Generate First eCommerce Sales with Facebook Detailed Marketing

Being an online business owner, I understand how difficult it is to generate sales from the very first marketing campaign, especially when you do not have any digital marketing skills. 

As a small business owner, I used to be always tight on budget and want my ads to convert quickly. Fortunately, I found a hack to do so.

The conventional marketing process works from targeting a broad audience then narrowing down the funnel and scratch out the best audience for your business. 

Well, I took a different route by starting from a very niche market to making a large audience. Yes, that may sound weird, but this method works. 

To make it work 100 percent, you only need one thing that is the niche market. 

You only need to know your niche, target the audience of specific interest, and then start making look-alike and custom audiences from data collected from the ad campaigns. 

Move from narrow to broad required some research to get prolific results for your online store. 

Why do you need to select a narrow audience to sell online?

To taste success in the online business, you need to be completely aware of your niche market. 

Once you find the niche, then half of the job is done, then you only need to find out the potential audience in that niche who are likely to convert into your potential buyers.

For that, you need detailed marketing (Facebook ads). Narrow targeting tells you how much potential your product has and how much people are willing to buy your product online. 

Because in detailed targeting, you get the core audience, and if they showed their interest in your product, you easily make a lookalike audience and broaden your audience base. 

In case your core audience does not show interest in your product, you get to know that there is more research work required in your product selection and niche. 

So, going from narrow to broad works great in online selling, exposing the opportunities and weaknesses in the initial stage of business. 

For narrow targeting, you need some dynamic social media marketing strategy with detailed targeting to achieve your objectives. 

Let’s understand how we can perform detailed targeting on Facebook.

Facebook Detailed Targeting

Target the most specific audience that you that can easily convert into your potential customer. To do so, you can use detail targeting on Facebook to find your core audience.

You may know that you can segment your audience with gender, age group, location, etc. After that, you can do detailed targeting to get the core audience.

Facebook’s core audience is the most accurate audience for your ads. You can segment them by behavior, interest, and other connections.

Let’s understand this with an example;

Assume I have started an e-commerce store to sell baby products, and I want to make a Facebook ad campaign for infant clothing with pet animal designs.

Now, the question that occurs here is how I would set my target audience for this campaign.

After setting up the ad objective and creating an ad set on Facebook business manager come down to the detailed marketing section. 

For every e-commerce entrepreneur, this section is the crux of the marketing strategy. 

In this part, you narrow down the audience to get the potential viewers of your ad that could easily convert into your customers. 

Here, you can see three sections:

1. Demographics

It is pretty self-explanatory, in demographics, you set the age, gender, education, job status, relationship status, and other factors. 

You can fill up as many categories as you want to reach your core audience.

So here, I am planning to sell infant clothes, I have to target new parents between 0 to 1 year old who have decent purchasing power. 

I choose two categories: new parents (0-12 months) and financial income. 

By doing this, I figure out the audience who are more likely to become my customers. 

Suggested reading:3 Best Alternatives to Facebook Ads for Shopify Stores

2. Interest

In the interest section, you make the audience based on people’s interests and hobbies. 

My campaign is for infant clothing with pet animal graphics on it. I have already selected the audience who are new parents and have a decent financial status.

Now, I am narrowing it down more to those audiences who have shown an interest in pets.

I have selected all those pet animals whose design I am printing on infant clothes.

Also, I can create a separate ad set for each animal, like cat graphics infant clothes and dog graphics infant cloths. 

3. Behavior

In the behavior section, you segment the audience based on their mobile usages, interest in events, political views, etc. 

I would select ‘engaged shoppers’ in purchase behaviors to get those audiences who do online shopping frequently. Although choosing engaged shoppers is optional as it might make your audience too precise. 

Here is an overview of my detailed targeting to find a core audience for my product:

• New parents (0-12 months)
• Household income top 10-25%
• Engaged shoppers 
• Interested in pets or animals

You can also use Facebook audience insights to do the same thing with ease by mentioning everything in the interest sections. 

Audience insights give the complete report of your targeted audience, such as its education status, job titles, and the pages they liked. 

By mentioning your requirement, you just need to click on ‘create ad’ on the top right to make an ad campaign. 

What’s Next?

The detailed targeting might shrink the size of the target audience, and you may feel that you are giving more money for lesser views, but in reality, you are only showing your ads to those who can become your potential customers. 

Once you complete the first marketing campaign, check out your advertisements’ engagement, and you will surely get some positive results. After that, create a retargeting campaign by creating a lookalike audience to broaden your target audience. 

Facebook detailed targeting FAQ

Author's Bio:

Bilal Uddin is a Shopify dropshipping and Amazon FBA expert currently working as an editor at Within The Flow, where he writes guides and eBooks about online business setup and digital marketing to help newbie e-commerce entrepreneurs.