Facebook has now made it possible for brands to target their ads down to specific households if not individuals. It will soon be introducing a new household audience feature that will allow brands to not just target individual families but even go further by targeting specific individuals in the family.
With this new tool, brands can now narrow down their targeting to individuals in the family who influence purchase decisions as well as those in the family who make the actual purchases. The tool allows brands to select a source audience uploaded on the social site comprising customers drawn from an email list or any other database. The marketers can then turn on the household audience feature to filter down their ads to specific individuals in the household.
Graham Mudd, product marketing director at Facebook, said, “What we want to do basically is leverage the power of our network to enable that kind of influencing or to support that kind of influencing across the family. Explaining how this might work during the holidays, he gave an example where he purchased products from Brand A, and invariably ends up in the brand’s customer database. Next, if his wife wants to buy him a gift, Brand A would target Mudd’s wife and even their children with ads designed to influence their purchasing decisions even as they’re shopping for their dad.
Traditionally advertising has been all about how you show the same ads to the same household at the same time. Facebook’s new feature will change all that by identifying individual members of the same household based on signals, as well as the relationships among family members and also the frequency of shared check-ins or where they access the internet. This will mean that advertising dollars will begin moving away from television networks toward Facebook in a major way because marketers will now be able to get a lot more ROI (Return on Investment) for the money they spend on advertising. This kind of precise targeting will ensure that brands have a better chance of maximizing their chances of getting their customers to make faster purchase decisions.