Get off the Ground: Updates from the Hatcheries
Through the Butler Launch Pad, the Blank Center awards graduate and undergraduate student entrepreneurs access to professional and semiprivate workspace to grow their businesses. Known as the hatcheries, these spaces encourage ideation and collaboration. In a series of blog posts, this semester’s hatchery teams will go beyond the four walls of their offices and share their experiences, advice for other entrepreneurs, and industry expertise with us.
The following post is written by Lucas Lee-Tyson ’20, founder of GrowthCave and Hatchery entrepreneur.
One of the fastest ways to get a new business off the ground is through Facebook Ads. Boasting over 3 billion active users on both Instagram and Facebook, Facebook Ads can be an incredible way to reach new audiences with your product or service. However, it can be an incredibly daunting task, both when it’s your own money on the line, as well as when you don’t know what kind of results you’ll actually get!
That’s why, in this blog post, I’ll be showing you how to use one of Facebook’s little-known tools that will allow you to do proper audience research and ensure you get the best results possible right from the start.
Detailed Targeting
Detailed targeting allows you to use Facebook’s data from their 3 billion active users on both Facebook and Instagram. For example, if you run a fitness and supplements company, there is an Interest you can target called “bodybuilding.”
Interests are one of the best ways for you to test out your product or service within an audience, as you’ll be able to get near instant feedback on how that audience responds to it.
How to Find the Best Interests to Target for Your Audience
The Audience Insights Tool is a little known tool that will show us hundreds of targetable Interests related to any audience we input into it.
You can access the tool by going to https://business.facebook.com/adsmanager, then in the top left clicking on “Ads Manager,” then “All Tools,” then “Audience Insights.”
You will then be brought to the Audience Insights Tool. On the screen that appears that asks “Choose an Audience to Start,” select the option that says, “Everyone on Facebook.”
The main method of utilizing the tool is by inputting an Interest in the left sidebar. For the sake of the tutorial, let’s imagine we own a fitness apparel company targeted at bodybuilders. The first thing I’d want to test plugging into the Interests box would be “bodybuilding.”
Immediately, we get access to demographic data related to the bodybuilding interest. This can be interesting to look at but generally isn’t as useful or actionable as the “Page Likes” tab.
Scrolling down on this screen, we will be shown a list of Interests that have a high “affinity” with the Interest you initially plugged in, meaning the higher the affinity, the more audience overlap there is between the two.
I recommend creating a spreadsheet for you to keep track of all the Interests you find, so you can prioritize which to start with.
Conclusion
The Audience Insights tool can be an incredibly powerful resource to help you find audiences related to ones in your core demographic, as well as ones you might have never even thought of! I hope you found this blog post useful, and if you ever need any help with your Facebook Ads, don’t hesitate to reach out.