Target Facebook Ads in Australia
If your company attempts to advertise in Australia, you might wonder whether your Facebook ads are actually generating any interest. Are the ad campaigns working? Are they increasing exposure and awareness in this different market? Ultimately, most of the leg work with Facebook ad campaigns is done with targeting, especially when you want to explore a market different from your own.
What about ‘Australia’ as an interest? According to some estimates, there are as many as 233 million different audiences for the interest ‘Australia’ on Facebook. With this many combinations, it’s too easy to set off in the wrong direction and fail with your marketing campaigns. How do you truly target this audience and make sure that the business doesn’t waste money with its advertising budget?
‘Australia’ as an Interest
As mentioned, the country as an interest in Facebook ads has an audience that exceeds 233 million. While just under 52% of the audience is male, a little over 48% of the audience is female. What’s more, around one-third of these audiences contain people between the ages of 25 and 34.
If you run campaigns on Facebook using this interest, targeting is critical, and we recommend considering the following factors:
Age and Gender
Since we’ve just spoken about these two factors, we won’t spend too much time going over age and gender. Of all those interested in Australia on Facebook, over one-third belong to the 25–34 age group. Meanwhile, around 22% are between 18 and 24. Therefore, it’s fair to say that Australia as an interest attracts younger users on the social media platform. The third-largest age group is between 35 and 44 which accounts for just under 20%.
In terms of age, it’s a fairly even split with slightly more males than females — 52% to 48%.
Education
Next, most people who have an interest in Australia are educated to college degree level, so this is important to keep in mind.
Relationship Status
The interest also seems to capture the imagination of the engaged market as well as all others in a relationship. Estimates suggest that around 42% of the audience falls into this category rather than being married or single.
Location
If you plan to target the interest, you’ll need to know where these people are located. Naturally, those in Australia account for a large portion of the audience, but it’s not actually the largest section. Why? Because those in the United States search for Australia more than those in Australia itself. Additionally, the interest is also popular in India.
This is an important point because talking about a country doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily talking to a country. When targeting the interest of ‘Australia’, you’re more likely to reach those in the United States and India than in Australia.
Job/Career
Finally, another important consideration for campaigns of this nature is the career of the audience members. Nearly 24% of people work in the Administrative Services niche while those in Sales and Management also account for a noteworthy percentage.
Related Interests to Australia
At this point, you have a better idea of the type of people associated with Australia as an interest on Facebook. Next, it’s useful to know the related interests that Australia has on the social media platform. By using an advanced tool, you can learn the related interest as well as the audience size. This information helps to understand what the audience is like and the sort of things in which they’re interested.
As an example, the closest interest to Australia is the Philippines with an audience of nearly 300 million people. Rounding off the top five are Vanuatu (2 million), SeaWorld Orlando (4 million), Rugby League (167 million), and Cocktail Dress (22 million).
By analyzing the relevant interests, you could get some inspiration for targeting your audience and resonating with them. The more you understand the audience, the more fuel you have to create an effective campaign. With this in mind, the following are also considered related interests for ‘Australia’:
- Visa — 60 million
- Netherlands — 131 million
- Sydney — 80 million
Before moving on, we should make two notes about this list. Firstly, the audience sizes are accurate at the time of writing this article. By the time you perform your own research, you may find that the audience sizes are different and that some interests have been replaced by others. Therefore, perform up-to-date research and ensure that you’re always following the latest information.
Elsewhere, the 60-million audience for Visa is interested in the document rather than the bank card. In other words, the document that residents of most countries need to supply to stay in Australia.
As has been true in the world of business for many generations, the audiences of competitors also have value to us. If you offer cleaning services to the community, the audience of a competing cleaning service has just as much value to your business. Once again, this is an analysis that you can perform by working with the right digital marketing tool. As well as learning the pages, you can review the audience size, following, and affinity.
What’s affinity? It’s a critical detail that tells you how relevant the Facebook page is to your own page and audience. For example, it won’t be a surprise to learn that the Facebook page with the most relevant audience is Australia.com — the main tourism website for the country. Not only is this the most relevant audience, but it has nearly twice the affinity of the next suggestion (7.5x compared to 3.8x).
The affinity of the latter belongs to Daily Mail while the third-most relevant audience belongs to LADbible on Facebook. Despite only having an audience of 33,000, the next suggestion is Taste Life. Furthermore, UNILAD is next with an audience of around 75,000. Other names further down the list of competitors include China.org.cn, WomenWorking, Lessons Learned in Life Inc, China Xinhua Sci-Tech, and the Dodo.
Advertising to ‘Australia’ as an Interest
With this, you’re starting to learn more about advertising to Australia as an interest and how it all works. Just because the interest is a country doesn’t mean that the audience is made up exclusively of people from this country. As we’ve seen, the largest market for this interest is the United States. Yet, it’s not enough to know this piece of information.
By extending the analysis, we’ve also learned of related interests. The top five included things like SeaWorld Orlando, Philippines, Rugby League, and Cocktail Dress. Now, you’re starting to build a picture of the audience and how you can appeal to them through Facebook advertising.
Then, we considered competing Facebook pages, their size, and their affinity to the audience in question. Once again, this is a basic analytics tool but one that can shape your Facebook ad campaign. If you plan to reach out to an interest or audience on Facebook this year, keep this sort of analysis in mind. The more you learn, the easier it becomes to optimize campaigns and target Facebook ads correctly; this should prevent the age-old problem of sending great content to the wrong people.
What if you want to target people who are based in Australia? Well, this presents a challenge of its own. For one thing, Australian consumers use the English language in a very different way to Americans…and the same can be said for all English-speaking countries. The audience might use the same language but the vernacular and use of words change from one country to the next.
For example, did you know that Australians call their flip-flops ‘thongs’? What’s more, a barbie is a BBQ rather than a plastic doll. Therefore, you need to know the lingo if you truly want to resonate with an Australian audience. If you write in US English, the audience will soon notice, and this will take away from your message. Even simple things like using ‘favorite’ rather than ‘favourite’ will make people notice instantly that you’re not an Australian company.
If you want to create advanced content for an Australian audience, we recommend working with professionals and learning from them as much as possible. These days, it’s easy to hire an Australian freelancer. In the early days, get them to adjust your content so that it’s appropriate for the Australian audience. As time goes on, have them look over your content. As you improve, it should get to the point where they only need to make minor adjustments.
When talking to an Australian audience, you should also try to use cultural references and adopt the right sense of humor. Making people laugh is one of the superpowers of leading marketers, and it’s hard to do this when writing for those in a different country. Learn from professionals and steadily improve your writing (or outsource and trust an external party to do everything for you!).
