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Facebook microtargeting

One of the goals of marketers is to create a message that the viewer believes is meant solely for him/her. Considerable time, money and effort is spent developing the right message for the right audience.

The smaller the audience, the more specific and compelling the marketing message can be. The practice of delivering messages to very small audiences is called microtargeting.

As a marketer that serves small businesses, I rely on Facebook’s ability to make microtargeting easier. I am currently working on a second round of Facebook ads for my client, author Cal Smith. With some research, we were able to microtarget based on similar authors.

Originally, we lumped all of those people together and delivered a fairly generic message. The ads performed fairly well, around .028% CTR. But the cost per click began to rise steadily and conversions are very low. So once that campaign ran its course, we looked at new ways to reach that market.

We broke the larger group into smaller groups, groups that centered on one author, not all of them. We selected the three authors that are most similar in style to Cal and created targeted messages that let the reader know why they were seeing that message.

So far, the ads are performing splendidly. CPC is extremely low and the CTR is close to .16%! I’m sure that it will level off, but so far, Cal and I are pleased.

Check back for updates!

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