Sniper Targeting on Facebook: How to Target ONE specific person with super targeted ads

As salespeople we have all been through some version of the following scenario:

We meet a prospect. The meeting goes well. We think it’s just a matter of time before the prospect will close and become a customer but all we get is…crickets! The prospect goes cold, for some reason we can’t even fathom! At this point, we are faced with 2 options:

1. We can either “harass” the prospect with “just checking in” emails, which go something like this:

Hi Future Customer

Hope you’ve been well! I just wanted to check in to see to see if you’ve received my mail about product y /service x that we discussed. Anyway looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Regards,

Desperate/Selfish salesperson

2. We can sit tight and not be pushy and hope the prospect comes back to us.

The problem with both these options is, more often than not, neither result in the desired end goal and even worse, option number one, even diminishes our chances as all the trust we have built up during the sales consultation is chipped away each time we send a selfish/nagging email.

So, what is the solution? Well, we have played around with this predicament for many years and discovered the following to work best — Introducing, Facebook Sniper Targeting (at least that’s what we call it)

Facebook advertising is super powerful at the moment and even more so when used in a creative and targeted way. Facebook allows you to target a whole range of audiences (either by interest group, customer list and many more) but there is an interesting potential if you some sneaky Facebook hacks which enable you to target a much smaller group of individuals and even one individual if you wish.

Facebook Audience Targeting

Facebook allows you to input a customer list or leads list of email addresses which will enable you to create an audience which you can then target inside of Facebook with Facebook ads. Most people use this function by inputting a whole leads list or customer list and targeting them with a generic relevant ad.

Example:

In our coffee company, Aquaspresso, we try to target leads who have expressed interest in the past in one of our coffee vending machines but haven’t bought yet. We’ll then use basic elements of relevancy in our ad to promote this specific model that they looked at, at a discounted rate. Below is an example of one of our ads:

Or something like this:

Now this works fairly effectively because:

• The audience that we are marketing to is already fairly engaged (as they were leads looking for these particular machines in the past)
• The ad has an element of relevancy as it advertises the particular machine the prospect was interested in creating a feeling that this ad was made “just for me” from the customers perspective.

Facebook Advertising on Steroids — Facebook Sniper Targeting:

Now we can take the principles of the above and take it one step further! Let’s go back to the example where we are hoping for ONE specific customer to convert. This time I’ll use an example we used in our digital marketing business, Digital Results. In this example we met with a client a few months ago who expressed interest in leaving his current digital agency to move to us. This particular prospect is in the security business. He had already mentioned that he felt his current digital agency was doing a poor job but for whatever reason hadn’t come back to us after the original meeting , which we felt went really well.

We then started serving him (and him alone) with the following ad:

We tried to be super specific without being too obvious. We even used his logo in our ad to catch his eye! We have removed his correct logo in this ad for privacy reasons.

You can’t get more relevant then that!

But Facebook doesn’t enable you to target only one user? Sniper Targeting Overview

That’s where our hack comes in. The smallest audience you can upload is an audience size of 30 people. Also, this audience size needs to be 30 people which Facebook can identify and find. So, if you upload an email list of 30 and Facebook can match only 20 of those email addresses to Facebook profiles then it will reject your list, so in most cases you need to upload a list of about 60 people.

You then need ensure you upload a list of only females or males which includes the one email address of the person you are targeting (the opposite to the one person that you are targeting). Lastly you need to choose the gender in the demographic filtering which matches the intended target. Here’s a step by step example below:

Facebook Sniper Targeting Setup Example:

Assumed the singular target is John Smith with email address john.smith@company.com

Step 1:

Upload a list of 60 females and John Smith into Facebooks custom list. So, your list will look something like the following

e-mail address 1: john.smith@company.com

e-mail address 2: women.number1@company.com

e-mail address 3: women.number2@company.com

e-mail address 4: women.number3@company.com

e-mail address 5: women.number4@company.com

.

.

.

e-mail address 61: women.number60@company.com

Step 2:

Include only males in your targeting list as John Smith is a male, thereby adhering to Facebook’s minimum list size of 30 and excluding everyone in the list who isn’t John Smith.. Ensure that you choose an age range which includes John’s age.

Step 3:

Upload your super targeted Facebook advert to catch John’s eye.

Step 4:

Monitor the reach in your Facebook analytics to see how many times John has seen your ad

Last Thoughts:

The above method is a great method to convert more hot leads into sales without being THAT pesty salesperson. Ideally this method should only be used for prospects with a large enough future value as it takes quite a bit of time to set such a thing up. If you found this article useful please show your appreciation in the form of claps!