A Big Challenge Made Easy

Facebook has a long history of delivering phenomenal results for businesses wanting exponential growth. However, for a variety of reasons, advertising on Facebook has recently become hypercompetitive where the prices for cost per click, cost per impression and cost per acquisition have gone through the roof.

Digital marketers are now struggling to find profitable audiences beyond the ones that normally work for their product category. And with these audiences also saturating faster than ever, the challenge of quickly identifying high-potential interests that can be used for targeting has never been greater.

Normally, to find new audiences, digital marketers have to use complicated processes to discover direct and indirect interests. These include customer surveys, customer interviews and qualitative analysis, all of which takes significant time and effort along with reasonable respondents in order to make an informed conclusion.

This is why Alavi Insights is a gamechanger for digital marketers. It helps you quickly find interests, behaviors and demographics from Facebook’s database that have a connection to your current customers. This means that research times are significantly reduced while accuracy is significantly increased as research no longer has to be done manually.

Start Researching

The insights found from audience research not only let you understand your customers better but also help you build personas for optimizing your brand’s customer journey. Once you discover your customer cohorts and their characteristics, you can personalize every touch point on the way to a conversion.

For most Alavi users, audience research is done for a variety of tasks, including finding new audiences for Facebook ad campaigns, topics for content marketing and SEO, online/offline engagement campaigns based on what a brand’s customers like, sponsoring TV shows or celebrities based on customer preferences, and learning from what best-in-class competitors are doing.

To start doing audience research with Alavi Insights, just use one of the methods mentioned below. Please note that to see data for My Customers, My Fans, Age & Gender, and Highest Overlap, you need to connect Alavi to your brand’s Facebook account, which you can do using one of the links provided on the product.

Method 1: Industry-based Topics

In the Alavi Insights Search Bar, enter topics related to your industry. For example, a fashion and apparel brand could use ‘fashion’, ‘dresses’ or ‘clothing’. A cosmetics company might try ‘skin care’, ‘hair’, or ‘face’. We suggest starting with well-known topics and then exploring results to identify more topic options. Doing this can help you find 100’s relevant interests, behaviors, or demographics.

Method 2: Product Categories or Product Names

Often, the most profitable audiences are based on interests related to product categories or product names. For example, for a food & beverage company, categories could be ‘juices’, ‘sodas’ and ‘snacks’ while products would be ‘iced tea’, ‘lemonade’ and ‘potato chips’. Start by using your brand’s categories or names as search topics in Alavi. You can also use categories from your competitors (or major brands in your industry) by looking at their website’s navigation. From example, on the Asos site, categories include ‘shoes’, ‘sportwear’, or ‘accessories’.

Method 3: Talk to Customers + Check Out Their Social Profiles

As they say, the ‘customer is king’, so speak to a few of yours to understand which products they like the most and what their lifestyle is. A survey may also work but speaking often reveals more insights, especially indirect interests, like a furniture company finding out many of their customers liked reading. Indirect interests can be excellent topics to use in searches on Alavi because they can lead to targeting options that competitors haven’t thought of going after.

Another way to learn about what your customers are engaging with is to browse their social profiles (a lot of information can be found on a Facebook profile even without becoming a friend). For example, a t-shirt company saw that several of their customers liked a specific movie. This movie was then used as a search topic on Alavi, which helped them discover a variety of movies their customers were engaging resulting in many potential targeting options.

Method 4: Identify Trending Topics

Before doing a search on Alavi, try to identify trends related to your industry using a service like Google Trends. For example, a fashion brand found ‘fashion week’ was trending and, using Alavi, was able to get multiple interests related to the trend for targeting on Facebook as well as personalizing the customer experience.

Method 5: Seasonal Topics

Seasonal buying patterns impact every business. With Alavi, you can prepare for them early and get a head start by identifying potential audiences and reaching out to them before your competitors. Seasonal search topics that may apply to you are Valentines, Christmas, Ramadan, Easter Sunday, or Black Friday. There are also seasonal events specific to your country and those should be searched for too.

Method 6: Use Competitors or Brands as a Search Topic

Do a search in Alavi for your competitor and, if Facebook recognizes the brand as an interest (which it unfortunately does not always do), you will be able to see all the interests Facebook associates with it.  

Method 7: Best Performing Interests and Keywords from Your Facebook and  Google Search Campaign

Identify the interests that are performing well in your Facebook campaigns and the keywords that are performing well in your Google Search Campaigns. Use these as search topics in Alavi to identify high-potential related/alternative audiences. For example, ‘gifts’ was getting good returns on Google Search for a flower company. Using Alavi, they were able to find related interests to target on Facebook.

Summary

Identifying what your customers are most engaged with can help you deliver a more unique brand experience. It can also bring in new customers when it is used for targeting. This is why audience research is now more important than ever. With Alavi, you can instantly get insights about your customers without having to do expensive and time-consuming research. It can help you be more dynamic and get you the competitive advantage you need.

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