Do you have a business in your community and want to do local advertising, but don't know where to start? Facebook Ads is a great tool to market your business on and can bring a great ROI. There are some tips that I suggest doing if you are just starting out. There are many things to do when you advertise on Facebook, but I recommend to always do six things. You'll want to define your marketing goal then target your audience using the audience insights tools on Facebook Manager. Next you have to decide AND or OR targeting and retarget users or find new customers.
It can be hard to begin to advertise on Facebook. Do you want to increase awareness with a brand awareness campaign, or do you want to increase sales by driving people on Facebook and Instagram to your store website, or get them to come into your physical location? Luckily the first step on Facebook is to set up your type of campaign where you can pick one of the three main objectives and from there pick a more specific action you want your audience to take. This is the first step when doing local advertising. Lastly you'll measure your frequency and budget effectively. Follow these basic steps and you'll be on your way to a great marketing campaign.
Don't be afraid to set lofty goals!
This is a great tool to use for businesses in the community seeking to do local advertising to understand your audiences’ behaviors. On here you can choose to find out data about your audience that are following your page. If you don’t get any data, it means that you don’t have enough followers, but it’s okay! You can still use this tool effectively. Just choose everyone on Facebook and we can start here.
Insights tools work like this:
Let’s say you’re a skateboard shop. Similar brands might be Zumiez or Vans. You can put these brands under “interests” section and learn insights about these audiences. This data will be helpful when you’re trying to define your audience. This is a great place to start.
This is an extremely important detail to get right so that you don’t target too many people or too little people.
Or targeting is used to target people that like Zumiez OR Vans. People that like either of these brands will be showed your ad. Your audience size increases when you add an interest under the OR targeting.
And targeting will narrow your audience. Let’s say you want to target people that like Zumiez and are a certain age. Now you have two different sections that overlap. Like a ven-diagram with the overlapping area, your audience will be in the middle where people that like Zumiez and are a certain age. Only this people will see the ad because of AND targeting.
Retargeting is reaching people that are already aware of your brand. They might have seen your ad, visited your website, or engaged with your brand in some way.
New customers being reached is the opposite of retargeting. You’re trying to expand your reach to new people that haven’t heard of you yet.
If will be hard to allocate money specifically if you already have a set budget. Plus, it’s confusing to see which audience is doing better when you have your campaigns combined. Having separate campaigns for these two things is the simplest for management and optimization.
Frequency means the times a user has seen your ad withing a certain period. Big or local businesses advertising to their audiences need to be careful in not showing too many ads in a such a short time. The consequence would be bombarding your audience and they will get annoyed.
It’s easy to measure this because you can add “frequency” to your campaign manager tab.
A good rule of thumb is half the number of ads shown to the days you plan to show the add. If you choose to advertise for two weeks, then your frequency should be no more than seven days. If you're doing local advertising then be extra cautious in not showing your ads too much because your audience size is limited.
Campaign budget optimization is something that’s been around for over a year and this could affect your campaign if you don’t keep tabs. CBO moves your budget from individual ads to the campaign then allocates more money on the ad that Facebook thinks is doing better. This isn’t always the ad that you think and see is doing better.
There are two types of budgets that you can set up on Facebook: daily budgets and lifetime budgets. Each has it’s won benefits and drawbacks. Here is a simple list to decide which budget choice is best for you.
Daily budgets for:
- Continuous running campaign
- Maximize strong performance
- Will change your budget regularly
Lifetime budgets for:
- Running ads on a schedule
- Set budget and end date
It can be a daunting task to do local advertising, but if you follow these six steps you already have a foundation for a great digital campaign. Remember to
