Ethnic targeting is notoriously difficult for any marketer. We’ve heard it all: linguistic profiling, targeting by hyper-specific area, targeting by interest, or JUST language. All of these felt, to be kind, shoddy in their construction.In years past, Facebook has worked hard to develop a more robust and accurate profile. They use their partnership with Datalogix to pinpoint credit profiles overlain with census data to build a real ethnic targeting capability.You read that right; they’re using credit card info to target your ads. Creepy as it sounds, it blows away any competitive targeting parameters in the ethnic arena. The result is a full offering that is especially useful in Hispanic Marketing.The real development here is the opportunity to target bilinguals, which at 60% of the US Hispanic population is the Holy Grail.

But the truth is any one of those groups is too broad for the type of hyper-targeted buy our clients are used to. They don’t want to target Asians. They want to target millennial Asians who are coastal and love action movies. That’s why Facebook’s ability to layer targeting puts it head and shoulders above the publisher network approach.Targeting by race alone is as silly and, candidly, lazy as you can get. Seth Godin made his name by encouraging marketers to “Find their tribe”. In essence, find a cohesive group of people with shared ideas and values that have similar purchasing patterns. The same could be said here. We do a lot of movie marketing at Socialtyze, horror movies especially. The Hispanic audience drives that opening weekend and as a result we work hard to match our creative, targeting and approach to extremely tailored profiles. That can include testing bilingual copy, overlaying interests against larger purchase profiles, and A/B testing creative.In sum, Facebook’s ethnic targeting is the premiere approach to a problem that has plagued marketers for a long time.Want more tips and tricks for how to dominate social this year with Data, Creative and Amplification? Download our 2016 Social Media Survival Guide.