The question
“Is there a way to target family-owned businesses on Facebook as opposed to startups?”
My answer
If I’m trying to find established businesses rather than people that are just starting their own business, I would use Facebook targeting. There’s a great way that helps you narrow audiences on Facebook.
Targeting interests
First, I would start by targeting interests that entrepreneurs would have. And there are so many different ones. For example, there are magazines, like Forbes, and different celebrities like Gary Vaynerchuk and Tony Robbins.
And then you can use a modifier that basically says “narrow audience further.” And one thing you could do because typically, an established business will probably make more money. It depends on whether Facebook is allowing this. It goes in and out. But sometimes you can target people that are in a certain income bracket.
Another way to target established businesses
Now, another and probably the better way to do this is to create content that startups would not be interested in, but established businesses would be interested in. I would create a video, maybe a 5-minute video, and it would explain a solution to a problem that a startup would not have, but an established business would have.
This video could be something about how to revive dead email lists, or how to get sales from clients that have not bought anything from you for 2 years. Pick something that has some sort of prerequisite.
Create a custom audience
Now go into the Facebook audience, into business.facebook.com, and create a custom audience. Your custom audience is going to be comprised of people that watched 25% or more of that video.
Then run that video as an ad. And, as I said, it’s 5 minutes long. So, if you’re running an ad targeting entrepreneurs, and you’re keeping track of the people that watch more than 25% of the video that startups would not care about, but established businesses would care about, you’re starting to filter these people out.
Build your list
And as you’re doing that, you’re basically building your list of people that are running established businesses while it’s eliminating a lot of the startup traffic. Then, when you want to run your other ads, just target that custom audience. This means simply targeting people that watch 25% of that video.
Create a lookalike audience
And once you have around 1000 people in your audience, you can create a lookalike audience and that’ll work even better. Technically, you can start by creating a lookalike audience with 100 people in your audience, but it works better with 1000 or more.
This strategy works really well. You can do it by basically targeting all entrepreneurs and then making sure that your content filters out the start-ups. So that’s 2 different ways to do it. Both work very well.
What I do
I do this type of strategy all the time when I’m trying to target personal injury attorneys. I’ll put up a video, “Here’s How Personal Injury Attorneys Can Get Car Accident Leads.” If you’re a divorce attorney, you’re probably not going to watch that video. So, I can basically just say anyone that watches 25% of that video is probably a personal injury attorney, and I’m going to target them with personal injury type content.
