If you are looking to market your coworking space, Facebook offers some of the best audience targeting tools to help you get into the eyes of your potential customers. The demographics and data accessible to marketers are almost limitless. With so many options where should you start?

In this article, we break down some of the best ways to not only run ads profitably but to which specific audiences you should be using to get the best return on your investment.

Let’s Go!

Should You Use Facebook Ads?

The first thing you need to ask yourself is what are your campaign goals? Are you looking to spread local awareness of your coworking space and attract top of the funnel awareness, or are you looking to attract in-market leads? Facebook is a very cost-effective tool. But, if done incorrectly (or left un-optimized) many come to the conclusion that Facebook simply doesn’t work for their business after spending thousands of dollars. I’m here to tell you that if done correctly, Facebook can generate a multitude of leads.

Understanding Audience Differences

Before we get to what specific audiences will help you receive the best results, it’s important to first break-down the types of audiences that you can target.

In-Market Audience (Your leads & Past Customers)

The most valuable information at your disposal is from the customers or leads that you have in your current pipeline. For example, you could take demographics from Google Analytics, website traffic history, or even emails from users who have completed your online forms.

Research Phase (Qualified but not ready to commit)

These potential leads have liked or have engaged with the type of business you run, but don’t yet know or understand what your value proposition is. For example, you can create a lookalike audience using Facebook’s algorithm to find similar customers to those who you already have a business relationship with. You can also target users by their interests if they know of a potential competitor.

Those That Don’t Know You Exist

This audience doesn’t know what you do or who you are. Through your outbound marketing efforts, you are disrupting these users during their daily lives to attract attention and drive awareness to your space. These customers don’t yet know they need your services and are the hardest to convert.

How To Install The Facebook Pixel

The Facebook Pixel allows you to collect information on what users (who are on Facebook) have interacted with your ads, website, and forms. The pixel allows us to create custom audiences based on how these users have engaged with our brand.

To create or find your Facebook Pixel, simply navigate to Data Sources and click Pixels.

If you do not have a pixel, click the add button and follow the instructions. Once you have your pixel Id, you can add or embed the pixel to your website.

WordPress has a simple integration, or you can manually add the pixel code by inserting it into the header of your website. In the example below, I added the pixel through Google Tag Manager and configured the tag to fire on every page.

Types of Facebook Audiences You Can Target

Saved Audience

Saved audiences allow you to use audiences across multiple campaigns. To create a saved audience when under a campaign:

Click: New Audience and fill out the locations, age criteria, and click save. If you already have some saved audiences, you can select them from the dropdown under saved audiences.

Locations

Everyone in this location

This option includes everyone that lives, recently visited, or is traveling in the location(s) you’re targeting. It’s important to note that this option targets those who do not actually live in your location (ie. temporarily visit).

People who live in this location

This option only targets those who live in your location. As a coworking space, you will want to primarily focus on this option, as most of your full-time members will be local residents.

People recently in this location

People who’ve recently traveled or visited the locations that you want to target.

People traveling in this location

People who are currently in this location; however, do not live there.

Demographics

Facebook allows you to granularly target age ranges, financial statuses, education, and even life events. Be careful not to mix too many options, as it will be difficult to understand which demographics are leading to conversions.

Interests & Behavior Targeting

Are your users engaged with your industry or avid mobile device users? By combining interests and behaviors, you can create customer personas that reflect what your analytics and data show.

The Best Facebook Audiences For Your Coworking Space

Facebook Audiences #1: Your Past Website Visitors

People who have previously visited your website are already familiar with your brand, offerings, and value – which means they will likely find your offer more enticing. When creating a campaign that retargets past website visitors, your goal should be to keep your product at the top of the minds of your customers with a simplified value proposition.

How to create a past website visitor audience:

1. Navigate to Facebook Ads manager
2. Business Tools
3. Audiences
4. Create Audience
5. Custom Audiences
6. Website
7. Choose All website visitors
8. Enter a period of time for more qualified users

Facebook Audiences #2: Membership Page Visitors

People who have visited your pricing (or membership page) have expressed intent to purchase your product. There is a great opportunity to run last-minute offers or discounted trials to this audience.

How to create a membership/pricing audience:

• Navigate to Facebook Ads manager
• Business Tools
• Audiences
• Create Audience
• Custom Audiences
• Website
• Choose People who visited a specific web page
• Add the URL paths of your membership page
• Exclude your thank you page (to weed out those that bought a package)

Facebook Audiences #3: Product Pages Visitors

Creating specific ads that target the specific pages your leads have visited is a great way to deliver a granular message. For example, if a user navigates to your website and only visits the office space product page, this gives you the perfect opportunity to remarket to this lead as to why your offices are their best option.

How to create an audience based on specific page visits:

• Navigate to Facebook Ads manager
• Business Tools
• Audiences
• Create Audience
• Custom Audiences
• Website
• Choose People who visited a specific web page
• Add the URL paths of your product page
• Add exclusions for other product pages

Facebook Audiences #4: Past Customer List

It goes without saying that your past customers are a gold mine. If you deliver an exceptional experience at your workspace, your past customers will be inclined to buy from you again. Keep your brand top of mind to past customers by using your past customer list.

How to create an audience based on your past customers:

• Navigate to Facebook Ads manager
• Business Tools
• Audiences
• Create Audience
• Custom Audiences
• Customer List

Facebook Audiences #5: Customer Lookalike

Your customer list is an absolute goldmine, but what if you have limited data? Facebook allows you to use your customer data and create a lookalike audience that reflects the same demographics and interests as your customers. Pretty powerful huh?

How to create a customer lookalike audience based on your past customer list:

• Navigate to Facebook Ads manager
• Lookalike Audiences
• Website
• Choose People who visited a specific web page
• Add the URL paths of your product page
• Add exclusions for other product pages (so your ad will be specific to your product)

Important Note: After you create your lookalike audience, be sure to further narrow down your locations after adding it as a saved audience.

The Composition Of The Facebook Ad

Each of your Facebook audiences will respond differently to varying ad types. Facebook offers plenty of options to perfectly curate advertisements. While each Facebook ad differs regarding the intent, the general makeup of the ad does not.

Text Ads: Make sure that whatever text you choose to insert into your ad isn’t too long, as you’ll lose the focus of your audience. When using a text ad, focus on your coworking space’s specifics that you know will attract your target audience while hitting on their pain points.

Headline, link description, and URL Ads: You will need some excellent copy written here, as your URLs, headlines and links must all give a hint to what your reader will experience by clicking on the ad. Your ideas must be clear and to the point.

Media Ads: The world loves a video ad and Facebook audiences are no exception. Images and image carousels work well for media ads, but a video will give you the chance to showcase your coworking space to all that need to see it. Create a media ad in which your target can picture themselves, either working at one of the desks in your space or having a cup of coffee in the common area or kitchen.

Audience and Ad Copy Example

Let’s say we would like to spread awareness about coworking space based on Long Island, NY. How would we go about doing this?

1. We would want to limit our location, allowing us to target only residents.
2. Since we are looking for those who already know about coworking, we should pick a qualified audience (preferably those that know about our competitors).
3. Age demographics should be adjusted.

Once you have a basic audience, you need to come up with an ad that is going to get your audience to react to your offer. I would recommend split test multiple ad sets to determine what works best.

Make sure your ad:

• Has a great headline
• Looks professional
• Includes a great Call to action
• Make sure it appeals to the audience you are targeting

Facebook Analytics

The campaigns you run, and content you create on your website all serve as great tools you can use to further optimize your campaigns and segment your audiences. To see the data your pixel is collecting, go to your business manager and click analytics.

Similar to Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics will show you an overview of your top traffic sources, active members, top pages, engagement time, and much more.

You can use this information to create specific audiences that cater to the demographics of those who engage most on your site. For example, you can create new audiences by creating filters for:

• Those that visited specific pages and actually completed actions like booking a tour
• Users who spent the most time on your website but did not complete an action
• Focus on the devices where users had the highest conversion rates
• Product page visitors
• Specific Blog page visitors

Audience Insights

If you are looking to understand more about the types of users who visit your website, their affinity categories, and what their intent is you can visit Audience Insights.

You can cross-reference your Facebook analytics with Google Analytics as well.