There’s a little known secret on how you can gain a wealth of information on how to market your target audience.

In this post I am going to reveal that secret and specifically,

• How your competitors are reaching YOUR AUDIENCE and how to reverse engineer what they are doing very quickly
• The 5 ways it is used (the fifth way is the most important so make sure you read the entire post)
• Specific examples of what to look out for to see these strategies in action
• What you need to do to implement these 5 strategies in the quickest fashion

So let’s just jump in!

Follow Your Competitors

If you are selling in a particular niche than you should be following other pages, groups and websites within your market. Makes sense right?

You need to stay involved with what’s going on within your market and your competition so that you can be in the know.

If anything, you can get great ideas from your competition on how to market better to the people in your target audience. You can easily see what people are responding to by what they are liking, sharing and commenting on.

One of the best ways of doing research is a Facebook features called “why am i see this?”

This is my secret obsession in Facebook. I am always looking at this because I always get ideas on how to market my target audience just by looking at this little known feature.

Here’s what it’s all about.

The next time you see a sponsored ad in your newsfeed, there’s a little arrow on the top right of that ad. Pull that down and click  “why am i see this?” You will know the post is sponsored because it will say that it is sponsored.

Doing this consistently will truly open up a whole new world of advertising for you!

There are 5 Main Types of Reasons you will see an ad, so let’s discuss those now.

5 Reasons Why You See Ads

1) You’re In A Custom Audience

The first reason you might be seeing an ad is because you are already in a marketer’s custom audience. At some point you have probably given your email address to that marketer and then they proceeded to upload your email into a Facebook custom audience. Marketers can then market ads to whoever is in their custom audience.

2) Lookalike Audiences

The second reason you see certain ads is you are connected to someone a marketer is already marketing to and you are similar to that person (meaning you have similar interests, you have a similar demographic, etc). Facebook generates what they call lookalike audiences and they base it on various similarities to other profiles within a custom audience base.

We did an entire post dedicated to lookalike audiences that you can see here: https://www.fearlesssocial.com/blog/how-you-can-easily-grow-your-customer-base-in-just-2-steps/

The “why am i seeing this” will saying something like:

 

When you don’t see a specific interest (like you will see below) of why you are being targeted, it’s probably a lookalike audience.

3) Website Visitors (Retargeting)

The third reason you see ads is from website retargeting. Smart marketers use retargeting because it is such an effective way of marketing. If you visit a website and the website is set up for retargeting, then the website owner is able to essentially follow you around and target ads directed at you on Facebook (and other parts of the web). It’s really a beautiful thing for a marketer because most people who visit a website take absolutely no action and leave without ever subscribing or buying anything.

Retargeting allows the website owner to get the benefit of your visit and be able to re-market you later down the road with a custom audience with offers that you will be interested in because you have already visited the website.

You can even go as far as retargeting people who have visited a specific page on your website! How more targeted can you get with that? If you have a page on how to remove spider veins, you can target ads to people who have visited that page and then put solutions in front of them on other platforms like Facebook. It’s truly incredible.

The “why am i seeing this” will saying something like:

4) Page Likes

One of the easiest ways a marketer can show you an ad is if you have actually liked their page. By liking a page, you are pretty much screaming out to the page owner to market you with Facebook ads. This is why it is so important to get likes on your Facebook pages. While there are other ways to get in front of a target audience, the best way to do it on Facebook is to actually own the like which gives you the most power to show ads to those people.

It’s a bit difficult to show you the “why am i seeing this ad” example for this one because technically, it’s not necessarily a sponsored post because the advertiser is marketing to people already associated with the page. The page owner can pay more to boost the post so there is more reach (it reaches more people who have liked the page). These days, simply posting a post to your wall will not guarantee it will reach all the people who like your page. Facebook wants marketers to pay for marketing and is not handing out as many freebies as they once were.

Basically, the posts here will look like a normal post, but it’s the page owner’s job to get in front of you by paying more to Facebook.

5) Other Page Likes / Interests

For me, number 5 is where it gets the most interesting. This is where you will get the most intel on how your competitors are marketing their audience.

The first thing you need to understand is what I said in the very beginning of this post…and that is you need to Like pages within your niche because essentially, you then turn from the marketer into the consumer. If you can understand why people in your niche buy things, then you will understand how to sell to them. So essentially, you need to pretend you are the consumer so that you can see how you are being marketed to by other marketers in your niche. Hopefullly that makes sense to you.

Let me give you an example.

Many of the sponsored posts where I look into the “why am i seeing this” a lot of the times it says:

Aweber – which looks like this:

Because I have liked the page Aweber, many marketers can assume that I do email marketing. Well, duh. I liked the page Aweber so I must have some clue as to what the heck email marketing is. Therefore, marketers assume that I will be interested in things like how to build profitable funnels, how to write better emails, how to write emails that sell, how to write email subject lines and all that good stuff.

You see? Now I can turn around and use that same strategy as my competition to market people who like Aweber or email marketing in that fashion.

Marketing is not about reinventing the wheel. It’s about observing and being smart about what you are doing.

Use this method and you will start to get so many ideas on how to market the people in your niche!

Be Attentive: Seeing The Same Ads?

One thing to note and to really pay attention to are the ads that you are seeing over and over. If you are seeing specific ads being marketed to a specific audience or even ads that you are just seeing a lot, that should send out huge smoke signals that the ad is probably performing well. Any smart marketer is not going to keep an ad up for days and days if it is doing shitty. If you keep seeing an ad, study that ad and ask yourself why it’s converting.

Look at all aspects of that ad. Look at the headline, the image, the description, and all the other components that make up the ad. This can give you a wealth of information without having to spend hours testing yourself. Obviously, don’t copy that ad, but get a good idea of what is working and then implement a similar strategy.

How To Implement

Now that you know the ways your competitors are targeting your target market (because you are following them and essentially spying on them) you can now turn around and implement the same strategies. All of these are really easy to implement but they each take some set up time in their own right.

Let’s discuss each of the strategies above, one by one, so that you can put them into place.

1) Make a custom Audience – The only way you can market a custom audience is if you set one up. You can do this immediately by adding your existing subscribers to create a Facebook Custom Audience. If you don’t have an existing subscriber list, then work to build one up.

2) Build Lookalike Audiences – Same thing as above. Create a lookalike audience with your existing Facebook Custom audiences. We show you how to do that here.

3) Setup Retargeting – Retargeting is not hard to implement either. If you have an webpage that you are sending people to, set up a retargeting pixel and create a custom audience. This will add whoever visits your page to your Facebook custom audience and you can retarget them with ads later on if they didn’t initially take action.

4) Get More Likes – Getting likes takes time to build up. Don’t think it all has to be done in one day. Build likes overtime. The more likes you have and grow, the more of an asset you will have later on down the road, in 6 months, and a year from today. It might not seem like a lot when you start, but a Facebook page can grow as you are working on other aspects of your business. That’s the fun part!

5) Interest with the Ads Manager and the Power Editor – Setting up ads either with the Facebook Ads manager or the power editor is probably the fastest way to getting in front of your target audience. Facebook makes this pretty easy to do.

Go to Facebook.com/ads and create an ad.

Scroll down to where it says interest and that is where you would type in an interest, just like Aweber in our example above.

Do you see how if you work on all of these strategies that you can easily increase the number of people who you can target? Of course, while you are doing this, you should be building an email list so that you can really take advantage of email marketing to get in front of your target audience any time you want to. Email is still the best way to do that.

So, start working on these strategies and over time, your audience will grow and people will start to notice you and on the flip side, other marketers will probably be copying your advertising, but that’s ok because you will be taking action and getting results!

PS – there are several links in this post that go into more depth about how to do certain things. Go check those posts out if you are unsure or just need more detail on how to do anything we described here.