The fact is, not all prospects will be ready to purchase your product or service when they first see your brand in an advertisement. So, it’s important to understand where your audience sits in the sales cycle so you can target your messaging and placement accordingly.

If you read our last article on Cold, Warm and Hot audiences, you’d be familiar with how to categorise audiences in terms of their current level of sales interest. And, although customers that sit within the Cold Audience category may not have seen or engaged with you before, it’s still useful to put out the feelers by introducing them to your brand and adding value. But, it’s important to be strategic about who your Cold Audience is–it’s not about targeting everyone.

Want to increase your engagement on ads? You’re in luck.In this article, I’ll show you exactly how to create and save a Cold Audience segment to increase your engagement and return on investment.

How to create a Cold Audience

Let’s get straight into it. To create a Cold Audience segment, click on “All Tools” from your Facebook Business Manager. Then, click on “Audiences” followed by “Create a Saved Audience.”

Now, the advantage of creating a Saved Audience over jumping straight into creating a campaign is that you only have to create this audience once, which is useful in the future, as you can use this same audience again in multiple campaigns. This is as opposed to having to create this audience from scratch each time you create a new campaign.

As an example, if you wanted to create a campaign using the “Video Views” objective, as well as creating a campaign of “Website Clicks,” followed by another campaign objective of “Lead Generation,” you may use the Saved Audience feature to make the process easier.

In this example, I’m going to target small business owners located in Sydney who are also parents.

Locations

My first step is to set the location, which will be Sydney for this example. You’ll notice that you have the opportunity to refine this audience down to 10 miles or kilometres (depending on your location settings). You also have the option to refine this audience even further by dropping a pin. This feature brings the location to within one mile or one kilometre (depending on what’s available to you).

I’m going to set my location within 25 miles and any age demographic. You have the option to specify your audience even further, for example by language and gender, if necessary. But, for this example, that’s not required.

Demographics

Once you’ve set up your location, you can use the “Demographics” feature to refine your results and what you want to target. Things age, job titles and relationship status come into play here.

For this audience, I’m going to target “Parents” and click “All parents.” Upon doing this, you will find your audience will refine itself to a smaller potential reach. So, now our audience has decreased to 600,000 users, who are the potential reach of Facebook users that live within 25 miles of the Sydney CBD, aged 18 and over, and are parents. The refining of audiences to be more specific can be very beneficial. The more specific your audience, the more chance you have of targeting users who will be interested in your product or service. Just know it can’t be too small, otherwise Facebook’s ad algorithm won’t haven enough room to do its thing.

Behaviours

As I mentioned, this audience will focus on small business owners. So, we’re going to narrow down the audience I’ve created and search for “small business owner.” The first option shows under “Interest” which, in this case, is not the option you want to choose.

Why? Selecting this option does not target actual Small Business Owners, but instead targets those who have an interest in small businesses. It’s important to double check if what’ you’re searching for is the correct search category, as this can often be misread, meaning that you could reach the wrong target demographic and waste your ad dollars.

To find actual small business owners, look out for the term “behaviour” on the right-hand side. To do this, you can either search for “small business owners” and select the one that’s a behaviour, or navigate to it by clicking as per the video above.

Facebook describes small business owners (under the behaviour category) as, “People who list themselves as a small business owner or own a small business owner page.” This is the target to select, as it’s more relevant to your search.

Now, my potential reach here is 29,000 users. This is a great Cold Audience as it’s specific, thereby increasing my chances of engagement to get a better return on investment for my Facebook ad spend.

Want to warm up your Cold Audience?

Now you’ve created your Cold Audience, it’s time to turn up the heat and take your leads to the next level of engagement. Stay tuned, as we’re going to focus on Warm audiences next. You won’t want to miss it.

Have a question? Be sure to leave it below.