Facebook advertising for local businesses. Tips and Tricks.

If you're wondering if and how online advertising can benefit your physical business, the answers are many. Today, we're going to talk specifically about Facebook and the special features that are geared towards local businesses.

We'll tell you how to create a Facebook ad for your site in a few steps, and along the way we'll share helpful tips and tricks from our experience.

Set a goal

When you start your advertising campaign, you need to know what you want to achieve with it. 📌

Do you want to increase visitors to your facility overall or increase the flow on certain days and times when you're not busy? Or maybe your goal is to increase turnover to a certain X and you're willing to allocate Y advertising budget to achieve it?

For the sake of post-campaign analysis and future success, write out your goals in advance.

Add your location details to your Facebook page

In case your business has more than one location, you can add them to your Facebook profile through Business Manager. Once you do, your main page will represent your business as a whole, and the individual locations will have their own with their respective contact details and addresses.

When you run an ad for your business, you can choose whether it comes from your main page or from one of your location pages.

Create a special offer

Think about which products or services you offer you would like to highlight to attract more visitors. For example, if your establishment is a bakery, a coffee offer with your customers' favorite baked good is a good idea.

Take a moving video or a beautiful photo with your phone and use it as creative for your ad.

Create an ad that targets by location

Advertise the already created offer using the Awareness -> Store location awareness option in Meta Ads Manager. With these ads you have the opportunity to:

• Show users the location of your nearest site (if you have more than one). This can be done by using a dynamic address field for your store in your ad creative.
• Add a button to the ad to give directions to your site or a button to contact you directly on Messenger, Instagram or WhatsApp.
• When targeting your ad, you can choose from the usual options, but the key here, of course, is location. You can place the pin at any point on the map and choose a radius for your audience to fall within. Or choose to target the locations where your outlets are located.
• Depending on whether your business is more narrowly targeted to people in the neighborhood or not, this feature will make it easier for you in your mission to present your ad to the right consumers.

Enable advertising during certain times of the day

If you choose the option to pre-set a budget for the entire campaign period, you can set which days and times your ad will be active using the "Run ads on a schedule" feature.

If we go back to the previous example and advertise an offer that includes coffee with breakfast, it wouldn't make much sense for the ad to run in the evening, would it? Set up the campaign so that it shows up in the right time slot to people who are in the area where your business is located.

And if you don't want to stop your ad entirely, use the manual bid option. Create a rule that the system automatically increases your bid at selected times and decreases it at others.

With this strategy, you can also try the Accelerated Delivery option, which increases the frequency of the ad. This is useful if you want to advertise your offer more aggressively and have a deadline.

Keep in mind that in this case you may spend your budget quite quickly and your costs will be higher, so be cautious and think carefully about the value of the maximum bid you are going to bet.

Remember that running ads only on certain days and times inevitably limits them . Also, if your peak time coincides with that of your competitors, this will affect the costs you'll have to pay to see results.

However, if you decide this strategy is good for your business or you just want to try it out, go for blocks of time (for example, three hours a day) instead of individual hours.

Keep track of offline sales that come from your advertising

Our plan started with clarifying the goals we are pursuing and cannot end without analyzing the results. But how do we track them if we're talking about a physical business?

The so-called "offline conversions" that are added in Meta Events Manager come to the rescue. With these, you can measure how your ads are driving results offline.

This is possible by adding information about your customers such as names, emails and phone numbers from the systems your company uses to process payments and mark purchases. Meta will compare this information to the list of people who saw your ad, and if there's a match, that specific purchase will be attributed to your campaign results.

To get a good view of your ad performance, it's important to add purchase data to your sites daily. This way they can effectively link to the performance of the ads you have enabled.

The offline sales information you add to your advertising account can also be used to create a custom audience of offline customers. From this you can create a lookalike group and thus extend the reach of your campaigns even further.

Facebook advertising can be an effective means of communication for your local business. Follow the steps above and apply some of our tips to make the most of the opportunities the platform offers. If you need professional advice for this, contact us, ADvantage Digital Agency.