Do you own a small business? Are you looking for ways to attract people to come to your local store?
Learn to Promote a Local Business with Facebook Ads
It is very common for small businesses to struggle in attracting new customers and many find it difficult to encourage people to visit a local store. Don’t be tricked into thinking that Facebook Advertising only works for big brands. There are over 2 billion people on Facebook, including the people in your local area!
If you have a local business, it’s crucial to have an active Facebook Page that you post regularly to, and here’s why: research shows that, as of 2016, the average person on Facebook has over 300 friends. This is a great opportunity to gain some exposure
Every time someone engages with your content, such as a comment, like, or share, it will be shared on their own newsfeed. This post will then reach their friends. As you can imagine, this means that the potential reach for your posts can be huge, providing that they are engaging. This is a great start.
However, as you can see, you have to rely on the actions of other people, which isn’t within your control. If you want to take control of your marketing, you should be running Facebook Ads. Facebook collects heaps of data which you can use to target people who are: Local to your store, and Most likely to be interested in your product or service.
So let’s now look at the different ways that you can use Facebook Ads to reach your local customers.
Facebook Ads Tactics:
Call them by name
The first thing you want to do is make sure you make people aware that you are local! In your ad copy, make sure you call out people by location. For example:
- “Seattle locals! We have a special offer just for YOU!”
- “Calling all Londoners! YOU are invited to….”
Give them a reason
Next, make sure you give people a reason to click on your Ad. A great way to do this is to offer a promotional code! For example, let’s say you own a small coffee shop and want to attract new customers to visit and spend time in your shop.
You could create an advert with a unique offer code such as “LOVECOFFEE” to give people a free cake when they purchase a cup of coffee.
This gives people a very big reason to visit your coffee shop. And once you have people inside your coffee shop, you have the opportunity to upsell them with more treats and might even get more sales if they bring a friend.
Track your sales
These techniques are all well and good. But how will you know if they are resulting in more sales? This is where tracking comes in.
Try using unique promotion codes on Facebook that you don’t use anywhere else. If somebody comes in with that promotion such as “LOVECOFFEE”, you will know the came from your Facebook Ads.
As with any marketing effort, you will want to be able to track if the investment you are making in that marketing channel is giving you a return on your money.
The metrics you will want to measure is called Return on Ad spend. This metric is simply the amount of revenue you receive for every dollar you spend on running Ads. If you have a positive return on Ad spend, then you’re doing well.
You can manually calculate this by tallying up the sales you made and measuring against your Facebook Spend. You can also do this automatically using Facebook’s Offline Events.
If you collect customer details as they are redeeming their promo codes (such as email address or phone number), you may be able to track all transactions that happen in your store from that customer as a result of your Ad.
Just make sure to set up an Offline Event before your ad goes live so that Facebook knows to start tracking.
What Are The Best Tactics To Use When Creating Facebook Ads?
‘Store Visits’ Campaign objective
As explained earlier, this allows you to create a Facebook ad to drive people into a shop, restaurant, dealership or other type of local business with physical locations. It lets you reach local people to your business and helps people navigate to or contact the nearest store to them.
This will not only help you to increase the number of people that visit your shop but can also really help boost in-store sales.
Engagement Ads
‘Engagement’ ads can help you either boost the number of Likes, Comments or Shares on a post, get more Page Likes or raise attendance at an Event on your Page.
Which objective should you choose? Well this depends on what you really want to achieve.
Boosting a post will feature your post higher in your audience’s News Feed, so there’s a better chance people will see your post! This is a great way to promote your business if you have a particularly engaging post that you wish more people could see.
You may or may not heard the news that Facebook has reduced the organic reach for Pages; meaning that only a small percentage of your followers will actually get the chance to see your post.
Unless you have a huge number of followers that actively check your Facebook Page, then a boosted post would be a great way to overcome this.
With that said, increasing the number of page likes is a great way to increase the organic reach of your future posts. The more followers you have, the more people Facebook will show your posts to. So if you love to post regular content about what’s happening in your business then this is a great option for you.
There’s nothing more annoying that making great posts that no one gets to see!
“Event Response” Objective
However, if your main focus is to attract people to your business for a particular event, then creating a Facebook Event and running an ad to increase the number of attendees would be a great solution.
This works really well if your business is built around running particular events on specific dates. An example might be one where you run a Nightclub and have organized special guests to host an event on Friday night.
You can set up an Engagement Facebook Ad with the ‘Event Responses’ objective to allow you to promote your event in the most effective way.
Key Things To Remember
As you are a local business, the most important thing is to make sure that your ad reaches the right people in your local area! When selecting your audience, be sure to select your location either by postcode or town/city name and feel free to adjust the radius where you see fit.
If your product/service is specific to specific interests or only appropriate for specific gender and ages etc, then make sure you include this in your targeting!
