Local marketing has never been easier than it is today. This is thanks to Facebook advertising, which offers affordable ads that reach your exact target demographic.
Unlike other forms of advertising, you have total control over the entire process. This is a great opportunity for local businesses to grow and make more money. Here are 5 easy ways to grow your business using Facebook ads.
Demographics
Effective digital marketing is all about understanding your demographic. Luckily, for local advertisers this is a pretty easy thing to do.
For example, if you are promoting a dental practice in a certain city or town, your market is people who live in that area. You can run ads on Facebook that only are shown to people who live in or are in close vicinity to that location. For example, in the below campaign, we targeted people who live in or around Apache Junction, AZ — which is just outside Phoenix, AZ.
You can see that audience is defined, so other targeting may not be needed other than that location.
You can take it one step further, even, by creating an objective for local businesses:
If you want to narrow your target location down further, just enter in a specific address and adjust the radius:
You can also specify whether you want to reach everyone who is in this location or people who actually live around this address based off their FB profile.
Why does this come in handy? Well, if you own dental practice, you would want to target residents with specific discounts.
Name Your Audience
Facebook visitors tend to want to read stuff that is written specifically for them. For example, they’re much more likely to notice an ad that has the name of the city where they live in the headline. Why? Because the ad seems more relevant to them!
So…. when you run any type of Facebook ad in a local market, it’s always important to use the name of the city in the ad!
In the above ad, ABC Property Management says, “Dream Tenants in Phoenix!” They’re specifically talking to people, mainly rental property owners, who live in Phoenix.
Above, The Smile Experts of Los Angeles say they specialize in cosmetic dentistry in Los Angeles. They’re doing a great job of catching people’s attention because their locations are IN Los Angeles.
Place Different Kinds of Ads
Facebook offers several different forms of ads to meet your needs. You can run call-to-action ads, which are optimized to get people to perform a specific action.
Here are a few examples of actions you can optimize for:
- Email List Signups
- Facebook Likes
- RSVPs for an event
- Website Traffic
- Branding Awareness
You can also run ads designed to get engagement, which boils down to likes, shares, and comments. If you want to get more advanced, survey ads will ask a question to people, giving you valuable consumer feedback.
Offer Discounts
You can offer a discount in your ad to entice people to give your service a try.
Think about the lifetime value of your customers. Is one discount worth a potential lifetime of them buying your products and services? If so, this is a great way to advertise. Create urgency by making it a limited time offer for the best results.
Create an Event
Creating and running ads for a Facebook event is also a great way to get people to visit your business, or raise brand awareness.
If you’re a property management company, have an open house. Offer free food and face painting. This will get a lot of people in the door!
Ads Can Work For You
As you can see, the possibilities are endless for local businesses to leverage Facebook advertising.
No matter what your end goal is, always focus on how you want to stand out in the newsfeed.
Ask yourself:
- Is the name of the city in your post?
- Are you giving them a reason to take action?
This is a great opportunity for businesses to make more money. Give Facebook advertising a try and see how it works for you.
We can’t wait to hear about your success.
