The RIGHT Way To Do Facebook Targeting For Local Businesses

in this video I'm going to show you how to advertise local businesses using Facebook and Instagram ads now you may have seen some of my previous videos where I might recommend not advertising to an audience less than half a million people when using the director of a strategy but that's not always possible with local businesses and actually because with local businesses you are targeting a much smaller geographical area usually a far smaller population than if you're advertising nationally or internationally you need to make quite a few adjustments to your targeting so I wanted to create

a specific video covering targeting foreign local businesses specifically let's get into it so I'm in an example ad account here and I'm going to quickly create an example campaign and then jump to the ad set level to show you how we would set up targeting and the adjustments we would make for local businesses so I'm an ads manager I'm going to click on this plus create button I'm going to go with the leads campaign you could use a different campaign objective if you were looking to depending on your sales depend on how that's constructed but

I'm going to go ahead and select leads and then click continue I'm going to go with a manual leads campaign to show you how this works and then what we're going to do is jump over to the ad set level now I've got lots of other videos that show you exactly how to do everything else within a campaign how to set up the campaign level and the rest of the ad set settings and the ads and things like that so for this video I want to keep it nice and specific and jump down to the

targeting section and just show you exactly how to set that up now the first thing that you'll often see is that meta will default location will be the entire country in which you are based so here we've got the United Kingdom that is not something that we're going to want to do if we're advertising a local business first thing I need to mention is it sounds fairly self-explanatory but I have seen people think you have to advertise to a whole country that's not true at all you can get very specific with your targeting so if

I go ahead and delete out the United Kingdom and I live in a town in England called Cheltenham so if I want to put that in let me make sure the right one comes up um Cheltenham England so start by entering in the center of the location that you want to Target and then you can adjust accordingly the area around that location so the decision here really comes down to where are you willing to travel or where do you think your prospects are willing to travel if they come to you as a local business because

obviously some local businesses operate where they go to the customer some it's a reverse so have a think about what that might be and it will differ depending on your business if for example you're advertising a gym that's a location that your customers are going to have to come to and they're probably going to do so quite frequently you'd hope so at least and therefore they're not going to be willing to travel very far so if you're advertising a gym you're going to want to really reduce this radius maybe even select current city only you

know depending on the place where you live and how far people travel in general how sparsely populated is it however if on the other hand you are an interior design business and you specialize in barn conversions well there aren't that many bonds to convert so you're probably going to have to cast a wider net and you probably only work on a couple of projects a year maybe a few more but you you know the sort of thing I'm talking about therefore you're willing to travel further to your customers so you then go back to cities

with radius and you might go with a 25 mile default you might really be happy to expand it out and think you know there aren't that many customers to be had we need to be willing to travel to cast a large in them so have a think about what that might be for your specific location you can always come in and address this address this later on if you set too larger radius and you know you find that people that are actually signing up for say your gym or whatever are only really close within your

Target location you could come in and adjust your targeting if likewise you find that you're missing out on potential customers because you haven't said it wide enough and you're willing to travel then you can adjust accordingly but just set your best foot forward and go with that because we're advertising on a local basis we can see that the audience size is going to be significantly smaller so if advertising to the whole of the UK that's going to be roughly 50 million Facebook Instagram users let's say whereas we can see here this estimated audience size on

the right for 25 miles around Cheltenham is 1 to 1.2 million um people in in that area okay so it's significantly small in terms of population that means we need to be less specific with our subsequent targeting options we can't really narrow it down like we might if we were targeting the whole of a country or multiple countries because we're going to end up with an audience that is just too small now if this was my target area I would want my eventual audience ideally to be above 250 000 people so you can see how

we're not massively shrinking this down so let's start with age yes you can narrow down your age range if your product or service is quite specific to it to a certain age but keep it broad so let's say we were advertising our digital marketing Services we only wanted to work with customers that we could meet with face to face in the local area and therefore we would narrow this down and we know that our typical customer is going to be a business owner let's say that is between the ages of 30 and 60. something like

that right well we're going to want to make this nice and Broad so let's make that 25 add some buffer on and we might go all the way up to 65 Plus or maybe just cap it under so that we don't get the plus and the and the tail and something like that you can see that even though this is a broad age selection we've already reduced our estimated audience size quite specifically then when it comes to genders unless you are very much one way or the other let's say 90 male 90 female or more

I would keep this open and allow meta to do its thing and work out who to put your ads in front of as our business we work with obviously business owners they're both male and female all the time so we would leave this um as all then the detailed targeting gets really interesting so if we were advertising a business like this one of the ad sets that we use would be targeting open targeting otherwise known as broad targeting which would basically be this right it would be age range gender if required the local area which

were to advertise and we wouldn't add in any detailed targeting options at all we would just leave that open and that may well be one of our best performing options if we do come into detail targeting select edit and want to add in some options we need to make sure that we stay relatively Broad in terms of our interests so if we were advertising our digital marketing Services we might go for people that are say interested in social media marketing as as an option okay interesting if we click on that we'll see that our audience

app so that audience hasn't changed because we've still got Advantage detailed targeting selected go ahead and deselect that but we can see look that's brought our audience all the way down to 71 000 to 84 000 that's just not going to be big enough okay are there other related interest that we could add in instead let's try digital marketing and delete this one out I imagine it's going to be pretty specific as well slightly bigger but still a little bit too small if we delete that out and go broader in terms of the terms that

we're advertising okay how about just Marketing in general what does that give us okay marketing significantly larger that's what you'd expect right hearing these targeting more people interested in marketing as a whole than social media marketing than digital marketing you can see how these sort of fit within each other this is a good audience size to test so we might have one ad set that is testing broad targeting one ad set that is testing marketing we may be able to have another ad set for example that is just people interested in business might be another

options that we can use slightly larger still but you see the sort of thing I'm talking about here you need to be broader with your targeting options when you're advertising locally and by the way all of what I've shown you here would have to be different if we narrowed this audience down so if I just briefly take this down to current City only for example we can see that now trying to Target business um as an interest takes us down to way too small so we'd have to basically if we were just targeting Cheltenham we

would have to go with broad targeting only as an option because that's the only way we could get the audience size up we would still by the way so if I delete this app to demonstrate we would still by the way be beneath the 250 000 that I mentioned and that's okay because if we only want to advertise to the actual city of Cheltenham there's only something like 110 000 people that live here and once we've added in a few of these we're looking at you know um 66 to 78 so let's say you know

70 75 000 people we can't make it any bigger than that if you only want to advertise in that area don't artificially increase the geographical area in order to make your audience size larger that's silly just be aware that your audience is going to be small that's fine there are some things you can do about that that I'll mention in a minute but that's how we would approach this okay so if I just go back to the previous example because I think most businesses are going to be using the radius we've deleted that out um

our detail targeting that takes us back up to this sort of range that's only slightly narrowed by the age criteria so we've got our open targeting ad set we've perhaps got a couple of Interest depending on whether you can find them or not that's going to depend on your business and whether you can find broad enough interests and how many people are actually in your location and then the other type of um targeting that we're going to use cold audience targeting that we're going to use for local businesses is look-alike audiences so you add those

in with this custom audiences section you click on this um in here search existing audiences and I've already prepared one now this is a 10 look-alike audience based on all website visitors okay so but people have visited the website 10 look like audience if you are not familiar with look like audiences I'd recommend checking out another video I've created that's a full tutorial shows you exactly how to do it I'll include a link in the video description below um so go ahead and check that out if you're not familiar with how they work and things

along those lines um now the reason why we're creating a 10 look-alike audience is that's the largest look-alike audience that we can create that meta will allow us to and the way it works with a look-alike audience is that you are saying to meta but 10 I want the 10 of people within this location that are most similar to The Source audience so in this case we've got the 10 of people in the UK that are most similar to the people that have visited our website within the last 180 days if you're confused by that

check out the look-alike audience tutorial it law makes sense now what you'll likely find is that your audience size is going to be beneath the sort of 250 000 that I mentioned we would make an exception for this audience because look like audiences typically do perform well particularly for local businesses okay they're very very powerful so we would make an exception and we would test look like audiences in an ad set where you do test a look-alike audience there are a few adjustments I'd make so I would personally get rid of Advantage Plus lookalike audience

which expands it Beyond not something that I typically use and I would also recommend leaving this open so no detailed targeting no gen under selection and then we would adjust the age back to the full range that we can use 18 to 65 because our the specificity is all going to be taken care of with the lookalike audience we don't need to add in any other specific criteria okay so those are all the cold audience options that we would use when advertising local businesses so I'm just going to flesh these ad sets out for you

actually and then we're going to create the warm audience ad set because that's really important so we would want to have this as our lookalike ad set okay and then if I go ahead and duplicate this and we will create um four duplicates into the same campaign so we would have multiple ad sets within the same campaign we've got our lookalike ad set there if we just select this ad set this one would be our marketing ad set okay and if we scroll down if we remember the marketing ad set option so we don't want

to look like audience in here let's delete that out we've got the same location targeting here we want to change our age range back to 25 to 64. and then in detail targeting we are going to add in marketing add that in okay and that's set up that's our marketing ad set then we would go down and create delete that lookalike audience out change the age range to I keep clicking on 24 for some reason 25 to 64. and then in detail targeting we would want to add in our business interest because we identified that

as one and then we would go up here let's go all the way to the top and call this business ad set Okay so we've got cold audience there cold audience there cold audience there and then this one here we're going to call this one open ad sets this is where we're going to have no targeting um options whatsoever so scroll down let's get rid of the lookalike audience we'll go with the same age parameters as what we discussed previously no detailed targeting in here whatsoever and that's going to be our largest audience size and

that leaves us with our fifth ad set which is going to be warm audiences now when it comes to retargeting warm audiences definitely something you want to do if you're a local business it's very very simple we'll delete out our lookalike and you just want to go ahead and add in all the relevant warm audiences so here we've got people who've engaged with our Facebook page people engage with our Instagram account people have watched videos of ours on Facebook and Instagram people who are on our email list and people who have visited our website so

all the available warm audiences that you have want to be added in here absolutely make sure that you don't have Advantage custom audience selected that was automatically deselected for me then but it probably won't be for you so make sure you go ahead and turn that off and then this would be our warm audience we would leave this open so we don't need to narrow the age gender detail targeting anything down when you're targeting people that have already interacted with your business and if you're not familiar with how to retarget how to create these custom

audiences they just very quickly be added in there because he's all pre-created I'll include another Link in the video description that shows you exactly how to go about setting all those up when to use each one and stuff like that so really useful video which strongly recommends you check out that tutorial but this would be how our targeting would look for a local business typically we've got a look-alike a 10 remember couple of interests if we can an open ad set and then ah we need to rename this one and then this would be our

retargeting ad set and if we're running the direct to office strategy which I talk about a lot and we're targeting for a local business this is exactly what you look like obviously you'd have to make sure that you've got all the ad set settings right or the campaign settings and that you've got your ads set out but in terms of targeting this is the way we go now there is an even easier way to get your targeting set up than what I've described in this video and that's to have my company do it for you

so we offer done for you Facebook and Instagram advertising Services if you're interested you can click on the link in the video description below take you through to a page on our website where you can book in a call with one of my team members these are free no obligation and it's to find out more about your business how we might be able to help you can find out more about our services what we charge and things like that so go ahead and book a call and hopefully we get a chance to work together so

the next videos I'd strongly recommend you check out are that one on how to create a look-alike audience a full detailed tutorial and that one on how to create these custom audiences so that you can retarget again it's a full detailed troll I think you'll find both of those very helpful if you found this video helpful please go ahead and let me know in the comments below and don't forget to subscribe