Whether your business is in its infancy or you have an established presence, doing research to better understand your customers is vital. There is a range of tools that can helpful for this, but I want to start with highlighting a tool called Facebook Audience Insights. This tool, which is available in Facebook under Manage Ads -> Audience Insights offers a slew of highly beneficial information. Start by choosing an interest that you expect your audience to have and then get a breakdown of what those followers are like. For instance, my business sells tabletop card games and board games. So I am going to start by selecting “Tabletop Games” under interests as a filter.

 

Let’s break down the analysis by major categories:

 

Demographics: This first metric gives you the gender composition, relationship status, education level and even average jobs. Using my filter for tabletop games I immediately see this interest is male dominated (72%) and highly educated.

 

Page Likes: Next Audiences allows me to see what pages my audience is following. I can what pages my audience prefers, and this gives me fodder for things to share or places to engage that are relevant to my base.

 

Location: Although as expected the US and Europe are major hubs for gamers, some unexpected countries like Egypt showed up on the list too. This information and knowing were my potential buyers are helps inform everything from market targeting to my fulfillment network.

 

Activity: This is another key area when doing your research, as it shows how likely your audience is to do different social engagement behaviors (like, share, comment etc.) and how they are accessing your content (desktop, mobile etc.). For my interest I see some really interesting trends. First, women are a minority, but the data shows they are substantially more likely to comment or share, almost twice as much as men. Furthermore, we found during our last product launch that Desktop only ads had a much higher ROI then Desktop/Mobile. Mobile ads were cheaper but didn’t seem to speak to our base. This is reinforced by the data that shows only 19% of my audience is accessing Facebook from their phones.

 

Overall, Facebook Audiences is only once piece of the puzzle and you will have to test and iterate to really get to know your audience. That being said, knowing as much as you can about the behaviors of a group is deeply important to effectively marketing to them.