Being able to get results with Facebook Ads depends on your ability to create an effective strategy to be able to promote your local business.
Whether you have a restaurant, a beauty salon, a clothing store, a doctor’s office or a bed and breakfast etc., it doesn’t matter, because you will hardly find a more effective tool than Facebook Ads to advertise your business.
What you need to know about how to promote your business on Facebook can be found in this post.
Why use Facebook Ads to promote a local business
If you want to explore in more detail the reasons why your company cannot give up using Facebook Ads, I suggest you read this post that I published previously.
Facebook allows you to be able to promote your business even with a small initial budget. You won’t need to squeeze your wallet to get some results, but you just need to invest enough to reach the largest number of people within your target.
Moreover, just by its very nature, Facebook allows you to make the most of word of mouth, ensuring that the people reached by your ad can share it with their friends. This will organically (free) increase the coverage of your posts and allow you to reach new potential customers.
Facebook is one of the most suitable channels for all local businesses, because it allows you to reach people who live or are in the immediate vicinity of your business.
The more restricted the area of interest of your business, the greater your opportunities will be to reach your target with the least possible effort.
Here are the main reasons to choose Facebook Ads to promote your local business:
- Items that are purchased frequently and nearby are not searched on Google;
- Delimiting the public of a local business on Facebook Ads is extremely simple;
- You can easily advertise coupons and offers;
- You can select the people who have already visited your business as the target of your listings.
How to use Facebook Ads to promote your local business
The easiest and most effective way to get people to choose your business is to offer them something of value for free. This is because, unlike what happens when using Google AdWords, users on Facebook are not actively looking for your product, so you certainly can’t expect them to buy something directly just because they saw it in your listing! And this applies even if the contact you intercepted is interested in your product.
The power of Google AdWords lies in the fact that it allows you to reach people who are interested in buying at that time.
Facebook Ads, on the other hand, does not allow you to know the intentions of the person who is reached by your message and the chances of being on Facebook thinking of you or your product are really low. For this reason you have to give something to your audience, something that attracts their attention and stimulates their interest and curiosity. In short, as they say in marketing, you must convey value to your target.
A mistake to avoid when promoting your product
Many ads that you see around Facebook tend to simply sell something, present a product in an aseptic manner, without the slightest appeal. Nothing could be more wrong!
What you need, instead, is to make the consumer understand what the added value of your product / service is, what benefit he can derive from clicking your advertising. In most cases, the person who is facing your Facebook ad will be completely uninterested in buying your product at that time. However, if you have set your audience well, you can easily offer them something of value connected to your product / service or your company. In this way, you offer yourself the opportunity to “capture” a certain number of people and convert them into qualified leads that could buy your product in the future.
Having made this premise a must, now I reveal the three steps to be able to achieve results with Facebook Ads.
The three steps to make the best use of Facebook Ads for a local company
- Select the right audience
For a local company one of the most important features of Facebook Ads is certainly the possibility to select the audience to reach within a predetermined geographical area. This information can then be cross-referenced with the interests of your target audience and its composition in terms of gender, age, educational qualifications, etc. This way you can build your perfect audience.
The size of your audience will vary based on the number of users in the geographic area you indicated. However, consider that an audience should tend to be between 10,000 and 100,000 units.
In addition, Facebook Ads offers you the Custom Public option (Custom Audience), which gives you the possibility to create Similar Public (Look-A-Like). Creating an LAL audience will allow you to reach subjects that are similar in interest, age, etc. to your customers or those who have interacted with your site or with your posts, etc.
- Give people a reason to click
As I said, you have to encourage your potential customers to click on your listing, right?
If you give your audience a reason to click or to interact with your ad, you will increase their interest in what you are trying to present to them. In this way, you will be able to increase your chances of pushing the potential consumer to become your customer.
The best incentive you can provide to your potential customers to push them to visit your store is a discount coupon.
But not only.
You could create an event or an info-product specific for your sector etc. The panorama of possibilities is wide and it is up to you and your imagination to experiment with every possible form of stimulus.
- Monitor and scale your campaign on Facebook Ads
One of the aspects that most determines the success of a campaign on Facebook is your ability to keep track of the indicators that warn you if your adverts are going well or badly. The KPIs that come into play are many, from the cost per conversion to the return on sales etc.
One of the things not to be overlooked is certainly the Tests. Test your listings and select the best performing ones, so as to channel your investment only to those ads that have a better response.
My recommendation is to create at least 4 listings for each group and test them two at a time. Once the test is finished, it eliminates the insertion that obtained the lower results and scales the campaign by increasing the budget assigned to the best one and so on. Eventually, you’ll find yourself having only active advertisements that convert and that will raise your ROI.
Conclusions
This post has provided you with a general overview of how to move around to use Facebook Ads for your local business.
Author Bio: Jenifer James is graduated from the college of Los Angeles and after that, she started working with a company who help people that how to appeal and reinstate a suspended Amazon seller account. In the meantime, she manages her own blog because Jenny loves to travel around the world.
