Whether your business is a dental surgery, chiropractor, bar, restaurant, gym, or any other type of business with a local clientele, you definitely should be taking advantage of Facebook advertising.
You already know that online advertising is crucial to business success, letting businesses connect with customers all over the world, but of course it can be expensive. When your customer base is local, however, Facebook advertising is an ideal means to target your ideal customers without blowing your marketing budget!
The benefits of Facebook advertising for local businesses
- You can tweak Facebook ads to target a hyper-local, geographically defined audience.
- The platform gives you detailed analytics that lets you fine-tune future ads to get the best results.
- With billions of Facebook users accessing the mobile app while they’re out and about, you can reach customers at any place, any time.
- Facebook offers high click-through rates, and those rates continue to rise.
Facebook ads for service businesses
While Google AdWords is a powerful tool for attracting people who are searching for your specific product or service, your audience on Facebook is slightly different. They don’t necessarily need your business right now…or at least, they don’t know they do…so your ad needs to make them realise it!
Whether you want to alert potential customers to your new local business, attract more to an existing business, or target visitors to your area, using Facebook ads is perfect for raising local awareness. And here’s how…
Firstly, what’s your objective?
You can, of course, create an ad just to let people know you exist, but the perfect ad has a definite end goal. It might be getting them to buy tickets to a special event at your bar, registering at your dental surgery, or signing up to your mailing list.
Next, you need to think about the audience you’re targeting and make sure you understand how to set up your ad to reach the right people. Luckily, Facebook’s interface makes it easy for you to do just that.
Once you know how you’re going to target your ad to a specific demographic, you need to make sure your audience will actually want to click through. How? Well, one of the best ways is to offer them an incentive to click – whether that’s a discount, a coupon, a competition, anything that people in your local area are going to benefit from.
When you run your ad you can select everything from the target demographic to budget, so you’re completely in control. And with the help of Facebook’s analytics, you can track the progress of your ad, meaning you can tweak and A/B test till you get the perfect formula for your business.
How you can benefit from ‘The Crazy Discount Funnel’
Here’s an example of how our clients benefit from Facebook advertising, with a funnel we call ‘The Crazy Discount Funnel’:
Step 1: We create an ad that offers something of Value SUPER cheap or even FREE.
Step 2: We use a landing page to capture name, email, and telephone details.
Step 3: We use a thank you page to offer something even better if they act NOW.