Category: Facebook Marketing

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.

You’re building up a Facebook following, attracting an audience, and getting reactions to what you’re posting on FB. So why aren’t your sales figures reflecting it? Getting an audience is just the beginning, now you need to turn that traffic into leads for your business.

These days Facebook is huge in terms of active users, with the platform’s own stats showing an average of 1.4 billion daily active users in December 2017, so the audience IS there.

The question for you is, how do you harness that audience to generate amazing leads?

Start with a killer business page…

Your business page is the first step to impressing your audience, and it’s a FREE inbound marketing tool, so make sure you’ve optimised it to be as appealing as possible. Get it right, and your page will be doing half the work!

1. Use the best visuals: Think carefully about what to use for your cover photo and profile picture, remembering that the cover photo is the largest visual on your page. Whether it’s your employees, your product, some great imagery, or a mixture, make sure it’s eye-catching as well as relevant to your brand, not just any pretty picture. The profile picture is fairly small in comparison, but still important in terms of displaying your brand, so your logo is ideal for this.
2. Engage more people with a button: Adding a button to your page is a free way to encourage engagement, and you can choose your own call to action – so whether you want people to visit your page, contact you, watch a video, or anything else, use that CTA!
3. Tell people ‘About’ you: Use the ‘About’ section to give users all the information they need about your business, from the basics like contact details to an engaging paragraph that tells people who you are.

Engage with your audience…

What you actually post on your page is something you need to carefully consider, unlike your personal page that’s full of hilarious memes and cute kitten videos (though they of course can also be OK to share on your business page, depending on what your business is!).

1. Mix it up: If you post the same thing over again, whether that’s sales posts or links to valuable articles or anything else, you’ll end up boring your audience. Make it a good mixture of different types of posts and check Facebook’s analytics for your page to monitor how your content goes down.
2. Make it relevant: Make sure everything you share is actually relevant to your audience, and is going to add value to their day in some way.
3. Get your audience involved: Rather than just talking AT your audience, try posting questions or polls that encourage people to respond. And when they do, make sure to keep that conversation going!

Run Facebook ads…

In terms of great value advertising, Facebook is perfect – you can focus your ads to your ideal audience thanks to the platform’s highly targeted advertising options, and it suits every budget.

Effective, adaptable, and straightforward, Facebook should be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. The only question is, are YOU taking advantage of it in the right way?