People want to join communities with shared interests. Niche Facebook pages are an effective way for brands to engage specific interest groups with content they care about.
Facebook continues to dominate social media. Nearly 3 billion users log on each month. Increasingly, they are turning to the world’s most used social network to find and connect with small, like-minded niche communities and subcultures.
For many brands – especially small businesses – that have established Facebook pages, the platform is a key part of their marketing efforts. Facebook offers a way to directly engage with existing and potential customers, build an online presence and brand awareness, offer company updates, gain customer insights through surveys, promote events, and drive followers to brand websites.
Over 1.6 billion people are connected to small businesses on Facebook. Two-thirds of Facebook users around the world visit a local business page at least once a week. Not surprisingly, almost 96 per cent of social media marketers worldwide believe Facebook provides the best return on investment (ROI).
One way to help maximize ROI is to use Facebook’s targeting tools and deep knowledge of its users to uncover niche communities. A niche community is a subgroup of your target audience who share a specific interest. Fashion, health and fitness, housewares, and arts and crafts are among the most popular online niches.
Identifying niche communities in your target audience will help you expand your reach to people you know have an interest in what you’re selling. This can help attract high-intent customers and drive sales.
How to target niche audiences on Facebook: Four best practices
1. Be clear about who you are targeting
This starts by creating an audience persona. Similar to a buyer persona, an audience persona is a research-based fictionalized profile that represents a group of similar people within your target audience. It describes who they are, what they want, their challenges, interests and how they make decisions. The audience persona will allow you to personalize all of your marketing and advertising campaigns. It will also help you focus on how you can help this niche group address their specific challenges. This is critical, as surveys show 66 per cent of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.
2. Understand your competition
Research other brands that your target audience is following. These brands have already established themselves as thought leaders in the niche you are focused on and have the followers to prove it. What types of content do they post and when? Track how users are engaging with the content via comments and likes to understand which formats/topics are creating the most interest. This will assist you in developing your own content strategy for this niche group.
3. Create niche-specific Facebook content
Now that you have a clear picture of who you are trying to connect with and the kind of content they want to see, you can create a content marketing strategy designed to meet their unique needs. Use Facebook’s free social insights tool to better understand how many people see your posts and when, as well as how many people choose to talk about your posts and when.
Tip: Develop and post content that shows how your products and services can support your niche market and that the niche audience will want to share with their followers.
Hubspot has identified the best content for each stage of the buying journey. At the start of the buying journey (the awareness stage), people are doing their homework. They are looking for information in the form of blogs, checklists, infographics and how-to videos. Once they’re ready to dig deeper (the consideration stage), people want comparison guides, case studies and, if appropriate, free samples. When they are ready to buy (the decision stage), trials and special offers give potential customers an opportunity to evaluate specific products.
4. Turn on Facebook’s Audience Optimization tool
Facebook introduced its organic targeting tool in 2016. The goal was to help publishers understand the interests of people clicking on their posts so they can improve the relevance of their content and increase engagement.
Audience Optimization has three features:
- Preferred audience. This allows users to add interest tags to content to help Facebook connect people with the topics and subtopics that are most likely to engage them. These tags ensure posts are prioritized and shown to followers who are most interested in the topic covered.
- Audience restrictions. This tab helps ensure specific demographics within your niche target group don’t see posts they might not find relevant.
- Audience insights. This feature provides visibility into content performance by showing reach and engagement metrics for each interest tag. Use this information to create Facebook ads that target audience segments with the content you know they want to see.
Broaden your reach by going niche. Use Facebook’s deep data insights to target subgroups within your target audience and give them the content they want. These are the followers who are most likely to become customers. If you would like to learn more about how to develop a marketing strategy for a niche audience click here.
