Facebook marketing offers an unprecedented ability to target your prospective customers based on geographic location, age and even their likes and interests, so it’s more important than ever to understand your consumers and how to reach them.

The following are some excellent online tools for establishing who and what demographic may be interested in your product or service;

Google Trends / Insights;

Google offers a range of services that will allow you to more accurately focus your Facebook marketing efforts toward the demographics where you’ll get the greatest return on your advertising dollar;

Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends) provides information on search trends around key terms. Using this tool, you’ll be able to quickly identify season peaks and troughs in search volumes for that particular niche subject. For instance, say we were targeting a gardening niche we could easily identify that the country performing the most searches on this subject is Australia followed by New Zealand – as such a your Facebook marketing strategy would get the greatest return by targeting these demographics. With Google Trends you can also compare up to 5 topics at a time so you can easily identify any correlation in topic interests – results are even exportable to a CSV file!

Google Insight (http://www.google.com/insights/search) extends the Google Trends functionality by offering a more granular search capability on trends, allowing for geographic drill downs through a range of filter options. You can also see a graphical representation of the countries with the highest concentration of search volumes for the niche term you’re searching on;

A lesser known feature of Google Trends / Insights is that searches need not be limited to search terms only. A wealth of information can also be gained by searching on Websites on Insights via the following URL on Trends;

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=facebook.com

Quantcast; http://www.quantcast.com

Another great online tool for discovering demographic information about a website’s traffic is Quantcast. While this service doesn’t exhaustively offer information on all sites, many of the more popular site are captured and can provide an excellent insight into your target market. In my own experience I have found this site somewhat limited, however when I’ve been lucky enough to find a listed site, the demographic information I was able to draw from this site has been quite indepth;

Marshall Index;http://www.marshallindex.com/

Marshall Index is a great site for finding out what topics are hot in the media atm. Perhaps more of a niche research tool than demographic research tool, this site provides a lot of useful information on consumer interest subjects. Check this out and have a drill down into some of the options available (under news –> entertainment), then check out some of the options to view tweets, youtube videos, Facebook, eBay offers etc around that subject. Excellent tool for idea generation!

As an example, see the screenshot below on Facebook popularity; http://www.marshallindex.com/terms/facebook-global-popularity

Hope you enjoyed the post, and Happy Hunting!