Facebook Ads Targeting For LOCAL Businesses

0:00hi guys it's been Heath from lead guru in in this video I'm going to talk about Facebook ads targeting for local businesses okay now there's lots of information online around Facebook ads targeting which targeting options you should use etc etc but not a lot of that is dedicated towards local businesses and local businesses obviously need to target in different ways to businesses that are advertising on Facebook on a national or international basis and I'm not just talking obviously about the geographical area in which you target coz that's going to change but because your advertising to a much smaller area with a much smaller population base that

0:37changes what targeting options you can use you need to adjust your approach and do things differently so this is a topic I've talked about a little bit in the past I've sort of added it on to other targeting tutorials but I thought I'd create a specific video for you guys running Facebook Ads for local businesses whether it's your own business or for your clients and how I go about and targeting because as an agency we work with lots of businesses that are national and international but we also work with lots of businesses that are local or at least you know they're dead chains and they have lots

1:04of different locations and they operate locally so we've sort of worked out some stuff about how you need to go about doing Facebook Ads targeting for local businesses and that's what we're going to focus on in this video before I get into the steps just wanna quickly mention there's a free Facebook advertising related resource I'm going to tell you about at the end of this video so make sure you stick around before that so the way I thought I would go through this I'm going to quickly create an example Facebook ad campaign gonna get to the ad set level and then focus on the local targeting aspect and

1:31then talk you through some of the elements that you need to focus on so I'm just in an example Facebook Ads account right now I'm gonna go ahead and set and create a new example campaign so just call this example campaign I'm not gonna worry about any of the other settings right guys I've got all sorts of videos on my youtube channel for things like campaign objectives and stuff so if you interests in all those go and check that out that's not what this video is about just record example and set and under what they're creating an ad for now because this video is about targeting okay so we're at the

2:05campaign level here I'm going to go ahead and click into the ad set level right and now I'm going to scroll down to the target area so you can see location has automatically been put in as the UK so the first thing to do which is probably fairly obvious but worth stating if you're a business only operates on a local basis you only serve customers within a certain geographical area you need to enter that information and target that area don't leave the default in my account here being national or anything along those lines okay very very important obviously you don't to be paying to be advertising in people that the other

2:41side of the country that you can't work with okay so if for example I was to advertise locally to me I live in a small city in the UK called cirencester okay which in the West of England now I've entered in the city itself and I can choose the area around which my ads are going to be displayed okay so if i zoom right in let's get the right area here you can see exactly where cirencester is in a map for those of you that haven't heard of it all right in the UK so you can see exactly what geographical area you'd be targeting so that's 25 miles I might decide that

3:19actually people are probably only gonna be willing to travel 15 miles to come work with me you know if you think about businesses like dentists or gyms they probably need a much smaller geographical area because people aren't going to want be willing to travel to a gym that's further away they're going to want to go to one that's fairly close if you're advertising you know your services it's not gonna be service based business but if you're advertising something that's perhaps a little bit more niche a little bit more unique that there's not a huge amount of competition in your local area so map perhaps people will be willing to travel further and

3:48you know something fairly specialist that usually fits the bill and of course you can increase your target location and you can add in extra location so let's say I've got 50 miles around Cirencester perhaps had another office in Oxford for example and now I want Oxford in the UK there lots of Oxford's and surprisingly and perhaps again I'm happy with 50 miles there so you can see I've got both radiuses there perhaps I had another you know location in Bath okay so I could do the same they're gonna want bath UK fifteen miles so you can see I've now got the fares the amount slightly now

4:28got these three sort of areas in the middle west southwest of England the ten that could be targeted and that's the first thing you need to do what I would recommend when you're doing your target areas is go with the sort of the broader options that you do operate in so don't go beyond where you operate but if for example you know you operate within an hour's drive of your place but most of your customers come within half an hour drive or wherever you're based I would go up to the hour mark because in general Facebook ad campaigns perform better with larger audiences so don't go

5:03beyond where you're willing to travel to or you think customers are willing to travel to you depending on what kind of localized business you have but don't really fix in very narrow go a little bit broader because I said Facebook ad campaigns in general perform better with larger audiences and then one thing I'll quickly mention as well is you can exclude locations so for those of you familiar with UK this is gonna make a lot of sense here I've got you know some fairly rural smallest type cities in science Esther Oxford and bath but Bristol here is quite a large location so what I could do if I was like I don't

5:39to compete with all the service providers in Bristol that'd be quite difficult I could exclude Bristol as a location add that in you can see it's got a very wide area but if I narrow that will go down to let's say 10 miles then you can see I'm almost in bath there perhaps I would need to move the pin slightly because I'm just getting the edge a bath but you can see the sort of thing I'm talking about in that case what I might do is something like this I might get rid of Bristol because I don't want to cut into bath I could drop a pin and if I pop

6:08that pin say there and I could make that plus I don't know 12 miles you can see I'm going to exclude most of the city of Bristol they still keep the rest of the areas there's all sorts of things you can do with the local targeting options to make sure that you're only left with the absolute areas that you want to target okay so that's location targeting now that's the first thing I want to talk about the next thing needs to be talked about is what else goes on down here right so once you've anything added in your location targeting you need to have a look at your potential reach so with

6:42these three options here I've got a potential reach of 1.3 million that's really quite healthy I've created another video talking all about Facebook Ads audience size and what you really want your audience size to be I'll include a link to that in the description of this video and that talks about where possible and I would like my target audience to be at least 250,000 people strong I appreciate that's not always possible with local businesses in particular and that's fine but in general I like it to be 250,000 person plus audiences so that means that with this potential reach here 1.3 million I can afford to narrow

7:19some of these options down okay so for example let's say that my market depending on what I'm advertising was mainly and let's say 30 to 50 year old women so let's edit the gender as well let's say that that's what in general okay so I've narrowed that down and that's brought my potential reach down all the way to 270,000 people okay so what that means is I don't now want to be adding in detailed targeting I don't want to be adding in interests demographics behaviors anything like that okay so let's say for example that most of my audience were small business owners so I won't be something like

7:59business page admins and I did that in as a behavior our audience now has gone all the way down to four thousand eight hundred people and this is where a lot of people go wrong with local targeting on the Facebook is they add in their age their gender parameters their detail are getting and they end up with an absolutely miniscule audience you do not want to run a Facebook ad campaign to four thousand eight hundred people so in this example I need to go ahead and get rid of that yes you may just want to work with small business owners but for your Facebook ad campaign to run at all

8:30you need to open up the targeting now when your ad copy and you're creative you could make it clear that you are focusing on small business owners and those with people that you attract that's absolutely fine but don't add it into your targeting options there now if I was to get rid of some of these options let's say I wasn't advertising in the Oxford area and I was not advertising in the bath area I can get rid of that because there's no need now just in science s step you can see our audience is down to a hundred and twenty thousand people with this criteria so that's probably

9:01narrower than I want to be so if my audience was predominantly female but let's say twenty percent of my customers were male okay well I add those back in and that's gonna I wanted to add that back into all yes that's doubled the size of my audience so that is something that we could potentially run two hundred forty thousands about small enough now let's take it one step further let's say that I'm operating in cirencester but and people are not going to be willing to travel 15 miles to come see me a gym for example being a classic case ok so let's say I narrow that down

9:31to just 10 miles you can see that we're only got 57,000 people that's smaller than I'd like it to be so now what I'm going to do is open up the targeting criteria so I might do 18 to 50 still only 94 thousands still a bit small I'm gonna go all the way up to sixty five-plus so you can see that in this area 10 miles around Cirencester which is quite a rural part of England not big population base as you can see there are just a hundred and forty thousand Facebook users in this area Facebook Instagram users therefore if I was just advertising to that area I'm not going

10:08to add in any other targeting criteria for the vast majority of the campaigns and things like that I run I'm just gonna leave it open because of the audience size and this is the really big difference that I see a lot of businesses that advertise locally get wrong and need to make is that if your population area is quite small which it is for a lot of local businesses then you have to keep all this stuff down here very very open okay now of course the opposite is true you know if I was and I didn't me to pick on that if I don't want to click exclude either let's

10:41go back to include if I was advertising in London and my area of operation was the m25 which for those of you not in the UK is this line you see my cursor is going all the answers like a motorway goes round London so 25 miles probably a little bit large so if I bring that to 20 miles and I've worked with a lot of businesses to say that's a sort of a standard is it's basically your advertising to Greater London and that's your area of operation 20 miles we're not far off there it's probably a little bit big but you can see we've got eight point six million

11:16Facebook users in there now in this case we can be a lot more specific so let's go back to our previous example we can be thirty to fifty which what we had set up we just want to target women what does that bring us down to still got an audience of two millionaire right so this is where we can go ahead and add in some targeting criteria what does business page after news bring us down to okay so that brings us down to 35,000 so that one might be a little bit small but what if I put in something like small business owners 41,000 again a little bit too small and but depending

11:53on your industry there will be targeting options that you could the you know you could use when you're advertising a much larger population base even on local basis than when you advertise in a much smaller one okay so those are probably a little bit too small but if I wanted you know there are other sort of business-related interest targeting options you can find and if you're trying to work out what sort of interest targeting behavioral targeting options demographic tagging sculptor's you should use go ahead and check out another video of mine all about the free Facebook audience insights tool where I show you exactly how I would do that so

12:26you can see I just come up with torches that don't work I don't have any off the top of my head that I would use in this industry therefore I'm going to audience insights I would find some options link in the description show you exactly how to do that and yeah go ahead and watch that video if you want to know what interest you can put in but basically you can get away with more stricter more specific targeting options and you can have a place so let's say small business owners was too small with that I could bring openness back up to all perhaps 18 to 50 and then if I go is small business

12:58zone as 130,000 still slightly on the small side but you see the sort of thing I'm doing and what I'm getting out here okay so hopefully that makes sense when you're advertising to local businesses I would recommend and not selecting the reach people beyond your detailed targeting criteria and I would recommend turning that on for national international businesses because there's a lot more scope to find to other audiences of people that might be you know interests and things like that in in this case I wouldn't because most local businesses are not going to be as detailed targeting anyway and I want to keep it quite specific okay so

13:35that's just a quick note on the local targeting right next thing I want to talk about is look-alike audiences now again I'll include a link in the video description to a tutorial all about how to create look-alike audiences look like audiences are absolutely fantastic you take a previous customer there's something like that you uploaded to Facebook and say Facebook create me an audience out of people that are very similar to the people who have already bought from me it's a fantastic targeting option produces fantastic results but when it comes to a local business there are some adjustments you need to make so when you create a

14:05look-alike audience you can create a look-alike audience that contains from one percent all the way up to ten percent of the population in that area okay so if I was targeting a look-alike audience and I'm advertising a local business I'm always going to go with the maximum the 10 percent and depending on where your advertising look-alike audiences may not be viable at all now if we go back to if I get rid of this targeted criteria you know what have we got here and I do the full age range in the sort of Greater London area we've got eight point six million people and yes I could advertise to a 10%

14:43look-alike which is likely to contain eight hundred sixty thousand people perfectly good audience eyes so probably been advertised to a you know a six percent look-alike audience or something like that because it's gonna contain enough people but if we go back to our Cirencester option so let's pop this in here and even if we leave it at twenty five miles you can see there's only a million people if we go back down to let's say something like fifteen miles we've got five hundred seventy thousand people if that's my area of operation I can't use a look-alike audience because the maximum size look-alike audience I can use is ten percent of the population

15:20of that area which is going to contain roughly 57,000 people there might be differences because look-alike audiences are weighted depending on geographical location so it might be a big chunk bigger than that but you know something I'm talking about and that's too small to run out campaign - okay so it if your population base isn't very large the local business you just can't use look-alike in that case you probably 20 use open targeting options just your location keep everything else blank if you're advertising in a big city big population base or a wider area yes you can use look-alikes but make sure they're larger look-alikes higher percentage

15:52look-alikes because the audience size issue is is absolutely ok so hoping that's been useful talking about a you know local targeting when it comes to to Facebook advertising now at the beginning of this video I talked about a free facebook advertising resource that I think you're going to find very interesting I'll quickly talk about that now and that's my Facebook Ads mastermind group so this is what free Facebook group to join and there'll be a link in the video description below there's about thirty six thousand members in that group right now absolutely fantastic community when the biggest Facebook advertising communities there are on Facebook and and yeah it's

16:25full of experts there's hundreds of posts every day people asking asking questions getting them asked answered by experts agency owners like myself really good community to be in I release free trainings in there every Wednesday and completely free to join link in the description we'd love to have you in there you get a lot of information and questions answered so go ahead down there and do that and yeah hopefully we'll be be talking soon if you enjoyed this video please give it a like please share it don't forget to comment below if you've got any questions comment below if you enjoyed it that really helps me out and of course subscribe to

16:57my youtube channel now when you do that make sure you turn on notifications so being a little bell that you can click or a sort of a pop-up say would you like to be notified when I publish new videos I'd recommend you do that so that you see and the new videos that I'm publishing both on Facebook advertising SEO related content and things like that thanks a lot guys and I will talk to you soon bye for now