Facebook has long been able to provide marketers with some of the most targeted advertising buys available anywhere. It’s one thing to be able to advertise on a television show that does well in a 25 to 54 demographic. It’s quite another to be able to advertise to people in a 25 to 54 demographic who live in a certain area and are married, or just broke up with their significant other, or like a certain musician, or went to a certain school, or just posted a status update about buying WordPress premium themes.
Facebook is not only social networking for its users, but also a source of a tremendous amount of data for advertisers. This is the trade off that users make, wittingly or not.
Now, that’s going a step farther as Facebook is taking the incredible amounts of online data that it has amassed for its users and combining it with offline data about users’ purchasing habits at the store.
Facebook Adds Partner Categories
Facebook has now teamed up with third party companies such as Acxiom, Epsilon and Datalogix to offer even more targeted advertising to its clients. These are companies that track the purchases that are made at grocery stores or other stores. Thus, advertisers could choose only to purchase ads that are displayed to users who purchased a lot of children’s cereal. This is another way of finding parallels between products and using them to target your advertising.
This can even be useful if you’re a small, local business. While you may think of advertising and marketing as ways to reach as many people as possible, that’s really not the way to go. You should be thinking about them as ways to reach as many potential customers as possible. If you sell women’s clothing, reaching men does you no good. If you sell teenage girls’ clothing, reaching middle-aged women who do not have children isn’t going to do you a lot of good.
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Make Partner Categories Work for You
This tool, by the way, is called “Partner Categories.” It’s a bit of a vague name, which may have something to do with Facebook not wanting to cause an uproar from users who fear “big brother,’ or do not like the idea of having their data amassed so that they can be more effectively advertised to. Of course, Facebook promises not to reveal any of this information in connection with a name.
While an advertiser may know that they are reaching 25-year-old men who bought beer at the supermarket, they will not know that John Johnson likes to buy Coors Light at the local Acme.
At any rate, the best way to use this information to your advantage as an entrepreneur or business is to look for parallel products. Write down the type of information that describes your target audience, or people likely to be your customers.
If you don’t know the types of people that buy your product, you have your work cut out for you but this is valuable information that you should know intrinsically even if you do not have. If you have to collect some data on your own to get started, do that.
Then describe your customers by various profiles such as gender, age, location and interests. Try to get an idea of what their interests might be in other types of products. For example, if you’re selling toys, look for people who buy kid’s food or a lot of candy. If you only want to reach adults who don’t care about fitness, you may look for people who buy junk food or cigarettes.
Once you do this, you’ll be able to narrow down your focus and advertise directly to your own likely customers.
About the author
Anny Solway is a dedicated writer at ThemeFuse – a leader in the premium WordPress themes area. She likes to discover new ideas about internet marketing, social media and blogging.
Facebook image courtesy of KROMKRATHOG at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
Facebook not only offers to the online marketers but even those who are searching a job even. It is the free costing advertisement in every field today.
My goal is to attract readers who are looking for someone just like me to help them buy or sell real estate in a specific geographic area — and yes, there are consumers looking for someone exactly like me. My target audience is finite and smallish.
Hello Jeny. I hope this article helps you to target your specific audience. Thanks for commenting 🙂
I agree. And if you know how to use Facebook properly it can be a great tool for marketing your business.