How to Reach Your Ideal Attendees With Facebook Targeting

Whether you’re a bridal show that wants more local attendees or an international music festival looking for a global fanbase, your first step to reaching your potential attendees is by building your Saved Audience.

Facebook’s built-in Saved Audiences feature allows you to reach potential ticket-buyers based on their interests, behaviours, demographics, and location. This is the most basic way to target ads on Facebook. And the criteria you set within them is largely used to refine the other two types of audiences.

Saved Audiences: What are they?

Saved Audiences are the default targeting method for Facebook ads. To create your Saved Audience, you specify the types of people you want to reach, taking advantage of Facebook’s native targeting criteria. The criteria you select from includes:

• Interests: People’s hobbies, favorite activities, and favorite sources of entertainment. For example, if you’re hosting a beer festival, you might include people who list beer brands in their interests.

• Behaviour: Device usage and purchase behaviours. If you’re hosting a tech conference, you might target people who have the latest models of devices or complex purchasing behaviours.

• Demographics: Traits like age, gender, relationship status, education, and job titles. A leadership workshop might want to target individuals who have “manager” or “director” in their job title.

• Location Where people live (for example, your event’s city or neighbouring cities).

Saved Audiences: Why they matter

Once you define your Saved Audience, Facebook can serve your ads in the feeds of people who fit those criteria. Here’s how you can tailor your Saved Audience targeting:

• Make the net of people you hope to target as broad or granular as you want

• Target all Facebook users that fit certain criteria in a particular geographic radius

• Create multiple audiences to target within any one campaign — you might target a larger demographic locally and a more narrow one nationally, for instance

Once you define your parameters, your Saved Audience will be the foundation from which you build out other audiences.

Saved Audiences: How to use them

Through Facebook’s Ad Manager, create a name for your Saved Audience, choose parameters, and save this audience. You can even denote subsets of your demographic that you do not want to target.

Notice that Facebook provides a handy meter, which lets you know if your audience is too narrow or too broad. Try to hit that “defined” sweet spot where your audience is targeted, but not so targeted that you aren’t delivering many impressions.

While it’s important to retain your most loyal attendees, the only way to grow your event is to help others discover your event. It stands to reason that your potential attendees might have qualities in common with the ones you already have. So instead of paying to promote your event to millions of uninterested people, target those most likely to attend using Lookalike Audiences.

Lookalike Audiences: What they are

Using Facebook’s matching algorithms and custom audience tools, create an audience that looks like your known audience. Facebook will find other users who are demographically and behaviourally similar to those you already have on your list.

For instance, you can create Lookalike Audiences that are similar to your website visitors, email subscribers, or existing ticket buyers. These are people who are statistically likely to be interested in your event.

Lookalike Audiences: Why they matter

Retargeting ads attract those who’ve already heard of your event or interacted with your brand. But to expand beyond this limited audience, you need to find new people to target. That’s where Lookalike Audiences come in.

Lookalike Audiences: How to use them

In Ads Manager, look for Custom Audiences you’ve already saved (or create a new one). Check the one you want to mimic, then select “Actions” and “Create Lookalike.” You can choose a geographic region to target, and decide how wide of a range you’d accept. A narrow range will give you a smaller audience, but a closer match.