This Simple But Powerful Ad Strategy Lets New Brands Find Their Customers

No audience yet? No problem!

One of the hardest things for new businesses is not knowing exactly who your audience might be.

Audience targeting is essential for Facebook ad success. But what if you don't even know who those people are yet?

If you've already done a ton of in-depth market research, or your company's been around long enough to get some significant data and feedback, you can get a pretty solid idea of exactly who is the most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

But what if you haven't, or you can't?

Without some demographic information to start with, it can be difficult or even impossible to launch a Facebook ad campaign without it falling on its face.

But, there's good news.

No matter how much of a shoestring budget you're on, inexpensive, accessible organic marketing channels can give you exactly the information you need about your audience — before you start putting your hard-earned money into Facebook ads.

The solution

There's only one solution and it's not pretty. The solution is…

You have to get known to your audience before you pour money into advertising.

Meaning you need to invest in organic channels — content or SEO or press and PR or sponsorships or events, what have you, anything that can get your brand name and the names of your product out there.

Brand advertising, in fact, can work for this. So television brand advertising, folks have noticed that TV brand advertising often drives the cost per click down and drives engagement and click-through rates up, because people have heard of you and they know who you are. Magazine and offline advertising works like this. Sometimes even display advertising can work this way.

The second option is to…

Advertise primarily or exclusively to an audience that already has experience with you.

The way you can do this is through systems like Google's retargeting and remarketing platforms. You can do the same thing with Facebook, through custom audiences of email addresses that you upload, same thing with Instagram, same thing with Twitter. You can target people who specifically only follow the accounts that you already own and control. Through these, you can get better engagement, better click-through rate, better conversion rate and drive down that cost per click and reach a broader audience.

But if you don't do these things first, a lot of times these types of investments fall flat on their face, and a lot of marketers, to be honest, and agencies and consultants lose their jobs as a result. I don't want that to happen to you. So invest in these first or find the niches where advertising can work for a first-time product. You're going to be a lot happier.

You can find more great advice on what to do — and especially what not to do — with Facebook ads in the full post from Moz.