What’s important is that the dollars budgeted for you or your clients can be used most effectively when the targeting tools are calibrated for success.

How precise can we get? We’ll look at Facebook as an example.

This is the current view for advertisers building a basic click-to-site ad. As you can see, we can add locations by zip code, down to people who travel into, were recently inside, or live in set locations. This is very specific and can be used in many ways to manage an ad campaign. 

I placed our office [VI Marketing and Branding] as the center of a small radius and included additional zip codes around the metro area for a hypothetical ad. If you know your audience demographics, this could be of great benefit for utilizing particular locations that would be better suited to your product. You could even build multiple sets of ads, and should, to target each location with different messaging. 

Once the targeted area is set, you can then further target your audience by a multitude of other factors such as income, job titles, interests and much more. Let’s say you want to place an ad for somebody in Choctaw, Oklahoma, who likes My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom, is single (shocking), makes more than $100k, and is between the ages of 30-40. Well, my friend, you just found them. 

While each platform’s form factor will vary, the importance of being able to serve ads to the right place and the right person is still the same. This isn’t a shotgun approach to advertising on social media, this is a precision guided operation that keeps potential waste of money even lower than before. When your audience is well targeted, they see ads that they would more likely be interested in and you are able to better connect with your potential customers in a cost-effective way.

It’s time to get to know your maps and your audiences.