Whether you’re selling a brand new product/service or competing in a tough commoditised market, finding new audiences through Facebook has never been easier.

The best thing is that you don’t need a large media budget to do so; Facebook is always adding to the multitude of ways that advertisers can reach their ideal audience. Thanks to both the Power Editor and the Ad Create tool, advertisers have numerous new ways to target based on geography.

TARGET BY ADDRESS
When selecting the geographic location of your audience, you’ll notice
In short, you’ve been able to target by country, state/province, city and postcode for a while. But the latest addition enables targeting around an address.

I’ve decided to target people around Brighton in Melbourne
Note that I can use distances of 10, 25 and 50 miles (yes, Facebook is American!) as well as entering a custom number of miles.
This is essentially what you were otherwise able to do when running an awareness ad, targeting people within a certain radius around a business, but now you can choose to customise the precise address.

EXCLUDE BY LOCATION
You can also use address targeting for exclusion purposes.

Let’s say, for example, that I want to target anyone in Brighton except the eastern edge of the suburb. I could exclude everyone within 20 miles of Emerald, which includes the east side of Brighton.

EVERYONE IN THIS LOCATION
That’s all fairly straight forward. But the drop-down below gets interesting…

By default you’ll be targeting “everyone in this location.” That includes both people who live or were recently in the targeted area.

PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN THIS LOCATION
Maybe you don’t want to reach anyone who is simply visiting the area. You only want people who permanently live there.

In this case you will be reaching anyone whose home is in the selected area, presumably determined by Facebook profile information.


PEOPLE RECENTLY IN THIS LOCATION
Maybe you don’t want to target those living in the selected location, but instead you only want those who were recently there. You can do that now, too.

Facebook collects location data, whether you share it or not, which is undoubtedly the primary source of this information.

PEOPLE TRAVELING IN THIS LOCATION
At first blush, you’d think that “People traveling in…” and “People recently in…” would be the same thing. But there is an important difference.

Facebook knows where you live and they know your current location. They also know that your current location is more than 100 miles from your home.

There is likely cross-over between the two — those who are 100 miles away from home are also included in the “People recently in…” targeting. However, we’re simply zeroing in on those who are in a location that is far from home.

SETTING DEMOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Facebook allows you to target fairly precisely by location, and the same principals apply for targeting for demographics. Once you’ve set up your location parameters, you can now choose demographic information as well.

DEMOGRAPHICS INCLUDE
• Relationship
• Education
• Work
• Financial
• Home
• Ethnic Affinity
• Generation
• Parents
• Politics (US)
• Life Events

INTERESTS
• Business and industry
• Entertainment
• Family and relationships
• Fitness and wellness
• Food and drink
• Hobbies and activities
• Shopping and fashion
• Sports and outdoors
• Technology

BEHAVIOURS
• Behaviours
• Anniversary
• Automotive
• Consumer Classification
• Digital activities
• Expats
• Financial
• Job role
• Mobile Device User
• Purchase behaviour
• Seasonal and Events
• Travel

This enables a significant and fine grained level of targeting.

IN SUMMARY
Learning about different audiences and how they react your products, offers and marketing messages can provide you with extremely valuable information; information that can be used to help you build a better campaign before you take it to market on print, radio or TV.