How to Use Facebook Marketing for Local Businesses

Local businesses are growing fast, sharing their own story with their targeted audience. The only key to success is timing and local awareness ads. Both are helping businesses reach their right audience at the right time.

With more than 80 million small businesses using the Facebook business page to engage their customers and promote growth, Facebook is one of the leading and indispensable resources for local advertising.

Facebook’s 1.6 million users connect with small businesses, and most of these users visit their preferred pages regularly.

While Pay-per-Click platforms such as Google Ads also offer plenty of tools to assist small and local businesses, Facebook ads have a an advantage – it allows direct communication between the businesses and its curious prospects as well as loyal customers. This can be done with both engagement ads, lead ads and much more, depending on how creative you get.

As such, Facebook advertising continues to be the powerhouse of resources for marketers wanting to engage their customers in various innovative and creative ways. So, if you have a local business, a story to share, and a vision, Facebook ads can be the best opportunity to make your dreams come true.

What makes Facebook ads so useful for local businesses?

By spending $250 on Facebook ads, local businesses generated $15,000 in revenue. Of course not every single local business did get these kind of results, but this is indeed possible if the ads is setup in the right way. We had several clients getting more than 2000% ROAS, for every 1$ you spend on ads they did generate 20$. This is good business, and we have been able to help them with creating and scaling their digital marketing campaigns.

Likewise, local businesses have successfully reduced their overall marketing budget and still created high-performing ads. The idea is to capture the attention of targeted customers and grow. With Facebook ads, businesses grew by 40% in a span of 3 months using just an education-based marketing approach.

So, how to do you start?

Target your Ideal Customers

Targeting customers are the most obvious purpose of marketing, and more so for local businesses.

However, the problem is that we are overconfident in our thoughts. If you believe that you already know your target customers, you may be wrong. So, just revise the process and redo with Facebook ads.

If you want your business to grow quickly with Facebook ads, you must have a precise knowledge of who are your ideal customers.  You can start by targeting geographically around the business. In addition, you have to know what your customers like and take an interest in, which includes their hobbies, what they like to read, favorite food, activities etc.

Based on this, you can offer those services as per preference.

Customer avatar is a relatively new concept. Do you know why it is so important? That is because more manifest attributes and vision of customers help you to draw them to your business easily. You can then combine those characteristics and preferences with location targeting for better results.

The most significant advantage of social media marketing for local businesses is the ability to target people who take a keen interest in your products. You have to understand the subtlety of handling customers too. Some customers react differently to some types of messages. For instance, customers coming to a restaurant for dinner are definitely hungry; however, they are not visiting your restaurant due to hunger, but for different reasons. It could be a birthday celebration, a professional meeting, women’s meet etc.

When you understand your group of customers, you can address them better with respect to their unique situations. As a result, it would improve the ad performance.

Geographical Location

Location-based targeting is the thumb rule for a local business. You have to reach people in your area and surroundings where you serve.

So, how would you go about it?

Firstly, you can target people near your business. This helps you to reach people who are physically located near the business irrespective of where they reside.

Secondly, you can target people living near your business. This way, you can reach people based on their specified location in their Facebook profile.

The fundamental step is to choose the radius of ad targeting, which is enormous. However, it is only feasible when you fully know who your target customers are. So, you must ask:

• Are you aware of the types of businesses appealing to people who visit your city? On the other hand, it is sensible to target local customers only.
• What kind of people can afford and invest in your business?
• Where do your target audiences live – in affordable apartments, affluent suburban locations etc?

Before creating a Facebook ad, make sure you have answers to these questions.

Grab Customer Attention with Great Offers

Offers never fail to grab attention.

Local businesses generally struggle with Facebook ads, as they do not know how to promote the business strategically. A clear offer is the only way to bring customers to your door.

Before running an ad, you must have a strategy to make your target customers aware of your business, your potential, how it can help them etc. Only proper engagement would ensure that your audience becomes customers and repeat shortly.

As a budding local business, you must give your audience the incentive benefit to come to your store, stop in, pick up a call, call you back, and stay on.

Running ads is never enough unless the ads are engaging and communicating with customers.

So, what can you do?

You can run a contest, declare a limited offer, give away vouchers etc.

Create Ads to Appeal Local Customers

Facebook News Feed is a happening zone. To make sure your ad is noticed and clicked, you have to stand out. Fortunately, local businesses can easily incorporate some appeal into the ads to give it a local feel.

For instance, you can use local people in the ad. Take pictures of real clients and customers who loved your products and/or services. Ask them, what was the best thing they liked about your business? You can also use their exact words to prepare the ad copy. That is simple, right!

You can also run customer surveys from time to time and check out how your customers respond. Use the top-notch responses for creative inspiration.

Similarly, you can also hold an event or a challenge and call your audience to participate. It would help you to gather local people with the ads. Create a sense of community to build a strong foundation of fans who would be happy to share your products and services with their own network of people. As your customers gather for an event, engage them in a conversation and understand what their opinions about your ads.

Have an Objective

When you are creating ads specifically for Facebook, you have to ensure that your Objectives are aligned with the goal of your campaign.

Your chosen objective directs Facebook to show the ads to many people within the target audience base most likely to take the action i.e. like, click or convert.

Image Credit: Adespresso.com

You can choose from a list of objectives and direct your audience accordingly. For example, if you are aiming to get your audience to opt for a free download, you can choose to “increase conversions to your website”. Likewise, if you want to send people to some informative content so that you can retarget them with another advertisement, you have to choose the objective – “send people to your website” with the “traffic” objective.

Facebook algorithms are getting better everyday to optimize the campaign specific goal to your target audience. Just let Facebook do the heavy lifting. Doing Facebook advertising has really changed over the few last years.

There is another objective – “Reach people near your business”.

This objective is more for creating awareness rather than trying to send people to your Facebook business page or website.

If your aim is to send people to your website, use the objective – “send people to your website.”

Track the Facebook Ads

Ok, so you have already given Facebook ads and your promotional campaigns are on, but are you tracking the progress of your work?

It is time to track the status of your ads. You can use various tools to automatically track every metrics of both the ads and the landing page. From the total number of ad views to the number of conversions and coupons claimed on the coupon page, you have to track everything to understand your progress, analyze your strengths and weaknesses, and plan a course of action.

The first thing to focus on is the cost per conversion. This would help you to find out exactly how much money you are spending to get one sale lead for the business. If the value of sales lead were higher than the amount paid for it, your Facebook Ads would be profitable.

Facebook Ad Optimization

If you are unhappy with the ROI and you are always looking for a way to tweak something new into your business to boost it, optimization is the key.

Above you can see an example of a client where we ran app installs for our conversion goals, where you can analyze within the Facebook insight analytics tool, how you perform. Sometimes this data might not be the same as Google Analytics. If it is not the same, make sure to check if your tracking is set-up right and if your attribution settings are the same on Facebook and Google.

Above is an example of a client who run an e-commerce store and generates great revenue through the Facebook ads we’re creating. This is a small new campaign we started, but seeing a good ROAS so far (DK is Denmark, which is where our company is located. Therefore we have many danish clients as well).

So, how would you optimize Facebook Ads to get maximum ROI? By testing, specifically A/B testing.

A/B testing is a unique strategy in marketing involving two versions – A and B, wherein A is the Control and B is the treatment. Both these versions are tested against each other. The purpose is to identify changes to increase the chance of what you want to happen.

A/B testing can be done by creating multiple versions of an advertisement to test against each other. In each of these variations, you can change one variable of the ad. For instance, if you are testing the headline, you can use a different headline in each of the variations leaving the image and description of the advertisement as it is. In this way, you would know for sure that the headline is causing a difference in the conversion rate of the ad and nothing else.

Important Variables in A/B Testing (ad creatives)

• The Headline: It is critical as users notice the headline first. The bold and blue colored text right at the top of the Facebook Ad steals the show. It is important to convince people to click on an ad by creating a powerful It is the place where people would make decisions to actually stop in and click. In addition, the description text also helps, though most of the people would have already made their decision even before reading the text.
• Landing Page: In the process of creating Facebook ads, the landing page is often forgotten. However, it is an indispensable element. One factor determines whether people clicking your ad would actually convert, sing up or buy. Therefore, having a compelling and convincing landing page is important.
• Image: Image gets your Facebook ad noticed when it goes line. A good image, obviously, draws users’ attention.
• Video: Testing different videos, both the formatting as well as video content types. Try and do both promotional videos, behind the scenes video as well as testing storytelling videos. Try to aim for good authenticy and be genuine with your audience. They will recognise it quickly if you are really pushy in your ads. Only do this if you have a really good or time limited offer.

Rotate Facebook Ads Regularly

Did you ever notice your Facebook Ad’s CTR going down after a couple of days?

This is the result of continuous web presence and same target audience. As your ad appears on the same target audience ’s page repeatedly, it becomes saturated. Facebook shows us an average number of times one user saw the ad under the frequency metric in the Facebook Ads Manager on every single campaign.

To manage this repetition and fatigue, you have to change or rotate the ad to make it fresh and new for your target. You can change the headline copy, call to action words, background colors, images etc. However, you do not have to make any drastic changes to the ad.

Layer the Ads

Layers work as filters, which you stack on top of the basic ad. In a way, you can combine demographics with Local Awareness and connect with your target audience in the locality having a specific inclination and belonging to the right place.

Facebook offers plenty of options when you target your ads. As you filter the Facebook ads using any of the layering techniques, you must remember that specificity is expensive. If you ad audience is smaller and more specific, reaching them would become more expensive. So, you would have to find a middle ground, neither too broad nor too specific. That is the time when layering becomes necessary.

For instance, if your business is based in New York City, in a prime location, you can easily get away with adding some layers for creating specific ads, especially with Local Awareness Ads.

However, if you do not have much traffic or significant demographic differences where the business is located, you may not succeed in creating a detailed layer of ads to make it visible.

Facebook has some real brilliant controls to deliver ads to customers who are genuinely interested in them.

Why should you choose Facebook Ads for Local Business?

Facebook ads have the potential to reach farther and target your audience. The reason to choose Facebook for targeted marketing is as noted below:

No Google for Local Shopping

People do not use Google to shop locally and frequently. When local businesses advertise online, it is a tendency to start with Google. However, with this latest change in trend, it would be wise to consider another tool.

When people want to buy something locally or on a regular basis, such as grocery items, cosmetics, or dry cleaning services, they probably would not go online searching for the same. They would just want to visit the nearest store and get the items they need.

In order to drive in-store sales with digital ads, you must target the right people in the local region. You have to try to reach them somewhere so that they see your ad. Facebook is that one platform, which allows you both.

Targeted Business Venture

Facebook allows businesses to target their ads as finitely as a locality, town, or city. As such, you can show your ad to the people who would be able to walk down to your store or drive down and buy.

Promotions are Easier

Facebook allows you to promote offers and coupons very easily. Using third-party coupon apps or offer apps, you can advertise your coupons and drive more and more people to claim the same on Facebook.

Target Old Customers

Using the Custom Audience Feature of Facebook, you can target customers who purchased previously. You have their phone number and address in your database, which would help you to communicate. If you have any type of loyalty program, you would have all the information needed.

Tips to Create a Facebook Ad that Converts

When you are writing a Facebook ad copy, you must possess a strong value proposition. Understand what that one thing is separating you from the rest of the crowd. For example, if you own a café, your value proposition could be that you have the best apple pie in town.

Once you are aware of your value proposition, align your marketing message with that specific thing. In the ads, clearly, mention and imply that value proposition, and make a strong and convincing offer for users to follow up with a click and convert.

Adding call to action to Facebook ads is a simple and useful idea. The more influencing and stronger your offer, the easier it becomes to persuade your target audience to take an action.

Final Word

Facebook allows local businesses to reach a massive audience on a global scale and a very specific audience on a local scale. If you want to build your business or startup, smaller and local is a better investment than huge and massive.

You do not have to be one of those two-thirds of local businesses failing with their Facebook Ads. Remember, Facebook is not only popular but also equally engaging and interactive social media. There are proven solutions to show that companies, regardless of size, have huge business opportunity online using Facebook. However, you must take the correct approach, strategize, plan and measure your steps before posting an ad.