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How to Choose Your Audience

Audience: There's an audience size estimation to the right indicating the total number of people in your target audience. This is the total number of people your ad will have the opportunity to reach if your bid and budget are high enough.

Location, Age and Gender: Choose the basic demographics of the audience you want to reach.

Precise Interests: Choose specific interests that are important to your audience. These are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

Broad Categories: Select broader groups of people, based on their Activities (ex: Cooking), Family Status (ex: Parents) or Music genres (ex: Alternative). These are determined by what people are connected to on Facebook, such as Pages and apps.

Connections: Select your audience based on whether or not they’re connected to any of your Pages, apps or events. Anyone who has a friend connected to what you're advertising will see their friend included in your ad. This can increase the likelihood that they'll find your ad relevant enough to click or engage with it.

Keep in mind that selecting multiple options for Connections will limit your audience to people who only fall under each parameter. For example, if you wish to target your Fans and Friends of Fans, you will need to do so using two separate ads, one for Fans and one for Friends of Fans. Selecting both parameters for one ad will target only users who are Fans and have friends who are Fans.

There are also Advanced Targeting Options that allow a bit more targeting:

Advanced Targeting Options

Click See Advanced Targeting Options to see more ways you can target your audience.

Interested In and Relationship Status: Select the sexual preference of your audience (for people who have indicated this preference on Facebook) and the relationship status relevant for your campaign (ex: Engaged). Not everyone lists a Relationship status on Facebook, so the only way to target everyone is to select All.

Languages: Target a specific spoken language within your target audience.

Education Select the education level or your desired audience (ex: In College).

Workplaces: Select the workplace of your desired audience (for users who have indicated this on Facebook).

By selecting the demographics that are most likely to respond to your ad, you’ll save money and increase your response.

Remember, the more specific you are about your market, the fewer people will see your ad... but this is a good thing! You don’t want to reach millions of people You want to reach the exact people who are most likely to respond to your ad.

Remember, you’re paying for impressions (CPM) with most advertising options. That means you pay for every single person who sees your ad, whether they act on it or not. Why pay for impressions from people who probably won’t be interested in what you have to offer?

Campaign Selection

You can either create a new campaign or add to an existing campaign. If this is your first ad, you’ll need to create a new campaign. Otherwise, you could just add the new ad to an existing campaign, however you’ll want to keep campaigns separate for different pages, products, websites, etc. so you can easily find specific ads later.

When you name your campaign, make sure it’s something you can easily remember. The campaign name will not be visible to anyone but you.

Campaign Scheduling

You can choose one of two options for scheduling:

Run my campaign continuously starting today - This will run your ad constantly after it’s approved.

Set a start date and end date - This will let you choose a specific timeframe for your ad. This is a good option if you want to run a limited time promotion.

Campaign Budget

How much you spend depends on your daily budget. You can choose a per day budget if you want your campaign to run continuously. If you want a campaign with a start and end date, you’ll choose a lifetime budget.

If you choose a daily budget, your ad will run each day until the budget is depleted for that day. If you choose a lifetime budget, the system will pace your campaign to account for that particular budget.

Ebook Sample Content Preview:

By some considerable margin, First Kiss remains one of the most viewed viral videos, with over 70 million views within its first month of release. The film's director, Tatia Pllieva combined a gamut of emotions- curious, awkward, coy, tentative and gauche- to create a passionate three-minute montage involving 20 strangers kissing for the first time.

Director Pllieva brought together 20 young -or mostly young- strangers, all good looking, gay and straight, to kiss each other for the first time, and what ensued was a compilation of adorable elementary reactions in adults who found themselves in a slightly awkward but exciting situation. The heart races for most of the participants as they tentatively attempt to make small talk, each person wondering if they should make the first move, most are embarrassed by try to conceal it with laughter; but all this sort of fades away when their lips meet.

The partners are seen exploring the kiss and slowly turning it into a mushy, passionate chemistry that most people long for, and which can happen to anyone, with anyone, and at any time. The video was shot entirely in black and white and it seems to trigger nostalgia and longing, instead of discomfort.

Now, think any of this was luck? No. It was the careful manufacture of content married to extensive and rigid research and an artfully plotted strategy. You may have seen videos of sneezing panda cubs or cute cats doing the rounds online and when properly executed, these videos are hugely successful because they pique at people's emotions.

I would like a viral video!

Every brand wants their videos to go viral but of course most of them go largely unnoticed. The key to driving engagement and sharing of your video is to target specific emotions, and really tug on that leash. Most marketers understand this and some manage to make memorable videos but there's always the challenge of blending those emotions in a way that causes the right effect.

Next time you want to make a marketing video for your brand, consider these factors:

1. Emotional appeal

As Bruce Lee once said so memorably, 'We need emotional content'. If a video makes you feel happy, shocked, angry, tearful, etc, it has great potential to achieve multiple shares. Strong emotional reactions are what marketers go for but like your marketing professor always said, it's best to keep things positive. Videos that cause positive reactions are more likely to get shared than say, a video that causes anger or disgust.

Most of the videos getting millions of shares across multiple social media platforms all elicit strong emotional reactions. Whether these emotions are positive or not, you have to really nail it. Budweiser nailed it with their Puppy Love commercial during the 2014 Super Bowl. Its a perfect example of a super shareable video, involving love, friendship, the cutest puppy ever, and a happy ending that pulls at your heartstrings.

They got a mix of emotions and worked them into a lovely commercial; but, like most viral ads, they don't scream Budweiser throughout the ad, in fact, the brand only shows up at the end of the ad, where it then closes with a clever hash tag #BestBuds.

3. Humor

Humor plays a huge role in making videos go viral. Of course the content varies and what makes one person crack up tends to be subjective, but generally, some things are simply funny. Watch a few ads containing humor, such as Old Spice's 'The Man Your Man Could Smell Like' ad, or that other one, 'Gangnam Style' by Psy.

These videos can be shared across all demographics, because they appeal to just about everyone. That's the power of humor; it appeals to a wider audience and if the video makes people laugh, it will be shared.

4. Children and animals

For some reason children and animals, whether used together in a video or respectively, they really take over the Internet. It could be because it's harder to script a video involving kids or animals- because they're harder to control- or because they are naturally funny, cute and genuine.

Whatever the reason, videos such as Charlie Bit My Finger or Otters Holding Hands are Internet sensations because they are either funny or cute.

5. Parody

Dozens of brands have parodied popular videos for their own agenda and in some cases, they experience great success. Miley Cyrus' Wrecking Ball video for example, has been parodied hundreds of times by individuals and brands, but of course it helps that the singer has millions of followers and she's naked on the original video.

Videos that allude to popular culture in funny, silly or outrageous ways have great potential to go viral. Kanye West's video for Bound 2 is one example. The video is so idiculous it caused an Internet sensation and resulted in multiple parodies, done by different people across the world, including one by Seth Rogen and another one by James Franco.

Why are emotions so important?

Digging into this whole concept of using emotional content in video

advertising, a study was conducted by Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, in an effort to understand how emotions play a role in medial social sharing. After analyzing 355 billion videos from a popular video distribution channel and analytics platform, Karen Nelson-Field, senior researcher at the institute found that videos that triggered strong emotions from the viewers, positive or negative, were twice as likely to be shared across social media as those that contained a somber message.

The study also looked into the various emotions that ensued from people watching the videos, and they found that positive emotions- mainly exhilaration- were the most effective in triggering sharebility. The second positive emotion was found to be hilarity, and as marketers have discovered, these emotions help viewers remember the the video- and they hope, the brand.

While emotions are universal, you also need to remember that different people respond differently to specific kinds of emotions. Strong emotions tend to cause subjective reactions so understand your audience well when developing the video. If you keep their emotional baseline in mind, it should help make the video useful for your brand.

Video marketing can do wonders for your brand, but it takes considerable effort to pull all these elements together and create a system that works. Few people get it right the first time; even experienced marketers make blunders when strategizing on a marketing campaign, but there's always another angle to explore, a new opportunity to reach people, so failure shouldn't hold you back.