Advanced Facebook Ad Tactics Part 7

Be Very Specific About Who Your Target Prospects Are – when you specify to Facebook the demographics and other details about your target prospects it really helps being highly specific in describing exactly who those prospects are.

Let’s say you’re a real estate broker in New York City looking to recruit established reps from other local brokerages.  You start out with the following criteria for your ad:

Age – Any Age
Interests – Real Estate Broker, Real Estate Sales, Realtor, Real Estate Sales Agent, Real Estate
New York City + people within 50 miles
Total Prospects = 35,280

Now if your office is right in New York City you may want to see how many people are within X miles of the city.  By changing this one variable we get the following results:

New York City + people within 25 miles – Total Prospects = 28,960
New York City + people within 10 miles – Total Prospects = 19,920
New York City alone – Total Prospects = 19,920

So by changing this one variable you’ve reduced the total number of prospects by 44%.

Now let’s say you want to ensure these people are actually current real estate professionals.  In the interest sections there is one category that doesn’t necessarily fit this description: real estate.  Someone could state “real estate” as an interest in their Facebook profile yet they might not be a real estate sales rep.  They might be a home buyer or seller, a real estate investor, or something else that’s real estate related but isn’t exactly what you’re looking for.  So if we remove Real Estate from our list our Total Number of Prospects is 4080 people.  That’s only 20% of our last number, and that’s a very drastic reduction in our potential number of prospects.  So we should probably consider having some ads with Real Estate as an interest and some without.  Some real estate sales reps may not have explicitly stated they were sales reps in their profile.

For the ads where we leave Real Estate as an interest in let’s start thinking about narrowing things down by age.  We might consider only going after an age range that fits the type of rep who’s in our office.  If we’re a tech savvy office with mostly young people under 35 we’d probably have a tough time attracting veteran reps in the 50+ age group who are still relying heavily on traditional methods of doing business, and vice versa.  So we might restrict our search to people aged 18-35.  That’s only 2680 prospects.  That’s certainly a far cry from the number we started out with (35,280).