Let’s talk about Facebook Ads. Nowadays, it is the perfect way to grow a business and increase sales. We all know how sales keep a business alive and allow it to grow indefinitely. However, how can you invest in Facebook advertising without risking much of your budget? By targeting specific audiences, of course. Most importantly, reaching out to targeted audiences means attracting more loyal customers, and loyal customers turn into recurring income. A question quickly arises – how to target fans of other Facebook pages?
Of course, every business has competitors. In this case, it’s best to find out why your neighbor’s backyard attracts more visitors compared to yours. This same method can be applied when turning to Facebook Ads.
Simply put, any ad campaign can be boosted by using the fans of your competitor’s page. Remember, these fans and followers are already attracted to the same products, you just need to market them much better and give them something your competitor lacks.
In this article, you will understand the step-by-step guidance of how to target specific pages on Facebook. But, before we begin, let’s talk about a little shortcut of stealing competitors’ audience to your advantage.
How do you target competitors’ fans with Facebook Ads?
While Facebook doesn’t offer this option in their advertising platform there is a simple (yet genius) workaround. 40 percent of all Instagram users have their contact information available on their profiles. You can get that data and add it as a custom audience and run ads only on those people. If your competitors have less than 1k followers you can manually visit every fan and copy-paste their emails. For larger campaigns, you can use our service to not only get their data but also to further filter their fans and target only the audience you need.
To get in touch with us simply list a couple of your biggest competitors in the form below. We’ll get back to you with an estimation of how many valid emails we can find as well as how to use our data. Not only in Facebook Ads but also for cold outreach via email.
Now, let’s talk about the other methods of getting targeted fans, something that might take more time to perform, bringing you a step closer to reaching your goal.
1. How to target specific pages on Facebook
In this part, you will learn how to target specific pages on Facebook. To begin with, you need to create a sheet of competitor pages to target. These don’t necessarily need to be any major ones, but rather choose businesses similar to yours in size. Why do this? It’s really simple. You can’t beat famous brands by trying to attract their audience due to several reasons.
Their branding identifies with millions of followers, which lasts for years, if not decades. In other words, their loyalty is rooted deep within the specific brand and product.
Whenever a fan or follower thinks of buying a product, the first thing coming to their mind is a famous brand. It means they won’t spend much time browsing through search engine results, but rather visit a famous competitor’s site directly. This can only make you lose more of the advertising budget.
To sum up, try to find competitors of your size and write down their Facebook pages. This allows you to maneuver their audiences to your products more easily, increasing visits and hopefully, providing more sales.
Another great idea is to browse competitors you’ve already liked before. Of course, there’s a reason you liked a certain competitor’s page, something that caught your attention back then. You can also add some of these to the list as well.
Also, use Facebook’s ‘search’ feature to find relevant competitors. Simply type the main keyword into the search box and make sure to select the ‘pages’ option. Here, you will find hundreds of companies selling the same products.
A word of advice, though. Make sure to include pages with real, organic likes and interactions. These competitors have an audience with high levels of retention and are usually more successful, unlike businesses sponsoring every Facebook post on their page.
Finally, you can use Facebook Audience Insights. While there, simply choose the interests most suitable for your business. Then, click on the ‘Page Likes’ tab and check out the list of pages people with the same interests have liked. It’s important to know that the affinity score needs to be higher in order to target the right customers.
Get targeted emails from your competitors' fans
2. Experiment with at least two different audiences
By now, you have a list of competitor pages and it’s time to do some A/B testing on them. Of course, this will result in at least two non-intersecting audiences, and help with targeting the right pages later on.
But, how will you know which audience wins?
The answer is – find the ad set with the lowest cost per result and continue working with that audience. Facebook has an entire department that collects testing data to show a confidence (or power) percentage to depict whether the outcome of a test would provide similar results if repeated using the same conditions and audience. Thus, pay attention to the outcome.
3. Find Content Inspiration With Facebook Page Insights
Did you know that you can discover many content pieces and valuable information from competitors, using the Audience Insights dashboard? Simply click on a competitor’s Facebook page within the dashboard and gain lots of ideas such as top engaging posts. If you need to filter out or focus on certain segments, find out more about their ‘Videos’ or ‘About’ sections.
This method will simply allow you to focus on certain posts based on organic popularity and determine prices and products. And yes, you should definitely make this a part of your strategy of targeting the proper Facebook audience. Now, before you do that, ask yourself the following questions.
What kind of content are they posting? Is it images, videos, textual, or visual pieces?
Are most visitor comments praising or criticizing the post? Will they reveal anything useful to further improve your ad?
What topics spark the most engagement among fans?
Think of it as taking your classmate’s ‘A+’ homework and turning it in as your own. A competitor has already spent a fixed amount of money on a post and its results are clearly visible to you and your business. All you need to do is analyze, upgrade, and release it as a ‘2.0 version’ ad.
Rest assured, this strategy only increases the chances to succeed because you are basically retargeting people who are already browsing heavily on the topic.
4. Create Ads Based On Your Competitors’ Fans
Finally, it’s time to put all the research you performed into action. Can you target Facebook pages with ads? Before you start creating the ads, know that Facebook does not allow businesses to directly target fans of their competitors’ pages, but rather paves the way towards this ultimate goal. By picking out people with shared interests, your ads will surely show much better results and save more for future ad campaigns.
There is an easy way to do this. Simply add the interests and hobbies of the people you’re trying to reach and make sure your targeted ads become more relevant to this audience. For example, if you plan on creating an ad for a local clothing store, just target the specific users in that location who have liked or shown interest in related pages.
The whole idea around this strategy is to map the interests and attributes of multiple audiences, allowing you to expand your options in Facebook Ads. For example, you can experiment with multiple interests similar to the primary one, perform split testing, and direct these visitors to something they will most likely buy or show major interest in.
Again, Facebook considers (and for a good reason) direct audience targeting of competitors’ pages, because we all know how competitive and unfair the market will become. But, by implementing several techniques and methods, you will discover the majority of people that will most likely show interest in your product or service.
Did you know that two-thirds of all Facebook users visit a local business Page at least once a week? This just goes to show how fair the social platform is towards local businesses, as well as providing endless opportunities which can skyrocket a small company into a medium business or enterprise within a short period of time.
Better yet, the average prices on ads have decreased by around 9% last year, which only increases the chance of creating a successful ad campaign.
More ways to create targeted audiences
Need more methods to find the perfect audience for your business? Feel free to try the ones listed below, and let us know if it’s working for you.
1. YouTube to Facebook
Here’s another clever tactic of finding competitors you were unaware of so far. Go to YouTube and browse the most popular and highest-ranking videos by typing in the specific keywords. These users may be individuals or companies, and if they have a link to their Facebook page in the video description, make sure to visit it. Doing this will most likely provide more fans with similar interests.
2. Split Test results
While experimenting with various ads and audiences, make sure to choose the ad set with least CPR (cost per result). Not many advertisers know this, but Facebook has a type of ranking called ‘confidence level’, which usually appears in the form of number percentage. Their explanation of using this ranking is simple – ads with the least cost per result will most likely perform similarly if run again.
3. Best time to perform split testing
Most advertisers will split test at least two different ads for exactly one week. Sometimes, you may get better results during weekdays and at other times, the weekend. No matter what, the end result will perfectly depict how an ad performed during a whole week. You will see how people react when they have less time to click on ads during busier days of the week and vice versa.
