How to Target Hispanics with Facebook Advertising
25 million Hispanics visit Facebook each month. That represents 74% of all online Hispanics. Given these figures, it is not surprising that countless brands and organizations use Facebook advertising to reach the nation’s largest minority group.
In this post, I’m going to share with you some of the insights I’ve gained firsthand by successfully targeting Hispanics on Facebook. Specifically, I’m going to show you how to use Facebook’s self-serve, cost per click based advertising platform called Marketplace.
Let’s assume we are trying to reach Spanish-preferring and bilingual Hispanics who are 18 years or older.
Define Objectives and Budget
It is imperative to first ask yourself what are you trying to accomplish and how will you measure success. Facebook advertising can be used to achieve several objectives, from branding and awareness, driving “likers” to a Facebook page, generating traffic to an external website or even direct response marketing. It is also important to set a budget and financial goals for the campaign and put the proper tracking in place to measure your success – that is, how much is your goal worth?
Establish a Target Audience
Facebook allows marketers to target audiences based on geographic, demographic, language and psychographic characteristics. Facebook’s targeting engine makes it easy and cost effective to reach various segments of the Hispanic online market.. Here are some simple targeting techniques you can use:
Location – Facebook allows marketers to target users on a national, state, city and zip code level. Location targeting give us immediate access to Hispanics as we know that certain DMA’s and zip codes have a high concentration of Hispanics from various countries of origin.
Demographics – Facebook allows us to target age and gender. We could choose younger cohorts in order to reach a large number of Hispanics, but for our campaign, let’s go with both men and women over 18.
Languages – Here is where it gets cool, Facebook advertising can be targeted to people in the United States who have chosen to use Facebook in Spanish. By selecting language = Spanish, we are able to reach almost 4 million Spanish-preferring Hispanics in the US.
Interests –Interest based targeting allows marketers to reach Facebook users based on the pages they like. This allows us to zero in on bilingual Hispanics, those that “like” Spanish language pages but use Facebook in English. Targeting those who use Facebook in English but like the pages of Spanish language media companies such as Univision, Telemundo, Televisa, CNN en Español and Azteca América yields an audience of nearly 700,000. If we add the Facebook pages of artists who predominantly cater to Latinos such as Wisin & Yandel, Don Omar, Ricardo Arjona, Juanes, Maná and Alejandro Fernandez, the audience grows to 1.2 million bilingual Hispanics.
Create Relevant Ads
Good ads are as important as targeting on Facebook. Facebook ads consist of a thumbnail image, a headline and a block of body copy. Make sure your ads are clear, compelling and call-to-action oriented. In our example above, we would use Spanish in the ads that would be targeted to the users who use Facebook in Spanish. For the bilingual group, we would likely test both Spanish and English ads. In terms of images, we have found that pictures of people tend to work best.
Launch and Optimize
Once you have defined your objectives, established your target audience and developed your ads, you are good to go, but once you launch your campaign you are only getting started. As with any online advertising tactic, Facebook advertising provides real time statistics on campaign performance. Be sure to monitor this closely and optimize your campaign to drive your objectives.