Does your business serve a specialized customer base?

Wondering how to reach specific niche audiences with Facebook ads?

Explore a strategy for retargeting specialized audiences using Google ads in combination with Facebook ads.

Why Combine Google Ads With Facebook?

Early on, Shane and Jocelyn discovered a lot of the marketing advice available online didn’t work for educators like elementary school librarians, history teachers, and football coaches. Marketers with a business focus can target the Facebook page of Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, or somebody with a million followers, because their fans are all entrepreneurs.

However, when you sell something like Civil War battlefield crossword puzzles, it’s more difficult to find interested people on Facebook because that audience doesn’t typically like or follow a page that reflects that specific interest. You may be able to target and find teachers; however, their specialty could be algebra, and math teachers have no interest in librarians’ material.

The Strategy

Start where your customers are searching for solutions to their problem. Shane and Jocelyn use Google, but your customers may be elsewhere. For instance, if you sell guitar lesson plans, you may want to buy ads on a forum for guitar players.

In Google, set up an ad based on your target keywords. The plan is to drive traffic to a page where you give something away. In your ad, offer something to solve people’s immediate search problem and emphasize that the item is free. On the giveaway page, eliminate any friction for getting the promised item.

How to Research Keywords

The power is in long-tail keywords. You need to be very specific.

Teachers looking for Civil War lesson plans can’t simply search for “Civil War.” A lot of people look up the Civil War online, so Shane needs keywords that exclude people with a general interest in the topic and zero in on teachers looking for classroom materials. He uses keywords like “Civil War crossword puzzle” or “Abraham Lincoln worksheet.”

Similarly, a football coach can’t just use “football,” because that will generate results for football fans. To find coaches, Shane uses keywords such as “quarterback footwork drills” or “defensive back drills.”

The Next Step on Facebook

The Facebook ads should be designed to give your avatar the next step in whatever product you’re selling in exchange for an email address. So you need to know their calendar.

For example, after teachers cover the Civil War, they’ll likely teach the Spanish-American War or World War I. They’ll see an ad that says something like, “You just had a great time with our Civil War lesson. Click here to get a free World War I lesson plan.” They need to opt in to get it. Then Shane can let his internal email autoresponder sell them his yearlong program.

The content flow will depend on the niche. An entrepreneur may send out a goal-setting guide in January and follow up with a sales funnel course to help readers reach their business goals.