Who is Your Target Market?
I was recently chatting with a new social media client to understand their target market before I put together their custom social media strategy. They were able to tell me an average age range, gender ratio, and a common interest. They knew a little bit about their ideal customer, but not extensive details. Knowing limited information about their target market is common for our clients.
If you’ve read any of the previous articles I’ve written for ANS, you know that my #1 piece of marketing advice is to know your target market using data-driven marketing. Now that we all understand the importance of data-driven marketing, I’ll review two methods I used to gain additional information about this client’s target market.
Facebook Audience Insights
Facebook is the largest social media platform in the world with over 2 billion active monthly users. With more than 25% of the world’s population being active on Facebook, it’s no surprise that it’s also a highly popular platform for social media advertising. It also has the most user-friendly and targeted ads manager I’ve used.
Facebook Audience Insights can be found in Facebook’s Business Manager and is a tool for analyzing your various audiences. You can either upload a customer file or select those that follow your page. It’s that easy. Once you determine which audience you want to be analyzed, you receive reports including information on your target audience such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Relationship Status
- Education Level
- Job Title
- City
- Language
- Lifestyle Information
- Other Pages Your Audience Likes
Here’s a sample of my client’s Facebook Audience Insights report:
Data Append & Customer Profile Report
A core part of our data-driven business model at ANS is to conduct a data append and create a customer profile report for our clients. This report gives our clients more profound insights into their target market, enable them to better segment data, and reach customers through multiple channels. ANS performed a data append and generated a customer profile report based on this client’s customer file.
Here’s a sample of my client’s customer profile report:
Comparison
When comparing the Facebook Audience Insights with the Data Append & Customer Profile Report for this client, much of the information was the same. That is to be expected when analyzing the same audience. However, the most significant difference between the two was that the client got an export of all the data from the Data Append for multi-channel marketing and target market segmentation. The export option is not available for Facebook Audience Insights.
| Facebook Audience Insights | Data Append & Customer Profile Report | |
| Consumer Demographics (i.e., age, gender, ethnicity) | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Consumer Lifestyle Traits (i.e., interests, occupation, homeowner/renter) | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Other Facebook Pages “Liked” by your audience | ✔️ | |
| Firmographics (i.e., employee size, title, executive level) | ✔️ | |
| Data export including missing contact information, demographic, lifestyle, and/or firmographic information | ✔️ | |
| Cost | FREE | $500* |
*Average cost is $500. Price is subject to change based on size and quality of customer data file.
Conclusion
Both Facebook Audience Insights and a Data Append & Customer Profile Report provide insights necessary to fuel a data-driven marketing campaign. The consumer insights provided by each are comparable, but Facebook Audience Insights lacks firmographic information for B2B marketing. Additionally, the Data Append includes an export of appended information for each contact that can be used for segmentation and multi-channel marketing. Export options are not available on a per-record basis via Facebook Audience Insights at this time.
For more information about Data Append & Customer Profile Reports from ANS, contact sales@a-names.com.