Advertising on Facebook allows businesses to target existing and prospective customers like few other social mediums. If you’re considering an ad spend to target your audience on Facebook, the following tips can help you make the most of your dollars.

Maximize Facebook Purchasing Behavior Data

Facebook has a virtually endless data bank of consumer purchasing behaviors—enough so you can afford to drill down to extreme specifics. If you’re looking for prospects that buy women’s clothing on weekends during winter, chances are you can target them with your new line of scarves on a Saturday in February. The more you know about the people you want to target, the better your chances of hitting the bull’s-eye.

Customize Your Audience

An advanced feature on Facebook called Custom Audiences allows you to upload customer contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses, so you can target them specifically. This means you can appeal to those who already buy your products and encourage them to make additional purchases. You can also customize using other data points, like demographics on income, marital status, profession, zip code—the list is virtually endless.

What’s also quite nice about Facebook Custom Audiences is that it lets you work in reverse. For instance, a free trial offer has no value to existing customers, but Custom Audiences allows you to exclude them from an ad spend that targets only prospects.

Celebrate Life Events

If you run a business that revolves around life events, you can target prospects accordingly. For instance, if you provide music for weddings, you can advertise to those who’ve just posted about their engagement. Or if you sell spirit gear for the colleges and schools in your area, you can target prospects during homecoming.

The key to successful life event marketing on Facebook is to identify the occasion and target and create a compelling offer. The more specific you can get the more successful your efforts will be. In addition to engagements, events such as birthdays, funerals, even divorces can be occasions to promote your products and services.

Experiment With Targets

Because advertising on Facebook is less expensive than traditional media, you can afford to experiment. Consider the social platform as your ad lab and try out different tactics. Create hyper-targeted audience campaigns and gauge their effectiveness. For inspiration, consider the efforts of one Facebook marketing guru who targeted his roommate with ads so specific, he thought he was being stalked.

While your efforts may not get as granular, understand that the capability to drill down to the nth degree, and then some, is what makes Facebook targeting so compelling. It’s like getting to the needle in the haystack without dismantling it piece by piece.

Consider the Costs

We’ve talked about ad spend in relative terms, but defining the cost of targeting should really be done on a case-by-case basis. The thing to remember about Facebook advertising is that you have the power to set parameters and raise, lower or stop the ad spend at your discretion. Of course, the more you plan your ad strategy beforehand, the less likely your dollars will go to waste.

Targeting on Facebook is a powerful way to engage your audience on many levels. As a small business owner, it may be your most effective advertising medium available.