Facebook provides a potential treasure trove of information to marketers, though that’s under utilized by most brands at this point. Somewhere between 60 percent and 70 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from small businesses right now, not large brands.
Such businesses are realizing the benefits of targeting consumers on a local level, similar to the way small businesses take advantage of radio, newspaper and billboard advertising to drive local sales, writes Dave Williams. National brands shouldn’t feel excluded — they, too, can engage their audiences on a more intimate level by targeting locally. And unlike traditional display, Facebook gives advertisers national scale on a very local level. Unfortunately, many are leaving this opportunity untapped.
There are many ways to engage with consumers between local events, new store openings, holiday offers and other local promotions It’s like the way Sunday edition circulars used to work pushing weekly specials out to relevant localized audiences with efficiency, mass reach and frequency.
We recently ran a campaign to promote a celebrity in-store appearance for a cell phone provider. By targeting the youth market in that region with customized Facebook display ads, we achieved a 0.26 percent click-through rate, relatively high for any type of display. That high CTR foreshadowed massive attendance at the in-store event, completely surpassing expectations, wrote Williams. Groupon and Living Social are two other companies that know how to effectively leverage this local display strategy, and you’ve undoubtedly seen one or both companies advertise deals in your city in Facebook’s right-hand column. Both companies have national reach, but their business model operates on a local level, so proper targeting pays dividends in scale.
Facebook can alleviate problems that come up from broad and general websites to smaller regionalized sites with little ROI. Companies can use the self-serve ad tool and Facebook’s Ad API to automate the process, scale and target the correct audience without breaking the bank.
Marketing on a local level maximizes the impact of your marketing campaigns on Facebook by minimizing advertising waste and maximizing your reach and frequency with the right audiences, making the brand offering more appealing, said Williams. Customizing an ad makes your brand message relevant to a consumer on a level where he or she can easily engage and take action. It combines the reach and targeting capabilities of Facebook in order to maximize brand awareness and drive consumers into an actual location to make a purchase which is, after all, the purpose of marketing.
Source: AdAge
