Are you at your wit’s end trying to create Facebook ads for photographers? You’re not the only one. Many are losing their minds stressing about how to target photographers on Facebook. A lot of photography equipment businesses don’t really know how to target them properly.
No worries, we’ve got you.
In this blog post, we’re going to share with you two awesome strategies on how to target photographers on Facebook, create a custom audience, and filter it through Facebook’s detailed targeting option, so that only photography enthusiasts get to see your Facebook ads.
A fun fact check before we dive in: Humanity took 1.440.000.000.000 photos in 2021… that’s over 1.4 trillion photos and memorable moments to be captured. Say Cheese!
Who is your target audience?
Suppose you’re the owner of a photography studio that provides customers with photography services such as photographic prints and photography equipment and is looking to increase awareness and generate more leads.
Who would your potential clients be?
Needless to say, those would be people who are interested in flying drones, taking pictures and videos, camera lenses, etc. Travel, product, portraits, or wedding photographers. The Facebook Ad platform is undoubtedly your best shot to target people interested in photography-related businesses.
Your Facebook page is a great tool for driving both awareness and purchases because no other advertising channel can match the level of detail that Facebook Ads have to offer.
But there is a catch to it.
Why it’s hard to target photographers on Facebook
First, even though Facebook has the most powerful social media advertising platform, targeting specific individuals with your Facebook ad can be quite challenging.
With over 2.8 billion users on the platform, it can be difficult to identify a target audience for a photography business and show your ad to people that are into cameras and lenses. And if someone isn’t an ideal match for your photography target market, why would you spend money putting Facebook ads in front of them?
You don’t want to reach as many people as possible. That’s not the point.
You want to reach the right people. And what makes reaching the right people (in this case photographers) for the photography target market even harder is the iOS 14 Update.
Apple’s new policy prohibits collecting and sharing data unless users opt-in to tracking. This imposes limitations on ad personalization, which directly impacts the creation of photography Facebook ads. The new update displays a pop-up indicating that an app wants to track you, and it gives you the option to opt out of tracking.
Not surprisingly 96% of users don’t like being tracked.
One thing’s clear so far: without a precisely targeted audience, your photography Facebook ads can be a huge waste of money. So how do you target photographers on Facebook and successfully bring potential clients to your landing page, without burning a hole in your pocket?
How to use Detailed Targeting for photography Facebook Ads
The detailed Targeting option is the breaking point for your photography Facebook ads, I’d say.
This part is where it gets fun, and also a little scary, especially when you realize just how much Facebook knows about us. It knows which restaurant we like best, where we like to shop, where we go for a holiday and a lot more.
We permit Facebook to know all this by signing up on the platform.
And now as Facebook advertisers, we can use all this data when we want to target our ideal customers – professional photographers in our case.
Since we are looking to target photographers, in the detailed targeting option we’ll type in ‘Photography’, which presents us with several options from the suggestions window.
The audience size is now 3,300. Just perfect.
Go ahead and adjust, and readjust these settings and filters until you have your target audience on point. For what is worth, the Facebook platform offers amazing options for detailed targeting, but with the limitations of the iOS 14 update targeting specific professional photographers using Facebook ads can be tough.
Luckily, there is a great workaround that you can do to help you target photographers on Facebook. Hang with me to find out how.
Target photographers on Facebook using consumer e-mail lists
The Facebook Ads platform allows you to input e-mail addresses from potential customers and targets people within that database only. This is known as creating a custom audience.
What is a Facebook Custom Audience?
A Facebook custom audience enables you to create a precisely targeted audience for your photography equipment business.
Targeting by creating a custom audience is the most ROI-positive way for promoting your photography equipment business, due to the high targeting control. With Facebook custom audiences the power of ad placement is put directly in your hands.
And with your ads aimed straight at the photography target market, nothing is stopping you from successfully targeting photographers on Facebook.
The best thing about these custom audiences is that Facebook doesn’t bother asking for verification that the people in your database are opt-in on your list. This is where you cash on the opportunity to import photographers’ email addresses as a custom audience, and target photographersyou with ease using Facebook ads.
Creating a custom audience is the most effective strategy because it allows you to expand your reach to highly relevant audiences who are most likely to be interested in your niche.
Now, let’s go through the process of setting up a custom audience for a Facebook ad that targets photographers on Facebook.
Creating a Custom Audience with photographers’ e-mail lists
Start by visiting the Facebook Ads Manager and click on the Create Audience field, as shown in the picture below:
In the next window, you’ll have to choose from where you’d like to source the information for your custom audience. Here is what that looks like:
You can choose between your source or a Facebook source. The options include:
Website, customer list, app activity, IG account, Facebook page, etc. You go with the customer list option, from your source.
After clicking the Customer List option, you can start building a custom audience from your existing customer list.
In the following step, you can begin importing your customer list. You can do this in two ways:
- By importing a customer list from Mailchimp
- By importing a CSV or text file (pay attention to your formattings here, you want to be sure that Facebook understands all of the data you’re giving)
Upload your list, name your audience, and add a description if you need a reminder of who this Custom Audience is targeting.
As your final step, in the creation of your custom audience, you’ll have to do some double-checking. Facebook is going to ask you to confirm that it has mapped your data to the correct identifies. So, go through the list and make sure that the emails are seen as emails, names as names, etc.
When you’re done, hit Import and Create, and you’re good to go!
How to use photographers’ email lists in Facebook Ads?
Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash
Consumer e-mail lists are the best way to create targeted photography Facebook ads, receive higher conversations, and increase your ROI. Investing in a highly targeted consumer e-mail list from a credible data provider is the most effective strategy to target photographers on Facebook.
At Influencers Club, one of the main services is providing data from social media that can help you target photographers on Facebook with a super-targeted list of e-mail addresses.
What’s our strategy?
We have two strategies.
- We find photographers’ emails from keywords in their social media bio. Allow me to explain how we do that.
In our first strategy for finding photographers’ emails, we’re on the hunt for keywords.
Generally, people use the limited space in their profile bio to highlight the most important parts of their lives. Meaning bios are full of keywords. And keywords are what we’re after. So we activate our Instagram bio search engine and target anyone with a photography-related keyword in their bios. For example:
- We find emails from people that follow your competitors on IG
In our second strategy, we get targeted email lists from followers of specific IG accounts. We analyze the fans of your competitors and discover them in our systems. Allow me to briefly explain the process to you:
Step 1. Share with us a specific IG account, be it a competitor, an influencer, or any account that your customers follow.
Step 2. We use trusted, external APIs to analyze the fans of your competitors and discover them in our systems.
Step 3. You get photographers’ email lists along with 28 other accurate data points that you can match in your Facebook photography ads.
Note: Automated scraping is against Instagram’s ToS, and we’d never recommend it. However, we do things a bit differently. Take a look at our process here.
For example, let’s look at Canon’s official IG profile.
Anyone with a photography equipment business would like to be able to e-mail the 3.2M followers Canon has. With Influencers Club you can easily target roughly about 40% of these followers using Facebook ads, and convert them into your customers.
To be exact, that’s 1.28M emails!
To ensure our emails are active and regularly used, we run them through Neverbounce to verify them. We also pay for an additional enrichment service called ClearBit to add missing information about every single prospect on our list, so that can businesses better understand their audiences and strengthen their engagement strategy.
If you are looking to outsource the creator acquisition via outbound email we have an entire team of 20+ people that have been doing that for a while now.
Take a look at our Partnership program and click here to schedule a free call.
Final thoughts on how to target photographers on Facebook
Implementing a targeted consumer e-mail list in your Facebook advertising strategy allows you to target photographers on Facebook more effectively and with a guaranteed increase in your ROAS.
Don’t take my word for it, check out this story of one of our clients who got 13x ROAS (that’s $13 for every $1 spent) from advertising to their competitors’ fans.
In short, the story goes something like this: Our client who owns an eCommerce store for beard care products used Facebook ads as their only channel for targeting potential clients.
They were running Facebook ads non-stop based on their audience’s interests, and yet the only thing they managed to mark was a significant drop-down in their budget.
That’s when they decided to go with a more secure approach and create a custom audience with the targeted e-mail lists that they purchased from Influencers Club. The rest of the story I already told you at the start – 13:1 RoaS on Facebook ads.
Back To You
Do you need a hand with targeting photographers on Facebook? We’re happy to help. Our strategies are built to help you successfully target people in your niche, run effective PPC campaigns, and engage your targeted audience.
So if you’re up for a growth hack and want to get targeted photographers’ email lists, Book a Free Strategy Call to learn how to target your Facebook audience with a maximum ROAS rate.
GET PHOTOGRAPHER EMAILS
If you are interested in learning more about how you can get validated Photographer email lists, make sure to schedule a quick call with our team, where you can discuss the details related to your targeting.
