Are you a local business owner seeking to grow your business super fast?
Then you better run Facebook ads for local businesses.
Facebook is one of the most popular social networks in the world. It’s used by billions of users daily around the world. Because of its wide reach, Facebook presents an enormous opportunity for smart local business owners. By advertising on the platform, you can get more new customers and increase your profits as many local businesses have discovered.
In this article, we will look at some important aspects of Facebook advertising, and how you can use it effectively as a local brand.
What Is Facebook Advertising?
Facebook ads are paid messages companies put on FB to promote their goods and services.
You pay for them whenever someone clicks on your advert. This is called Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising model. You’ve seen this type of online advertising when you log into your Facebook account or open an application.
Small business owners can show advertisements in different places of the Facebook interface, depending on the settings of the promotion itself, which are set by the advertiser.
Restaurant owners can use Facebook ads to show their customers that they offer a new menu, for example. Or, if you own a clothing store, you can advertise special sales and discounts on your products.
Why Run Facebook Ads?
Good question.
The simple answer is because Facebook ads work.
FB advertising is often quite a profitable investment for local brands because it provides a lot of advantages for advertising goods and services, which we will discuss below.
3 Types Of Facebook Ad Objectives For Your Local Business
We build all Facebook adverts around objectives.
So it is important to choose the right objective for your business at the start. Having a simple goal helps you to create an aligned advert that produces results. FB ad objectives fall into 3 broad categories:
Source: Social Media Objectives
Let’s look at each category in turn, shall we?
Awareness Objectives
Awareness objectives help create an interest in your company and product at the top of the funnel. By providing valuable information connected to the problems you solve, you help clueless prospects understand your business and what it does.
Awareness objectives include:
Consideration Objectives
Consideration objectives make people reflect on your business and reach out to you for more information.
Conversion Objectives
Conversion objectives seek to drive action on your Facebook pages, app, or website. These actions include:
Once you’ve identified your digital marketing goal, you are ready for the next step, choosing the right ad format for your specific campaign.
4 Types Of Facebook Ads For Local Businesses
Different Facebook ads can help you achieve different marketing goals.
After picking a goal, you will customize your ads in line with the selected goal, since each goal has its characteristics in the settings.
Let’s now consider the types of advertising on FB.
Image Ads
The first type of Facebook ad campaign you can run is image ads.
As the name implies, an image ad is a still graphic image that’s displayed on Facebook and Instagram.
You can display them on the:
Facebook supports all the popular ad formats like PNG, JPG, JPEG, TIF, and more.
Image ads are great for delivering a simple message to generate interest in your brand or service or inspire people to take action, e.g. book a call.
How’s this for a specimen image ad?
Source: Facebook
Simple, yet powerful.
A pic of cheerful people enjoying ice cream and coupled with a captivating question-based copy.
Video Ads
Next up are video ads.
Adding motion and audio to still images makes video a more powerful medium. Like images, video ads can also be shown on FB and Instagram. You can use video ads to boost Facebook posts.
Plus, you can also create a slide show that can be played as a video. The platform allows you to use 360 videos.
You can show video ads:
Here’s a specimen of a video ad.
https://www.facebook.com/business/success/west-elm-vamp
Source: Facebook
West Elm, an Australian brand, used video ads and a slide show like the one above to increase brand awareness and online sales. Here’s a summary of their results.
In short, let’s just say they killed it.
Carousel Ads
Carousel ads are like slideshow ads.
Carousel ads display up to 10 images or videos in one ad. You can create a link for each image so users click on it to find out more. Carousel ads are popular for e-commerce brands selling a variety of products.
You can place carousel ads on the:
Here’s an example of a carousel ad.
Source: Instapage
The series of images enables Foodpanda to showcase four products at once.
Collection Ads
A collection ad is built as an online catalog to lure people to buy.
Collection ads feature a dominant video on top plus 4 small product images underneath. These are specifically tailored for mobile users and are perfect for discovering e-commerce goods.
There are 4 templates for this type of ad:
This template is superb for organizing your products into groups to make it easier for consumers to identify what they are looking for. You can also use this template to:
Pick this template when you want to:
Choose this template if you want to mobile users an immersive, highly engaging full-screen Facebook ad campaign experience that:
Instant customer acquisition is what you are looking for if you want to:
You can show collection ads on:
Jewelry brand, Pura Vida posted impressive results through a collection ad.
https://www.facebook.com/business/success/2-pura-vida
Source: Facebook
Here are the numbers of their campaign.
I’m sure you agree with me that this was an exceptional Facebook ad strategy that produced a good return on their ad spend.
What To Do Before You Start Facebook Advertising For Your Local Business
To get started with Facebook ads for local businesses, you need two things:
To advertise on Facebook, you must have a FB page. Creating a page is easy. Go to your FB page profile: Pages > Meta Business Suite > Create A Facebook Page.
Image credit: Tailwindapp.com
After clicking ‘Create a Facebook Page’, you will arrive on a new page. Provide the needed info:
Click on ‘create page’ to launch your page. You can fine tune the page later by adding contact info, images, and other info.
Facebook Ad Targeting Options For Your Local Business
Identifying the EXACT audience you want to reach is one of the biggest benefits of Facebook ads. Small business owners can benefit immensely from the platform's powerful targeting features.
Here’s how the audience section looks in Facebook Ads Manager.
Let’s now look at the targeting options in detail.
Core Audiences
Using Facebook's basic audience targeting features, you can target a wide audience by location or age, as well as narrow your audience.
The primary audience is determined by the following parameters:
Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are people who’ve already been in contact with your business and shown interest in your offerings or what you do.
Marketing to these people is easier since they already know your business.
Custom audiences include:
Lookalike Audiences
Lookalike Audiences is using reaching out to a new audience on FB that shares similar characteristics with your best current clients.
There are three major benefits of using Lookalike Audiences.
First, you can adjust the audience size you are targeting. You can narrow down the audience you are after by increasing the number of shared interests between the source audience with the new audience to, say, 95%. Or you can reach a broader audience by reducing the shared traits.
Second, Lookalike Audiences tend to drive higher conversion rates. This is because you are targeting people with the same interests as those who have already bought your products. Another advantage is that it’s easy to monitor in Ads Manager, so you tweak your ads as you go to improve results.
You can use this option if:
4 Tips For Creating Fantastic Facebook Ads For Your Local Business
After selecting the target consumers and objective, move on to the creation of the ad.
A well-made advertisement should include:
Let’s look at each one.
Grab Attention With Stunning Visuals
Visuals are at the heart of any Facebook ad strategy.
Here’s why.
Studies reveal our brains process images 60x faster than words. So by using visuals, you will have higher chances of grabbing people’s attention fast.
Below are a few guidelines for creating visual content:
When you are selling food services, looks are everything, as the ad below shows.
Source: Facebook
Mami’s Catering Services made sure the food dominates the ad. The text is minimal, so all attention goes to the food.
TF Cornerstone, a pet grooming service also used visual content intelligently.
Source: Facebook
What’s better than showing off an excellently groomed dog when advertising a grooming service? That’s what makes this ad powerful—the lovely dog takes center stage.
Clearly Communicate Through Your Facebook Ad Copy
Copy is at the core of your ad creative.
It’s the mortar that binds everything together. So you must craft your advertisement text with utmost care for it to yield remarkable results.
A few tips on how to create captivating Facebook ad copy:
Here is a very good example of ad copy local businesses can learn from.
Source: Facebook
The Get Response advert ticks many boxes:
Source: Facebook
Why does this advert work?
First, it’s User-Generated Content (UGC). Content that comes from fellow customers generates interest because other customers find it appealing. Research by Tint shows a whopping 93% of customers trust content from consumers more than content produced by brands.
Also, it’s simple, so prospects get it straight away. Next, it uses social proof as they tell readers they’ve sold over 300,000 quilts. The massive number convinces Facebook users to become paying customers.
The ad seals the deal with a simple direct CTA ‘shop now’.
Close The Deal With A Strong CTA
Writing a call to action is a crucial part of an ad.
For your advertisement to succeed and drive the desired action, it must have a strong call to action. The CTA must be:
Above all, include a verb, since your goal is to drive action.
That’s exactly what MRS Heating And Cooling did.
“Call now”.
Simple. Instructive. Effective.
A homecare brand, The Pines Of Mount Lebanon used a concise CTA to boost engagement on their FB page.
The CTA ‘like page’ is succinct and unambiguous. Users know exactly what’s required of them, which makes it more likely for them to act.
Set Geo-Targeting For Your Local Business
An excellent way of attracting local customers is via geo-targeting.
It’s pivotal for a local company to set geographic targeting. Get it right and you will have a steady stream of potential customers coming to your brick and mortar store.
You can set geo-targeting in the audience section at the advert group level.
Besides setting the geographic location, you can choose what type of people to target with your advertisements:
Here are your location targeting options in Ads Manager.
Source: Adexpresso
The best part?
You can both include and exclude placements and set the radius around the location point that the advert will target. This gives you total control of the people you want to reach. You can zoom in on a particular radius in the neighborhood and target a specific gender and age range.
Source: Adexpresso
Physical location targeting is a marketing heaven for local businesses because it allows them to create personalized adverts that boost store visits significantly.
How To Track Facebook Advertising Results
Facebook provides marketers with a lot of data for gauging the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Here are the top ones and why is vital for you to track them.
Drive Fast Growth With Facebook Ads For Local Businesses
Facebook advertising is a huge opportunity for local and small businesses.
It’s all about finding what works best for your brand.
Don’t follow the crowd because your company is unique. Experiment with the different types of advertising available on Facebook to see which one produces excellent results for you. Once you find the advert types that work for your business, double down on them.
Soon, you’ll have people banging on your door in search of your product or service.
Keep reading on MikeVestil.com: Even if you're an author, you can use Facebook ads to sell more stuff. Check out this article on Facebook ads for authors if you want to sell more books.
