
If you attempt to deliver conversion-focused ads to cold audiences, you’re probably going to continue to see low conversion rates and high acquisition costs. Instead, warm up audiences by running paid or organic campaigns to top- and middle-of-funnel (MOFU) audiences. Running these campaigns is critical for two reasons:
- They introduce your brand and offer so your target audience will be more likely to convert later.
- They give you several options for building in-app and third-party audiences you can retarget later.
1. Facebook and Instagram Videos
If you use video creatives in your TOFU campaigns, they can be ideal for building retargeting audiences. Before choosing videos to build these audiences, check the metrics for the original ad campaigns. To deliver ads efficiently, you’ll want to create audiences of a sufficient size so it’s important to make sure the original video received enough views.
How many views are enough? There’s no magic number to aim for, as ideal audience size depends on your objective, offer, and targeting. But if you notice an Ads Manager warning that your campaign may not generate any results due to the small audience size, you’ll know that you need to expand it.
Start by creating a custom audience based on video content. Choose how much of the video you want the audience to have viewed. For BOFU audiences, make sure to select an amount that signals a high level of engagement or intent. In many cases, you’ll want to target at least 50% or ThruPlay.
2. Facebook and Instagram Messages
Does your team run paid or organic campaigns designed to start conversations in DMs? If you’ve run messaging campaigns using the engagement objective in Ads Manager or encouraged followers to DM your account for an exclusive resource, retargeting these audiences can be great for boosting conversion rates.
Note that this data source doesn’t offer much in the way of customization. Instead of letting you target certain types of messages, it only allows you to target all Instagram or Facebook users who messaged you in a certain timeframe. So if your business receives a lot of messages from people who aren’t a good fit for your offer or who don’t intend to purchase soon, you’ll probably want to choose a different type of custom audience instead.
To use DMs as the seed for your audience, choose either your Facebook page or Instagram account as the source. Then choose the People Who Sent a Message option. Pay close attention to the retention window, which automatically defaults to 365 days. If your sales cycle is relatively short and you want to reach high-intent shoppers, narrow the window significantly.
3. Facebook Events
Are webinars, masterclasses, or other online events a key part of your sales funnel? If you promote these events to your Facebook audience, you can retarget engaged attendees with BOFU offers later. First, go through your list of events and mark those that align with an offer you want to promote.
Then in Ads Manager, choose Events as the data source for the audience. Choose the segment carefully, as you’ll want to deliver ads to people who showed a high level of interest in your event or who actually attended it. Choosing People Who Responded Going (for free, unticketed events) and People Who Purchased Tickets (for paid events) are good starting points.
4. Website Visitors
Retargeting users who engaged with your content on Facebook or Instagram (i.e., videos or lead forms) can be one of the more cost-effective ways to build an ad funnel. But in-app engagement isn’t the only data source for high-intent audiences. You can also retarget people who visited website pages designed to educate TOFU audiences.
To build this type of audience, set up a new custom audience with a Website data source. Confirm that your Facebook pixel is selected as the source, and choose who you want to include in the audience. By default, this option adds everyone who visited your website. But when you want to target high-intent audiences, it’s important to be selective.
5. First-Party Customer Lists
When you want to set up more precise audience targeting, use the Customer List option in Ads Manager or on the Audience dashboard. If prospects have opted to receive your digital marketing materials or submitted lead generation forms, you can sync them with your CRM and upload the data for audience targeting.
When you want to increase conversions and improve ROI for BOFU ad campaigns, it’s crucial to target high-intent audiences. With the ideas above, you can plan more effective Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, build more relevant audiences, and achieve more ambitious results.
5 comments
Great post. Someone who has been doing fb ads for a year now, this info is truly terrific for improving my results.
Thank you Jai
Glad I could help Grace! Stay tuned 🙂
If only someone told me about TOFU, MOFU & BOFU when I started running ad campaigns. This makes so much sense. Bet you’re killing it with META ads…
Everything happens in due course of time Rohit.. You’ll only get better with time.
Happy to help always!
I will be trying these hacks this week for my small business. Thank you for such valuable piece of info Jai.