How Facebook’s Local Awareness Ads Can Boost Business
Facebook can be an extremely helpful tool for marketing your business, especially if you’re willing to dive deeper and learn more about all of the useful tools that the platform has made available. Some of these tools are incredibly easy to use, too.
In particular, Facebook's Local Awareness ads can be a great way to beef up local advertising. These targeted ads are designed to drive in-store traffic to your local business. They’re often effective, but that doesn’t mean every small business can benefit. If you’re trying to determine whether these ads are the right move for your small business, this guide will help you answer that important question.
What are Local Awareness ads?
Before we dive in, it’s important to understand what Local Awareness ads are.
These ads allow for precise targeting of potential customers that live in or have recently visited the area near your business. When you set up a campaign you can help people get directions to your storefront, provide a phone number for easy calling, or prompt people to message you with a question.
All of these actions can be accomplished right from your ad, making Local Awareness listings a very effective way to get users to take action.
Pros of Facebook’s Local Awareness ads
There are several perks of using these ads, including:
Precise audience targeting. Because Local Awareness ads target the areas where a user is physically present, the targeting potential is very precise. This means that you can attract customers who are on vacation or just visiting, and not only people who have your city or town listed as their residence on their Facebook accounts.
They’re easy to use. Setting up the most effective Facebook ads can become incredibly time consuming and difficult. Local Awareness listings were specially designed to be user-friendly and easy to create.
Cost effectiveness. You control your budget, so Local Awareness ads can be a great way to reach a large audience without spending extravagantly on marketing.
Help people find you online, without Google. Many small businesses focus their online marketing efforts on SEO (search engine optimization) and other Google-friendly tasks. But, people probably won’t be searching Google for things they buy regularly, like groceries. As Wishpond mused, “ ... to drive in-store sales with online ads, you need to be able to both target the right people in your local area, and reach them somewhere that they’ll see it. The one website that allows you to do both of these things is Facebook.”
Cons of using Local Awareness for small business advertising
Right now, the main downside to these ads is their limited segmentation capabilities.
Location, age, and gender are the only demographics that advertisers can segment, which could be problematic if you need more detailed segmentation for your ads. This is likely to change in the future, though, as the tool becomes more robust and powerful. Facebook might not be the best social media platform for what you need right now.
How do I create a Local Awareness ad on Facebook?
The technology behind Facebook’s location targeting might seem complicated, but setting up a campaign is very straightforward. Social Media Examiner created a useful guide that’s worth a read if you want to get started with your own Local Awareness ad campaigns.
