The 9-step guide to Meta Ads audience research for wealth managers

Understanding the breadth of Meta's native audience filters is key to building a highly targeted campaign audience that maximises your budget and delivers better results.

Here’s our step-by-step guide to ensuring you make the most of Meta’s targeting capabilities:

1. Leverage Meta's Audience Insights Tool

• Explore demographic data: Use Meta’s Audience Insights tool to analyse available audience data like age, gender, interests, education level, location, and income brackets (available in some countries).

• Understand behavioural patterns: Identify behavioural data, including device usage, purchasing habits, and life events (e.g., retirement, job changes). This helps you refine your audience based on relevant behaviours.

• Competitor and interest analysis: Review what pages and brands your target audience are likely to follow. This can uncover additional niche interest targeting opportunities, helping you craft a highly specific audience.

2. Explore Interest Categories

• Interest-based targeting: Begin by selecting relevant interests related to your industry and/or target persona (e.g. retirement planning, wealth management, investment planning).

• Refine progressively: Once you have a list of broader categories, narrow down based on more specific niches and behaviours (e.g. business owners, executives in finance, entrepreneurship or women in tech). This allows you to trim down non-relevant segments.

3. Review Life Events and Behaviours

• Target specific life stages: Meta allows you to target people undergoing significant life events like moving, getting married, or nearing retirement - these major life moments are often when financial planning becomes top of mind.

• Leverage purchase behaviour: Wealthier audiences may exhibit certain behaviours like frequent travel, luxury purchases, or technology adoption. Use Meta’s ‘Purchase Behaviour’ filter to reach audiences who signal financial capacity.

4. Utilise Custom Audiences

• Upload first-party data: If you have a CRM or customer database, create custom audiences by uploading lists (email addresses or phone numbers). This helps you target prospects and leads you have already captured and have qualified as good-fit.

• Lookalike audiences: From your custom audiences, create lookalike audiences to find users with similar characteristics and behaviours. You can adjust the similarity range (1% to 10%) based on how narrow or broad you want the audience to be.

5. Narrow Down with Demographic Targeting

• Focus on relevant income brackets: Although income data isn’t available in the UK, in some regions (like the U.S.), Meta provides income bracket targeting, which can be useful for reaching high earners and high-net-worth individuals.

• Demographic filters: Use job titles, education level and industry to refine your target audience - especially for campaigns aimed at professionals or wealthier individuals (e.g. target lawyers, doctors, city professionals and finance executives).

6. Test Regional and Location-Based Targeting

• Location-based targeting: If your wealth management firm operates in specific areas, use geographic filters to target users in those regions. You can even drill down to cities, neighbourhoods, or radius targeting around key offices or hubs.

• Region-specific interests and behaviours: Different regions may have varying financial behaviours or interests. Tailor your targeting based on local economic activities (e.g. business hubs in London vs. tech hubs in Manchester).

7. Combine Multiple Filters for Precision

• Layer interests and behaviours: Combine filters like job title, company, income level (where available), and life events, with interest-based targeting to make your audience as specific as possible.

• Exclude irrelevant groups: Use the exclusion filter to remove irrelevant segments (e.g. people under 25 for retirement planning campaigns).

8. Use Saved Audiences for Future Campaigns

• Save successful audience setups: Once you've created an effective audience, save it for future campaigns. This saves time and allows for consistency across multiple campaigns.

• Optimise over time: Regularly review your audience filters and performance metrics, refining targeting to improve campaign results.

9. Utilise ChatGPT for Support

• Leverage AI Insights: Use ChatGPT to generate ideas for interest categories and demographics relevant to wealth management. It can help brainstorm niche segments to be used as a jumping off point for exploring options in the Meta Ads platform. 

• Supplement Research: ChatGPT can provide additional context on audience behaviours and preferences, offering insights that complement your findings from Meta's tools to ensure you have a robust audience defined before launching your campaign.

By carefully reviewing and using Meta's audience filters, you can craft highly effective campaigns that reach the right people with the right message at the right time, leading to better engagement and ROI.

So you’ve built your audience. Next, read our article on how to improve conversion rates through your marketing and sales funnel.