Facebook is one of the top social media platforms in the world. Every month, it boasts an average of 2.38 billion active users.
That’s excellent news from a marketer’s perspective. With Facebook Ads, you can reach a broad audience, spreading the word about your local business.
You simply need to understand how to use them effectively. This guide will help. If you’re marketing a local business via Facebook Ads, keep the following tips in mind.
Tips for Marketing Your Local Business with Facebook Ads
Target Users in Your Area
Although Facebook has many users, the vast majority of those users aren’t going to be customers of yours. That’s simply the nature of running a local business. You need to market to people in your area.
Luckily, Facebook makes this easy. When creating a Facebook Ad or campaign, you have the option to create a Facebook Custom Audience. Meaning, you can establish specific criteria to ensure your ads are only seen by people who may actually become customers at some point.
Geographic location is one of those criteria. By only targeting users within certain regions, you increase the chances of your content being seen by users who might find it relevant.
Test Multiple Audiences
Don’t limit your potential by creating just one Custom Audience. Location is not the only factor you can use to target potential customers. You should experiment with multiple Custom Audiences, adjusting multiple factors, to determine which is most effective.
For instance, perhaps your local business is a winter sports retailer. Facebook allows you to target users based on their interests. Thus, you might create a Custom Audience of people in your area who list various winter sports among their interests.
That’s not to say this type of audience would deliver better results than one where you only target users based on their location. You can’t know which audience will provide the best results until you test each. The more you experiment, the more you’ll understand how to refine your audiences in the future.
Use the Lookalike Audience Feature
It’s worth keeping in mind your business probably already has a customer base. You can use those existing customers to help you target new ones via the Facebook Lookalike Audience feature.
For example, perhaps you already have a Facebook business page. Facebook can analyze the profiles of your current followers to generate a new target audience that shares many similarities with them.
This is key to reaching new customers. You don’t want your ads to reach people who already know about your business. You want to make sure they’re being seen by people who may have an interest in your business but aren’t customers just yet.
(Although that’s not universally the case. This topic will be covered in the next section.)
It’s also important to know you can use other sources of customer information, such as your email list, to generate Custom Audiences. This may be an ideal option if you don’t have a Facebook page for your business. You can still use customer information from your email list to create a Custom Audience, which can then be used as a model for a Lookalike Audience.
Don’t Forget About Remarketing
The above example illustrates how Facebook Ads can be used to remarket to users who are current customers or are interested in your business.
There are several instances when this might be your intention. Perhaps you want to let existing customers know about an upcoming sale. Maybe you’re announcing a loyalty program. You might be launching a new product or service. By creating a Custom Audience from existing customer data, you can reach the ideal targets for these types of ads.
The Facebook Pixel is another tool that serves a similar purpose. This is a line of code you can insert on various pages on your site. Every time a user reaches a page on your site (as long as the Pixel is being used on that page) via your ads, and takes a subsequent action, such as making a purchase, the Pixel will alert you, and collect the user’s basic information. You can then use the data gathered by the Pixel to learn more about your customers and create new Custom Audiences.
Let’s return to the example of a winter sports gear retailer. Although you’re a local business, you might sell items online. Maybe you’re also launching a new product that complements or supplements an existing item. That means, when advertising this new product, your preferred audience would be people who own the original counterpart product.
The Pixel makes it easy to reach them with your ads. You can gather information about users who purchased the original product on your site and create an audience accordingly.
This tool can still be useful if you don’t sell any items online. There are other actions a user may take on your site that indicate an interest in your business, such as filling out a customer survey, signing up for an email list, or signing up for a rewards program. The Pixel will help you target Facebook users who’ve taken any of these types of actions.
Use Audience Insights
As a marketer, you don’t need to be told how important it is to monitor the performance of a campaign and make adjustments when necessary. That’s why you also need to use Facebook’s Audience Insights tool.
Maybe a particular ad or campaign performed even better than expected. With Audience Insights, you can select an audience to learn about. In this instance, you would select the Custom Audience that the ad was targeting. Audience Insights will deliver comprehensive information about the users who make up this audience, such as:
- age range,
- gender,
- lifestyle, and
- Facebook usage habits
You can use this information to create even stronger Custom Audiences in the future.
That’s key. The tips here will absolutely help you take advantage of Facebook Ads for a local business. However, to get the best results, it’s still essential that you always consider ways to improve your campaigns. That’s how you take full advantage of Facebook as a marketer!
