How to target wealthy Facebook users
Targeting the right audience is crucial to having a profitable Facebook advertising campaign. There are generally two benefits of targeting the right audience:
- Better conversion rate – Targeting a relevant audience that is likely to be interested in your product or service will help to improve the conversion rate of your ads. This means less of your ad budget is being put towards users who are not going to purchase your product or service.
- Better engagement rate – By targeting the right audience who are more likely to be interested in your ad, you’re likely to get a better engagement rate. A higher engagement rate will help to bring down your click prices. This means you can buy more traffic for your budget.
Before setting up any Facebook campaign, you need to understand your customers, their likes, dislikes and general persona. When you have this information, you can match these up with the targeting options available to you in the Facebook ads manager. A specialist PPC agency or PPC consultant should be able to help with this.
Once you know your target market’s persona, the next step is to look at the plethora of targeting options on Facebook in order to create the right audience for your campaign. Businesses selling up-market or premium-priced products would expect to see poorer conversion rates from users who are less affluent. Therefore, it may be more profitable for them to try to get their ads in front of a wealthier audience. If you’re trying to get your products in front of a wealthier audience, then your options will vary depending on whether you’re trying to target people based in the US or outside of the US.
How to target wealthy people in the US
Targeting affluent users in the US is a little simpler than targeting wealthy users in other countries. Facebook allows advertisers to target people based on the average household income of their zip code. There are four income levels that you can target:
- Top 5% of ZIP codes
- Top 10% of ZIP codes
- Top 10% – 25% of ZIP codes
- Top 25% – 50% of ZIP codes
One thing to bear in mind is that the above income targeting options are not available for housing, employment and credit ads.
How to target wealthy people outside the US
If you’re trying to target people based outside of the US, your only option is to try to target the persona of a wealthy person. When you’re building your audience, you should be aware that not everybody in the list that you target will fall into the ‘wealthy’ category. However, the key is to create a list where you’re likely to find a lot of wealthy people in. For example, not everyone who owns the latest and most expensive phone is likely to be wealthy, but wealthy people are very unlikely to own a cheap phone. You could, therefore, choose to layer on top of your audience list, people who own an expensive phone.
Make sure you layer audiences lists on top of each other to improve your targeting. When creating your audience list, Facebook allows you to target anyone who falls into any of the audience lists that you choose. You can also tell Facebook to show ads to anyone who falls within two different audience lists
Here are five suggestions of targeting options that you could try in order to target wealthy people who are likely to be interested in your products.
1. Lookalike audience of your converters
One of the easiest options is to create a lookalike audience of your previous website converters and let Facebook’s algorithms do all the heavy lifting for you. Facebook will look at the persona of the people who have converted on your website and will try to target people similar to them. Facebook has a wealth of data on its users, and I often find that using a lookalike targeting strategy works well.
Note that this strategy will only work if your website currently gets traffic from wealthy people.
I would recommend that you start by creating a 1% lookalike audience as this will tell Facebook to target an audience that it thinks is only 1% different from your past converters. The general advice given is that if the 1% lookalike audience performs well, then you can scale your advertising budget by targeting a 2% lookalike audience and then further expand.
One issue to be aware of with creating lookalike audiences is that they generally perform better when they have more data to work off. So, if you don’t have a lot of conversion data, then the performance of your lookalike audience may be poor. This is because Facebook’s algorithms won’t have a lot of data to build a lookalike audience around.
2. Target affluent job titles
If someone has a job that pays very well, then they’re likely to be wealthy. For example, a call centre representative or taxi driver is not expected to be very wealthy. However, the CEO of a company or a business owner is more likely to be wealthy. Therefore, think about the job titles that pay well and target them. For example, you could choose to target people with the job title of ‘Small Business Owner’ or ‘Owner and Founder’.
To target by Job title, when creating your targeting options, click on Demographics, Work, Job Titles and then input the job title that you want to target. If Facebook has a particular job title in its system, then it will appear, and you will be able to target it.
One of the issues that you will come across with this method is that there are many job titles that Facebook just doesn’t have in its targeting criteria.
Also, Facebook’s job title search option can be quite picky with the words that you search for. For example, one of the job titles that it allows you to target is Owner and Founder. However, if you search for Owner, Facebook doesn’t find any job titles. If you search for Founder, then it does find the Owner and Founder job title.
3. Target affluent locations
There are certain locations within the UK, where people tend to be richer and more affluent. If you can find locations where the wealthier people live, then you can target only those locations. To do this, you will need to do some research to find the most affluent areas.
As a starting point, if you’re looking to target people in the UK, then you may choose to target London as it contains a good number of millionaires. Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham are also wealthy cities that you could target. Windsor is known to be the wealthiest town in the UK.
4. Frequent international travellers
Everybody wants to go on a holiday abroad. Often, we just don’t have the finances for it. A wealthy person is more likely to be able to afford to travel overseas frequently. A less wealthy person may be able to travel abroad, but if someone travels abroad regularly, then there is a good chance that they are doing quite well financially.
Luckily Facebook has an audience list to target people who frequently travel internationally. When creating your Facebook targeting criteria, under the detailed targeting option, search for and select ‘Frequent International Travelers’. It can also be found by looking in the Travel subcategory which is under the Behaviours category.
5. Exclude the persona of non-rich people
Finally, a good strategy that I like to layer on top of whatever audience personas I target is to add in audience lists to block out. If you’re trying to target wealthy people, then think about the persona of the people who are the exact opposite of them and exclude them. It can be challenging to build a list that will only target wealthy people. However, with this method, you can take steps to reduce the number of not as wealthy people that get served your ad. Think about the targeting options you have available to you and match them up with the general persona of people who are likely to be poor.
For example, very wealthy people are not likely to live in a rented home, own an old model mobile phone or be living with a flatmate. You can, therefore, block these audiences out so that Facebook doesn’t show them your ads.
A good place to start is to take each of the previous targeting suggestions to target affluent people and apply them to poorer people. For example, someone who works as a call centre representative, loan advisor or a taxi service employee is most likely not going to be affluent enough for you to target. You can choose to exclude these people from your advertising campaign. Similarly, a wealthy person is not likely to own a cheap phone. So, you can block out people who own phones that are quite cheap to purchase or old.
Here are some areas that you could look at when thinking of personas to block out:
- Aged under 21
- University students
- Living with flatmates
- In rented homes
- Owns an old model or cheap mobile phone
- Low paid job titles
- Interested in stores marketed towards less affluent people (e.g. Home Bargains, Primark, Aldi etc.)
Wrapping up
Targeting a wealthy audience can be tricky as it requires thinking of the kind of behaviours, interests and personas that would fit in with wealthy people. When creating your list, you’re inevitably going to end up targeting people who aren’t wealthy. However, your focus should be on playing the numbers game; you’re trying to create a list where the majority is of wealthy people and then you can take steps to exclude the personas of less affluent people.
