Facebook Local Awareness Ads Get Personal

Facebook ads are notorious for knowing you better than you think you know yourself. While shopping for a wedding gift a few month ago I was looking at power tools (a weird gift, I know), and for the next week all the ads on my Facebook news feed were related to power tools. Whether I was sitting on my couch or out and about, Facebook somehow magically showed advertisements for local hardware stores near me selling the tools I had been looking at.

Now Facebook advertising is becoming even more targeted—who knew that was possible—so if you’re a small business owner, listen up.

Specifically Targeting Each Business Location

If your business has multiple locations, you can target your Facebook ads individually. Meaning that you can create location-specific ads based on each of your company pages—which will help to directly target those Facebook users nearby.

For instance, Facebook shared, “if a cafe with multiple locations in the Bay Area decides to run Local Awareness Ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are. So, people in Menlo Park would see ‘Join us for lunch in Menlo Park,’ while people in San Francisco would see ‘Join us for lunch in San Francisco.’”

“Call-to-action buttons are also dynamic, so when someone clicks on the ‘Call Now’ or ‘Get Directions’ button, they’re connected to the store currently closest to them. This helps advertisers spend more efficiently, since they’re only connecting with people likely to visit the store and the information they share is hyper-local and relevant.”

There are many benefits to this new feature, for example, the ads target the area in which the user is physically present—allowing both local residents and tourists to see the same ads simply based on the data shared by their mobile device’s location-based services. They also allow for affordable reach in your neighborhood. Smaller businesses can now reach a large number of people in a smaller, more targeted area.

Facebook Local Insights

Although not a live feature yet, Facebook will soon be rolling out “Local Insights.” Local businesses will be able to find out the demographics of Facebook users who have passed through their area (that have location-based services enabled on their phone). Local Insights will allow business owners to better understand the groups of people near their store and more specifically target their local advertisements to these potential customers—improving the results of their Facebook ads.

The Local Insights feature is beneficial to discovering the neighborhood’s busiest days of the week and times of day, and also includes typical demographic metrics that differentiate between age, gender, tourist, and local residents. Business owners can also see how many Facebook users were within 150 feet, 450 feet and 1,500 feet of their stores throughout the day. Facebook believes that “Insights of this kind empower businesses to tailor their marketing to the people nearby and drive more people to their store.”

The Local Insights tool is not directly tied to Local Awareness Ads, meaning that businesses with only one location can use it to see who’s nearby and when. However, these insights will be particularly valuable to businesses with multiple locations. Facebook advertisers will be able to analyze the correlation between their Facebook ads and the traffic to their specific store locations.

When combined with Local Awareness Ads, business owners can better understand whether their ads are increasing their store’s traffic and whether they are reaching targeted customers.

Don’t worry about privacy—Facebook stresses that anonymity is of utmost importance. “To protect the privacy of people on Facebook, data is anonymized and only shown in percentages and overall trends, not absolute numbers. Local Insights does not share location information about individual people with businesses.”

The Facebook Local Awareness Ad updates will be available to all business owners in the next few weeks—so be on the lookout!

Facebook Advertising for Small Businesses

Social media advertising gets your business in the hands of the consumer. People are spending more and more time on their mobile phones—creating a new challenge for advertisers. Whether you’re a small or large business owner, you have one goal: to increase your store’s traffic, and in turn, increase your sales.

Want to use Facebook’s new Local Awareness Ads to wrangle in new customers? Blue Corona specializes in Facebook campaigns and can help your small business see results. Contact us today to learn how paid social media marketing campaigns can help your business.