Ah, Facebook and Instagram. A staple to anyone’s social tool belt – plus a super convenient birthday reminder! But jokes aside, there’s no denying their powerful marketing capabilities. So this post is going to cover some best practices and a clutch geo-hack for how to target art buyers on Facebook.
But what is this “hack” you ask?
It’s called geotargeting and essentially means you’re targeting people based on a specific location or set of locations.
It’s a clever strategy, taking your art marketing to the next level.
But I also address some key points with paid ads and discuss digital marketing best practices.
Understanding the concepts in this post will be pivotal in your art marketing success.
Alright, enough small talk – let’s do this!
Outline
- Intro: Facebook Audiences, Targeting & The Geo-Hack
- Step 1: How to Target Art Buyers – Marketing 101
- Step 2: Building A Facebook Audience & Geotargeting Ideas
- Step 3: Launching & Monitoring A Campaign
- Step 4 Bonus: Setting Up Retargeting Ads For The Most Interested Prospects
- Conclusion
Introduction
Facebook Audiences, Targeting & The Geo-Hack
Both Facebook and Instagram offer incredible targeting opportunities for businesses, entrepreneurs and artists alike. In fact, Facebook alone boasts over 2.6 billion active users (Statista, 2020)!
So reaching your ideal target audience has never been easier.
But before we get into the nuts and bolts of Facebook targeting, let’s first cover some basics.
All Facebook targeting requires that we first build out an audience, which the platform offers 3 different types to choose from.
Saved Audiences
Generally cold traffic & new prospects
Targeting is built around interest-based parameters, geography, gender and other demographic data
Custom Audiences
Used for retargeting and reaching existing customers
This is retargeting people who know you/your brand, such as website visitors, email list subscribers, people who’ve engaged with a previous post and more
Lookalike Audiences
Uses existing data from custom audiences to build a similar, lookalike group of people who share similar attributes
A very useful cold traffic targeting strategy that leverages the power of the Facebook algorithm and automation
For this post, we’ll be using saved audiences for geotargeting.
I briefly introduced geotargeting at the start of this post, but let’s dig a little deeper.
Geotargeting is a strategy that adjusts your targeting to a specific location or set of locations.
This type of targeting is especially popular for certain businesses, such as brick and mortar shops wanting to track foot traffic.
But it can be applied in numerous other clever ways as well.
Ultimately, this can help you reach art prospects based on specific geographic parameters – rather than just interest-based targeting.
We’ll explore the specifics of this strategy below, but first let’s do a little more housekeeping.
There are some important things we need to first establish to take full advantage of geotargeting – and digital marketing in general.
Namely, defining our target audience, objective and content strategy.
Step 1: How to Target Art Buyers - Marketing 101
Knowing Your Audience, The Truth About Paid Ads & Adding Value VS Selling
One of the first actions of a digital marketing campaign is to clearly establish who we’re trying to reach and to what ends.
Knowing how to target art buyers starts with knowing exactly who you want to reach.
Art is diverse so you want to ensure you’re reaching people that will appreciate your art.
We do this by clearly identifying our ideal target market.
Although everyone will have a different target market that fits within their art niche, there are a few interest-based parameters that could be applied across the board.
General Interest-Based Targeting Ideas for Artists
- People interested in art/art collection
- People who like pages related to famous artists similar to your style
- Famous artists similar to your style
- People who like a specific style of art, such as abstract or modern art
- Engaged Buyers
- This targets people who have recently made a purchase on Facebook or Instagram, meaning they’re more likely to buy something again
- People interested in online shopping
After applying some general targeting parameters, we want to then niche down and focus on our particular, well, niche.
For example, if your art appeals to boaters or a coastal living lifestyle, you should add these details to your audience targeting.
Likewise, if your work is inspired by coffee, reaching coffee lovers would an important layering to add.
This is how we target art buyers on Facebook – by knowing our niche and customizing ads for them.
We can explore and find interest-based targeting details easily within the Audiences section of the Facebook Business Manager.
I’ll talk a bit more about interest-based targeting below, so let’s shift focus a bit and talk about campaign objectives.
Your marketing objective will guide your content, messaging and overall marketing strategy.
To define your objective, you have to ask yourself exactly what it is you’d like to achieve.
This is kind of a “yea, duh” explanation, but bear with me.
Your objective does not always need be for sales or conversions.
And this is that truth about paid ads I mentioned in the heading.
The Truth About Paid Ads
People need multiple points of contact before taking an action – especially on Facebook, when they are not in a buyer’s mindset.
So if we’re targeting cold traffic (people who don’t know you or your art yet), then we shouldn’t expect to make sales on the first go.
We’ll likely need to implement retargeting strategies.
This just means we send followup ads to everyone who showed the most interest in the first campaign.
For example, let’s say you made a video ad documenting the process of your new artwork.
Then at the end of the video, you have a call to action inviting the viewer to buy the artwork.
That’s a pretty cool idea.
But most people probably won’t buy – at least not at first.
So in this scenario, we would want to send retargeting ads to everyone most interested in your video. That is, everyone who watched most of the ad (over 50%).
We can apply these targeting parameters with Facebook.
So each time someone is reminded of your artwork and they engage with that new ad, you’re essentially pushing them closer to a purchase.
Conversions and sales will likely require retargeting ads or reaching an audience that already knows your brand and trusts you.
Check out the bonus section below for more on retargeting!
Retargeting means you’re using a sales funnel model.
This will go a long way in organizing the complex buying journey, so you’re only spending ad money on prospects who are actually interested in your art.
But let’s not forget, there are many other objectives to consider with paid marketing.
For example, lead generation, brand awareness, reach and video views are all powerful ways to reach new customers.
This is building brand, trust and authority, making sales down the road much easier.
Building brand, trust and authority is done by adding value.
We should be in a sell, sell, sell mindset.
Rather, a give first, ask later approach is best if you’re targeting new customers.
So what is value?
Value can be something that’s entertaining, educational, inspiring or some combination of these.
For example, a lead generation objective could simply be you offering some type of free value to your target audience.
This is a lead magnet offer and is effective because is focuses on relationship building.
An offer is something your end consumer should find enticing, personalized and actually helpful.
Ideally, it will solve some specific problem your audience is facing or provide a quick win for them.
This is value.
Value-Adding Ideas for Artists to Explore
- Home Design Or Decor Tips
- Before/After Design/Home Decor Case Studies
- A Personal, Emotion Driven Story Of Your Art
- For example, here’s how my abstract pet paintings give pet owners something to hold on to after their furry kids are gone
- Ways To Improve Office Settings & Employee Motivation Through Art
- Art’s Effect on Emotional Well-Being, Motivation, etc.
- How Big Should Wall Art Be?
- How To Make A Dated Space Feel More Modern
- Bathroom Art Versus Living Room Art
- How To Make A Cottage Or Home Feel Vintage/Boho-chic/etc.
- Getting a Farmhouse Chic Feel Through Art Without Breaking The Bank
All the examples above would be perfect ways to introduce prospects to you and your brand while not going in too quickly for a sale.
Remember, this approach fosters a relationship.
OK so once you have your offer, objective and targeting down, what’s next?
Well, now it’s time to decide how we want to package our offer. This is where a content strategy comes into play.
For example, are you using a video format or linking to a landing page or a helpful blog article?
Or perhaps you want to package your offer around something more engaging like an online quiz.
And relevant for discussion here, how does your art relate to the specific geolocation you’ll be targeting?
For example, if you’re reaching people who recently visited the modern art museum, was there an exhibit there that featured artwork similar to yours?
In the end, understanding these basic tenets are crucial and highly useful for understanding how to target art buyers.
Your future marketing efforts will thank you!
Now on to the good stuff: building saved audiences and geotargeting.
Step 2
Building A Facebook Audience & Geotargeting Ideas
The basic idea behind geotargeting for artrepreneurs is to reach potential customers who recently visited places that align with your art style or objectives.
But before will explore this, let’s look at building a basic saved audience.
Step 1: Go to Audiences inside your Ads Manager.
Step 2: Click on Create Audience, choosing Saved Audience.
Step 3: Scroll down to detailed targeting and type in some ideas. Check out the Narrow Audience & Suggestions tabs for more inspiration.
Step 4: Snoop around & explore! Try making some audiences!
Pretty simple! But here’s a little more information:
- Start filling in detailed targeting by typing a seed interest
- Using suggestions tab is great to explore ideas but also layers your interests, making your audience more niche
- Use the narrow audience and exclude features to further “niche down” your targeting
- Keep an eye on your audience size – not too small, but not too big (read more here)
OK, so there’s your crash course on building a saved audience! Now let’s talk about geotargeting more and how to do that.
A good first step is to have some basic ideas of the type of location targeting you’d like to do.
Let’s look at some location ideas worth exploring.
Geo-Targeting Location Ideas for Artists
- Art Museums
- Stores That Sell Art
- Art Galleries
- Framing Stores
- Fabrics & Crafts Stores
- Find Stores, Businesses & Locations That Match Your Art Style
- For example, if your art would fit within a boho-chic design, consider hotels, vacation spots and stores that appeal to that style
- Or would your artwork match the style of somewhere like World Market, Edra or maybe even a boating/cottage/lake-themed shop?
The idea here is people who have visited these places are likely interested in art and potentially interesting in buying art (especially for places like art galleries).
So once you identify some places, you can further pivot to a local market to keep things customized and organized.
For example, a collection of specific art galleries in a specific city.
We can also narrow our geotargeting by choosing from Everyone in this location, People recently in this location or People traveling to this location.
Although testing is always great, choosing the option that simply makes the most sense is a good start.
For example, People recently in this location if you’re geotargeting a museum location would make sense.
But choosing everyone who lives here for locations next a beach would suit an artist who has a lot of beach-inspired products.
With location targeting, we can target based on country, state, city, ZIP code, DMA (designated market area) or business address.
This last one is especially interesting for us. Being able to use specific locations allows for highly customized marketing and niche targeting.
So play around with this and get creative – there are endless possibilities!
Recommended Read: Facebook Geotargeting: Why and How You Should Use It (Connect.io)
Step 3
Launching & Monitoring A Campaign
OK so admittedly, a few steps were skipped – such as preparing creatives, getting your messaging right and building out the actual campaign.
Unfortunately, covering every one of those steps would make this post way too long.
So I’ll put a link at the end of this section if you’d like to read up on those parts more!
Once we do have everything ready, launching and monitoring the actual campaign would be the next step.
This is done by simply hitting the Publish button in your Ads Manager.
However, it can take some time for ads to get approved.
So just stay patient during this waiting period – especially if your account is new, which can prompt manual reviews as well.
Once your ads go live, you’ll start getting data and (hopefully) some engagement.
It’s important that you do not change anything or make any edits to your ads for at least 3 days.
This initial launch period is when the Facebook algorithm will go out and start optimizing your targeting and ads, finding the best subset of people to show your ads to.
Making changes to soon can interfere with this process.
So only make changes (edits, pausing under-performing ads and scaling better performing ones by raising the budget) every few days.
Alright, so once these initial ads get some steam and data behind them, what’s next? In one word: retargeting.
Recommended Read: How To Build A Facebook Ad Campaign
Step 4 Bonus
Setting Up Retargeting Ads For The Most Interested Prospects
I’ve brought up retargeting a few times in this post.
It’s definitely the bread and butter to a modern marketer’s paid strategy.
In fact, it can take up to 7 points of contact or impressions with a new brand before a prospect takes an action or makes a conversion!
So remarketing campaigns should be a vital component to your art marketing strategy. I won’t go into a full tutorial here, so I’ll leave a link at the end of this section.
But let’s dig a little deeper.
Retargeting promotes a sales funnel approach by building upon and strengthening relationships with the most engaged audiences.
By sending out customized retargeting ads, we’re essentially pushing prospects gently through the buyer’s journey.
And the degree of retargeting available can get really granular!
For example, we can retarget everyone who clicked on your first post, landed on your landing page offer, but never took any action.
Likewise, we can retarget anyone who viewed more than 50% of an initial video ad, but never clicked on the link or took any action.
So as you can see, a customized retargeting strategy is a great way to scale and increase your chances for a conversion.
Recommended Read 1: A Foolproof Guide To Facebook Retargeting
Recommended Read 2: Creative Marketing Strategies: How-To Guide For Video-Views Retargeting
Conclusion
This post showed important tips and a guide for reaching art buyers using Facebook ads and its powerful targeting features. We reviewed an overlooked geotargeting hack to give your ads a unique edge.
Topics related to monitoring your campaigns and the importance of creating retargeting ads were also visited. Although I couldn’t provide full tutorials for these concepts, useful links were provided.
As you start building Facebook ads and exploring the various features available, just remember the importance of testing, reading the data and adding value to the end consumer.
After, at the end of the day, that’s what matters most: what unique value can I add to the end consumer and how can I help them.
Thanks so much for stopping by today! Let me know in the comments of any questions you may have! Have you ever tried Facebook ads before?
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