Target Demographics and Interests

Demographics

Demographics refer to basic descriptions about your audience, including things like occupation and income, education level, family and marital status, race, and ethnicity. This can clue you in to key insights to inform your ad targeting and strategies.

For example, to leverage demographics data is targeting people who have recently been engaged. You can bet that many of these people will likely soon be planning their wedding, so you may look to advertise things like jewelry, accessories, party favors, invitations, and similar items. Plus, you can retarget them in the future with ads for honeymoon travelers and new homeowners, for example. Use creative and messaging that taps into your audience’s current lives.

Types of demographic segmentation

Age

Advertisers will separate the market into different age group categories because consumers of similar ages will have the similar interests, wants and needs. Therefore, when advertisers divide up the market by age categories they will be able to target the group or groups that will be most interested in their product and communicate directly to them. This allows the advertisers to find the most appropriate way to communicate with each group. As different age groups respond to various methods of communication differently. Over time consumers will mature and their wants and needs will change.[6] this means that advertisers either have to change how they communicate with their current target market. Therefore, dividing the market into age groups allows for advertisers to target the age range that will find their product the most appealing.

Gender

Nestlé’s marketing for its chocolate brand Lion’s focuses on its appeal to the “predator” within the male consumer.
The Coca-Cola Company’s former drink Tab and its successor Diet Coke both primarily target females.
Dividing the market by gender is a common way of demographically segmenting the market. It involves targeting the gender which advertisers believe their product will appeal more to. This generally is an effective way to market because men and women have some contrasting needs and wants to each other. The market for beauty products is primarily dominated by females however some males are into these products. It is important for advertisers to realise that as society’s social norm changes consumers are more likely to not be defined by past gender roles. Therefore, advertisers should be cautious when using gender as a way to demographically target their target market as a way to communicate with them as they could be excluding a whole other category of possible consumers. Toy guns in the past were solely marketed towards young males, however advertisers realised there was a gap in the market and have begun marketing these kinds of products to young females as well. This has created a higher demand for these products.

Income

Dividing the market by income levels allows for advertisers to communicate with the income group that will be more interested in their products due to their income level. The products might be the same but of different qualities and therefore be more appealing to consumers with different income levels. Advertisers advertising premium products will focus on communicating with high income earners because they will be able to afford their products. However, due to each consumer having different priorities in life, not all high income earners will want to spend their money on luxurious items and some low income earners may want to spend their money on high cost products. Therefore, it is important not to rely just on the consumer’s income levels when communicating with them.

Race

Dividing the market by race is important for advertisers to do. Race, religion and culture often go together hand in hand, which is why these factors do affect different consumer’s buying decisions. A lot of consumers from Arab nations are Muslim, therefore an advertising campaign trying to sell a pork based product in one of these nations would be highly unsuccessful. This is why it is important to consider race as a way to demographically target a market.

Interests

When to use Facebook interest targeting?

Facebook interest targeting is one of the available targeting options in Ads Manager.

Next to targeting custom audiences, lookalike audiences or targeting based on behaviours, job titles, employers, life events or geolocations.You should use Facebook interest targeting when you’re just starting out and you don’t have a lot of (high quality) pixel data yet. Then it’s your best bet even.

Many advertisers get this wrong. There is a weird but very persistent belief that Facebook lookalike audiences will always outperform Facebook interest targeting because “the Facebook algorithm is smarter than you”. But that is simply not true. And it’s also very logical why that can’t be true. 

If you feed Facebook’s algorithm shit, then that’s also what you’ll get in return shit in shit out

It’s really that simple. 

If you don’t get a lot of (recent) conversions and build lookalike audiences from low-value pixel events like website visits, then your lookalikes will be low-value too.

Facebook won’t be able to find consistent patterns in your seed audience and the result will be a fairly random lookalike audience of people that match this weak pattern.

You should definitely use lookalike audiences when your campaign starts to mature a bit and you have a decent volume of value-events, like purchases.

Another reason to use Facebook interest targeting is because it’s like market research to learn as much as you can about your target audience. 

Using lookalikes and hoping Facebook’s blackbox will magically find your next customers is a weak excuse to learn who your perfect audience is. You need to know this.

You should also use Facebook interest targeting when your audience can be clearly defined by a set of common interests they share. Like a specific hobby, passion or brand interest.

Facebook has a ton of data about its users’ interests, which is key information to inform your ad targeting. Interests covers a wide range of things, including sports, even specific sports teams or athletes; music, including favorite bands, artists, or even songs; and pretty much any hobby you can think of.

There are many Facebook interests you can target. But the list constantly changes, with interests being added to it and removed from it.
Sadly Facebook’s doesn’t provide a full (master) list of all the different interests that you can target at any given moment.
They only share a static list of broader Facebook interest categories. You can see this list when you go into Facebook Ads Manager and then click on the Detailed Targeting field you’ll find the option to browse through “Interests”.

You’ll quickly notice it’s a fairly short list and most interests that are available for targeting will fall outside of these categories.

We’ll stay inside the Facebook Ads Manager, to discuss how most advertisers search for interests to use in their campaigns (when they use Facebook interest targeting).

It’s the interest suggestions list that shows up when you start typing interests.

It will show a list of around 25 ideas for other interests you can target, related to your input keyword. This list also includes job titles and behaviours, so it’s actually a little less than 25 interests.

Many advertisers use this thing like they also use Google.

They type “fitness a”, “fitness b”, “fitness c” in hopes of getting different suggestions each time. In most cases it will be duplicates with just a few new interests.

Searching interests through this tool can be time-consuming, because you’re basically guessing input keywords hoping to find relevant related interests.

One thing you might notice is that the interests that Facebook suggests in this dropdown are mostly interests with a large audience size.

Facebook has determined there are a lot of people interested in these topics.

Please don’t put too much weight on the Facebook interests list. It can be used for a little bit of inspiration and to spark new ideas, that’s all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBIxsuNA9b0&ab_channel=WesMcDowell