Facebook Ad Targeting Ideas for Home Performance Contractors, Part II.

Last week we wrote about how to use the Facebook Ads targeting tool to perform demographic research in your area, following a previous post discussing whether Facebook Ads are a good marketing tool for home performance businesses.

We thought it was worth following up with a few ideas for targeting your Facebook Ads. Since part of the beauty of Facebook Ads is that they allow you to target very specific users -- based on information entered by the users themselves into their Facebook profiles -- it's a good idea to put some thought into what types of Facebook users would be most likely to invest in a home performance upgrade for their home.

Age/Gender

While age and gender are two pretty big demographic factors, without more extensive research we don't think it's wise to recommend gender and age groups too specifically. That said, two things:

• There is some evidence that suggests that women are increasingly the decision-makers when it comes to home improvement investments.
• As for age, we haven't seen anything to suggest that one age group is more likely to invest in home performance upgrades than another. We will remind our readers, however, that younger Facebook users are less likely than older users to be homeowners. We'd probably put a minimum age of around 25-30 in the age section, and leave the maximum out.

Activities/Interests

This is where Facebook Ad targeting gets interesting. Since Home Performance upgrades are driven by so many different factors -- a concern for the environment, a financial interest in energy savings, political and geopolitical leanings ("let's get ourselves off foreign oil," etc.), and more, you can really hone down who's seeing your ad based on whatever inkling you have.

We do think, however, that it's best to stick to the broad, pre-programmed interests that are already in the system. Entering even something as broad as "energy efficiency" into the "precise interests" form narrows down your audience a lot.

Here's a screenshot showing what I mean. Apparently, there are only 1,380 people in the entire country whose FB profiles say that they're interested in "energy efficiency": 

So, enter "energy efficiency" for your city, you probably won't have a huge audience.

But how about using the "broad categories" to narrow it down? Better luck here. I narrowed down the geography for this next one to Chicago, removed the "energy efficiency" interest, and added "environment" from the broad categories of interests (the interests that have a big enough audience that FB includes them off the bat). Not so bad:

2,589,700 people living in Chicago who are interested in the Environment seems like an awful lot. Whether or not this is spot-on accurate, the point remains that you have a huge audience of potential customers here if you're a home performance contractor in Chicago.

Here are a few other categories of interests that we think you may have some luck with in terms of finding potential customers in your area:

• Gardening
• Outdoor fitness activities
• Personal finance
• Technology early adopters
• Recently moved
• Newlywed
• Parents
• Engaged
• Charity/causes
• Environment
• Health & well-being
• Home & garden
• Politics

These are, of course, just a few ideas. Finding the ideal customers for your home performance business will depend on your area, the type of work you prefer to do (low income weatherization, deep energy retrofits, energy audits as a stand-alone service, etc), and much more. But we think using these initial categories as a starting point might be a useful exercisee. 

Any other thoughts about how best to use Facebook Ads to market your home energy biz? Feel free to let us know in the comments.