Use Facebook’s Audience Insights tool like a pro

YOU'LL LEARN:

[1:06]
...the three reasons as to why your posts aren’t getting the traction they deserve.

[1:55]
...what you need to have in place to access Facebooks’ audience insights tool and the link that gets you there.

[4:28]
...the process to uncover whether your business page’s fans are matching your ideal client profile, and steps you can take to align them.

[7:41]
...how to explore your prospects’ lifestyle and interests to create engaging posts and ads that hit the mark.

[10:50]
...how to determine which audience is the most active one (because you want to get more thumbs up, hearts and comments, right?).

[11:55]
...the process you should follow to create a custom audience of eager buyers who love what you offer.

[13:44]
...the secret strategy of pros to create custom audiences that can be targeted with less advertising spend (it’s a game-changer!).

[14:08]
...how to leverage the advanced data to make sure your content finds its way to your perfect people.

It’s not a secret that Facebook aggregates quite a bit of information about its users.

In this video, I’ll show you how you can access some of those details within the Facebook audience insights tool and use it to your advantage to grow your coaching business online. You’ll be amazed at how much you can learn about your clients and your competitors.

So if you want to speed up your market research and grow your business with more certainty, read on to understand how you can leverage this free insights tool to the fullest.

The Facebook audience insights tool is perfect if you’re putting a lot of time, effort, and maybe even money into creating posts or ads that aren’t getting the traction they deserve, nor are they bringing in sales. Well, in my opinion, there are three reasons why your Facebook marketing, like posts or ads, haven’t rocked your growth yet:

Reason #1: the people who like your page aren’t really your fans or ideal clients so they might get your content, but don’t really care about it.

Reason #2: your content doesn’t connect with your tribe’s values or lifestyle as it is too generic and attracts the wrong crowd who won’t buy.

Reason #3: the algorithm doesn’t distribute your content to your perfect people organically, so your reach won’t move the needle in your business.

Now let’s have a look inside the audience insights tool to get to the gist of those issues and alleviate them as best as possible.

To access the audience insights tool, you need to have a business page set up. Yes, having a personal profile won’t do the trick here. Now, whenever you’re ready, head to this link. The page you’re on should look similar to this one.

If you’re already logged in, just click the “Go to audience insights” button which is located here. If you’re not logged into Facebook yet, the button here says something like “Log in”; click it and follow the prompts.

To get started, you need to choose an audience. I always go with the “everyone on Facebook” box here as I can access everything I want, including the people linked to my page by setting some filters... so let’s click that one.

As you can see here, the default filter is set to the United States. If you’re interested to see a global audience and not just results linked to users in the United States, make sure to click the little x here to delete this filter. If you want to change countries, let’s say because you’re only interested in Canada, you can adjust the filter and add a new one just like this. For the purpose of this video, though, we start with a global or worldwide audience.

Let’s quickly talk about the graphs here and what the blue versus the grey bar means. The blue bar shows the audience spread based on the filters you set on the left-hand side; the grey represents all people on Facebook or if you set a filter here all people on Facebook in that specific country or countries, depending on your location filter. You can easily compare the two bars and see if your settings provide results that are above or below the Facebook median. I have to admit though that I’m not really spending much time on analysing those bars and comparing the two values.

What I think is more interesting is the information you can find in this section here. You can check the demographics of your audience, think age and gender, relationship status, education level and job title, which is, in my opinion, a little bit misleading as you can only see industries or sectors. Further to the right, you can see page likes - this is really cool, the location and the activity level of your chosen audience. I use those tabs depending on the insights I’m looking for.

First, how do we check if the people who like our page are really our fans or ideal clients? Well, let’s scroll down to people connected to then select your page - either under page or place. Let’s head to the top. The demographic section shows you the spread of your audience. You can check it against your niche and positioning goals. Do you have the right kind of people as fans think, gender, age, and so on?

Let’s assume you’re a relationship coach and your focus is on female singles between 25 and 34 years in mid-level management positions living in the US and Canada and let’s say this will be your business page data. Well, just looking at the first tab and comparing it to your ideal client profile and (psst: I’ll make a video about how to create one soon) you would need to clean up your fans and rethink your content strategy.

Because:
A) even though just 11% of your fans are male, it should be closer to 0% as your focus is on females. So I’d clean up my profile likes and get rid of those men.
B) you’re not attracting the right age range with your content plus the bulk of your audience is actually in a relationship or married. Well, that explains why you’re having a hard time selling. They don’t need what you have on offer.

So I’d recommend to hop on the phone and interview some of your ideal clients in the right age bracket to understand about their interests and what drives them. I’d also put less generic and more specific content out there. For example, a love or confidence related quote attracts everyone, so be sure to craft one that speaks to your single ladies and their obstacles and dreams only. Now you’re spot on with the education level, and well there’s not a lot to analyse when it comes to the job title, at least when we take this page as an example.

So should you ever see a blue square with an “i” in there like here, it means that Facebook hasn’t enough data to show results. It often happens if you have an emerging page with only a couple of likes or your fan base is outside of the United States - like in this case here.

You can hop over to the other tabs and see the pages they like, which reflects if you’re attracting the right folks when it comes to their values and lifestyle, but also what else they’re interested in that you could weave into your content plan to connect with them on different levels. We’ll go into more details about this in a second, so stay tuned.

You can see where they’re based. Remember our relationship coach example where the focus is on female singles between 25 and 34 years in mid-level management positions living in the US and Canada? Well, this would be another sign that you’re not connecting with your ideal client as most of the fans are based outside of the US and none in Canada. You would need to course-correct your strategy here.

Within those two tabs here you can find how active your audience is, think comments and likes, plus what devices, think mobile versus desktop or ios versus android, they prefer. We’ll dive into those in a minute.

So let’s assume that your following is aligned to your niche or you did a major clean-up to get there, but still you aren’t gaining the momentum you hoped for. Remember, reason number two, your content doesn’t connect with your tribe’s values or lifestyle. So let’s have a closer look into that.

Imagine you’re just starting out as a health coach and there is no information on your page likes section available, but you know that what you have on offer and the audience you would love to work with is pretty similar to the one of Kris Carr. So let’s find out more about her audience’s values and lifestyle so that you can weave that into your content and posts to connect better with your tribe and gain momentum.

First, click the little x to delete your page filters, then go to interests and type in Kris Carr and make your selection. Based on what exactly you’re looking for you could set even more filters such as country or countries, the age range and the gender. And if you want to go really fancy, you can use the advanced tab down here too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and keep it simple with just one filter setting.

You can see that Kris is attracting mainly females between 35 and 54 years. That’s her primary audience. Most of them are in a relationship in some form, and they’re highly educated folks. We can also see in which industries or sectors they work. Facebook settings show you the one with the biggest percentage difference first. What I want to see though is the bulk of the industry those people work in. So let’s click on selected audience, and here you go. You will learn that most of her following works in management, admin services and sales. I love those insights as they give you so much inspiration regarding how you need to structure your freebies and offers and the stories you choose in your marketing.

If you want to sort starting with the smallest number, just click selected audience again. Let’s go all the way back up and go to page likes. You can see the top categories of what other pages her audience likes. If you want to see, more than ten click see all. If you go to the next section, you can see relevant other pages. This page is gold when it comes to learning more about any audience really yet it’s especially useful to understand the values and lifestyle of your audience better. Are they nuts about whole foods, or are they vegans? Where do they shop? What clothes do they like - high-end labels or small sustainable brands. Who else do they follow? What books or magazines do they read? Etc. You can use this information to create tailored content which references to other things they like.

Briefly, you show them that you truly get them.

Let’s quickly go to the location tab. Here you can see where the people are based, the cities they live in and the language they speak. You can filter by clicking the header. This might be interesting if you run a local coaching practice or want to just focus on some bigger cities to start out with.

Now over to the last tab, the activity tab, it shows us how active her audience is compared to the Facebook median, and it looks like she’s attracting a bunch of really engaged people, which is excellent as you can expect higher engagement on your posts too if you tap into her audience. Plus Facebook’s algorithm likes a lot of engagement too so you can expand your organic reach. You can also use this detail when comparing one audience to another, especially if you’re keen to run engagement-focused campaigns. You can also see which devices and systems they prefer. I think the key is to make sure that your content, like your website or landing page, is mobile-friendly.

From a market research perspective, I get the most insights from the first two tabs, the demographics one and the page likes one. I think it’s amazing what you can do with all this information when it comes to tweaking and tailoring your marketing efforts.

We’ve been through quite a bit inside the Facebook audience insights tool, so what stood out for you the most? Leave a comment below this video. I’d love to know.

We talked about how you can check if your fans are really a match, how you can optimise your content to connect deeper with your audience by understanding them better... Let’s now look into how we can define an audience of perfect buyers to whom we can boost our posts or target them with ads to alleviate reason number three. Because we all know that the organic reach of a business page isn’t really the best one these days.

No matter if you run ads or want to boost a post, putting it in front of the right audience is vital if you want to get a return on your spend. And to create the best possible audience, we use the audience insights tool again.

To create an audience you can either use your fans - if your page is cleaned up and your fan base is big enough - and create a custom audience including a lookalike audience, or you can expand your reach by targeting different interests and other criteria. To create a new audience, set the filters in the location and age and gender section to match your ideal client. Then add interests, but don’t go overboard here. If you need inspiration, use the page likes tab.

Let’s use Kris Carr again. You can target most of those pages listed on here. Yes, I said most of them, not all. If you want to check which one you can target and which one not, simply type in the name in the interests field (play around with the spaces) if it doesn’t pop up... bad luck. Simply choose a different one from your list. If it pops up like this one, you can target it. Add all the interests you want. I personally bundle them and rather create multiple audiences than stuffing everything into one.

A little bonus tip here: Don’t just go with the interests listed in here. Those are the top interests, which also means high ad prices if you want to target them. Do your own research outside of Facebook and find people, authors, blogs, brands, associations, and so on your tribe is interested in. Make a list and then check if you can add them as interests in here.

Now let’s move over to some fancy criteria or the advanced tab. It’s pretty cool, depending on your niche.

By the way, if you haven’t figured out your niche yet, you can grab your copy of the ultimate Coaching Niche Finder kit; the link is in the description below this video.

Under the advanced tab are eight more criteria that you can select. You can target people whose profile is in a specific language, great for expat coaches, so for example, you can target people living in Brazil, having US English as their Facebook profile language and are working in management positions. Voilà, you’ve got an audience of 150,000 to 200,000 people. Pretty cool.

If you’re a parenting coach, for example, focusing on mums in Ontario, Canada, with kids under 12 years, you can do this too within the Facebook audience insights tool. So let’s delete our old settings and create a new one. Under location we have Ontario, under gender it’s moms, and here we select all the kids up to the age of 12. And tada... you can reach an audience of 100,000 to 150,000 people with your post or ad.

If you’re a health coach, helping soon to be brides glowing from the inside out... here you go. Select females and under the relationship status, go for engaged, and you’ve got your audience.

Or if you’re a relationship coach focusing on couples who have a long-distance relationship, it’s here too. Go under life events and select long-distance relationship.

Check out what’s under all of those advanced tabs and get creative. And once you’re happy with the audience you created, go to the top of the page and click save or save as. And the audience will be available for you within the Facebook ads manager.

You’ve just learned more about a pretty cool tool and how to navigate it like a pro. Now it’s your turn to play around with it and apply the insights to your coaching business.

Should you need some inspiration when it comes to ads, you can find the tool that I use and a mini-tutorial in this video here. I’m sure you’ll love it.

If you’d like to get your hands on more tips and tricks, subscribe to my channel, give this video a thumbs up and don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Now let me know in the comments below this video one thing you didn’t know about the Facebook audience insights tool, but now you do. I can’t wait to hear from you.

As I love having you around feel free to check out my other videos here on YouTube. They’re all about how you can grow your coaching business online with ease and grace.

Bye for now and I’ll see you in the next one.