Should You Advertise Locally or Nationally With Facebook Ads?

0:00hi guys it's ben heath from lead guru and in this video i'm going to answer the facebook ads question should you advertise locally nationally or internationally with your facebook ad campaigns if you have the ability to advertise in multiple locations what should you do should you go with the really specific approach should you keep it broad and just lump everything in together that's what we're going over in this video before i get into that just want to very quickly ask you to smash that like button and of course subscribe to my channel if you are new and haven't done so already so i'm in an example facebook ad account

0:31here i've created a campaign and we're at the ad set level and we obviously got location set up here because we're talking about a few things to do with that in this in this video now before i get into that i just want to very quickly say that when making this decision don't advertise anywhere where you can't or don't want to deliver your products or services don't add them in for the sake of the facebook ad campaign so if you're a service business that operates locally or you're like a gym or a dentist you know people are only going to travel so far just advertise in the area that you're

1:02going to get customers from and you want to get customers from likewise if you're say you know an e-commerce company but you have the capabilities to ship all around the us but not internationally then you know if you don't have the capabilities to do it or it's very difficult for expensive perhaps shipping is really difficult or you've got to pay extra tariffs and duties and things that makes it tricky it's absolutely fine to go with the area that you really want customers from where they're worth the most and we've worked with businesses before they have all sorts of you know various reasons why they want to keep things

1:34local we've worked with companies that sell perishable goods so just one to advertise in a couple of states near where they're based in west coast us for example as opposed to the rest of the country because obviously they don't want their stuff to to perish and go off before it reaches the customer um we've worked with a lot of businesses particularly pertinent to business operate in the uk that would actually rather sell their products in the us or canada or outside the eu because then they don't need to charge vat which is sales tax in the in the uk in europe actually um which is quite silly that you would

2:06incentivize uk sellers to want to sell abroad as opposed to domestically and in the country surrounding them but there you go there are all sorts of reasons why people want to do that and all of that is absolutely fine external facebook advertising factors should take precedence when trying to work out where you are going to be advertising but assuming that all places are equal or somewhat equal so yes it costs a bit more to ship there but it's worth giving it a go because if your cost per purchase is significantly less well it's worth paying a little bit of extra shipping assuming you're in that situation

2:36what should you do so when people first started advertising on facebook they were really keen to um what i say people when facebook advertising was was was growing up it's probably how i'd put it people were really keen to narrow in on the areas the geographical locations they thought they were going to get the best results from so we you know talked to lots of businesses saying oh we just advertised in the major metropolitan areas you know in us for example we've got 30 cities that we target that have all have x population and we think have the right sort of demographic for our stuff and that was the best approach for a

3:10while but now we know that in general um larger audiences on facebook produce better results if you compare you know audiences that are very very similar but one's bigger than the other the bigger one's almost certainly going to to win so with that being said i'm not a fan of artificially constraining the geographical areas you're targeting unless you have to so what does that mean if you're advertising in the uk for example don't just think oh our demographic is younger people that are in the cities therefore let's just target you know the six biggest let's just go with like london manchester birmingham you know some of the biggest cities in the

3:51country it's now much better to target the whole country because facebook does such a good job of working out who within that target audience in this case a country um is most likely to take your desired action when it's become a lead purchase etc if it's 80 in the big cities facebook will work that out and they'll put 80 of your ad impressions in the big cities but you don't want to miss out on those other 20 where those people are just your target demographic but they just happen to not live in those areas okay so unless you have to or unless there's a significant advantage of doing so

4:26i would target the largest geographical areas you can so countries whether that's your whole country maybe that's internationally is usually going to be the the best way to go now on that point because i feel that's fairly simple fairly clear there's something else i really want to to make people aware of don't adjust your product or service to be able to advertise it nationally or internationally when you could or you currently offer it locally so the classic example for this is someone's a service-based business and their service is expertise based so it would traditionally be delivered in person but could be delivered nationally or internationally now the obvious advantage of doing that

5:12of changing up okay well i'm gonna offer my service online as opposed to offering it in person locally and you think this is fantastic because i can advertise to the whole world the whole world is my customer yes you are right the whole world is a potential customer of yours but the whole world is also competition now if you are advertising international international audiences so is everyone else okay and when it comes to service-based businesses actually advertising to a local audience will usually deliver better results if it's something that could only be delivered locally because you've really restricted your target market but you've actually decimated the number of competition i mean you've

5:56just removed 99.9 percent of the competition and provided that you know you might go for example um oh this this example came up the other day i was speaking to someone about this other day personal training services right if you live in a medium-sized town you there might be i don't know a couple hundred personal trainers in that town how many of those are advertising on facebook and instagram maybe 10 20. it's probably more like 10. so 10 is your competition now if you've got a good sized town there might still be you know a couple hundred thousand people for you to to advertise to so 10 of you are

6:33competing for a couple hundred thousand people if you go nationally or internationally you're going to be competing against thousands of other advertisers yes the population's a lot larger but the way large large-scale online business works is it ends up being or when it takes all it ends up being in your town you're competing with your 10 people perhaps everyone's offering similar pricing you don't have to just compete loan pricing if you advertise those services nationally interaction i can guarantee someone has worked out a way to charge very very little and they're trying to build a really big business off the back of it okay and what i'm trying to get at is it's better

7:12to be sort of the local store that sells to your local community that amazon can't reach as opposed to trying to compete against amazon because no matter what industry you're in even expertise based service providers there is an amazon in your industry and they're gobbling up so much of the business that you're often better off advertising locally so don't don't and i see this a lot and this obviously happened loads recently because with lockdowns people have had to um advertise their services you know put their services online and offer them um over a large geographical area i completely understand that but aside from that i think it's the

7:48better approach to go with a service sometimes even a product as well that is for a local audience can be delivered to a local audience and you therefore completely remove the competition because there's lots of people that won't go with the online versions for example personal training services they will go with the in-person version so thinking that they're in your target market when you're advertising nationally it's just not correct okay they're only going to go with the in-person version and by focusing on that you give yourself a massive advantage um when it comes to reducing advertiser competition okay so that's something like really tricky to do right now and you might be going

8:26well i can't do that right now because my country's in lockdown fine don't do it right now but just know that that is a good way to go going forward we speak to businesses all the time and i you know when i'm speaking to a business owner that's interested in our services for example and they say oh yeah we have a local service business even if they've got and we often have this 50 branches throughout the country where it's like each one operates in that local area those tend to succeed a lot more than just going oh we you know offer our um service uh you know

8:59national we offer our service online and we offer it to everyone okay um so i just want to separate those two things right if you're not constrained geographically in who you can sell your products or services from absolutely advertise the largest audiences possible and make it geographically very large like e-commerce business for example advertise the whole country internationally go for it don't pick specific cities but what i'm saying is don't change your product or service that could or is currently being offered locally to an online version so that you can then advertise it nationally or internationally thinking that by doing so you have a much larger target market and

9:39you're going to see great results that's often a bit of a i can so understand the logic but it just doesn't work out in reality because you're also competing against everyone if you can or are currently offering your product or service locally stick with that add in other branches that also offer it locally if you really want to expand your business right stick with that that's a way to better results because your competition is a tiny tiny fraction of what it is if you try and play um by going for you know much broader target market hopefully that's helpful hopefully that makes a lot of sense if you want more

10:11information around how to run campaigns within a local area and things like that check out my youtube channel i've got a bunch of sort of local i've had i've got a whole local business playlist so um i'll include a link to that in in the video description below i'd recommend you you grab that and check that out if that's what the route you are going to to go down otherwise i've got all sorts of content on all sorts of facebook advertising related topics if this video has been useful please give it a thumbs up please comment look below to let me know and of course um subscribe to my youtube

10:38channel if you are new before you go couple things i want to mention the first is our facebook advertising services so my company lead gurus are facebook advertising agency we create manage and optimize facebook ad campaigns for our clients we do have a 3k per month minimum budget requirement so you need to have that to spend or be close to that point in order to be able to work to work with us but if you're interested to find out more about our services go ahead and click on the link in the video description below that'll take you to a page on our website and you can book in a call

11:07with one of my team members there um who can let you know all about our services we can find out more about your business see if we'd be a good fit and then see if we better help you get much better results which is obviously what we what we aim to do and do do for the vast majority of our clients um other free thing i want to mention is well other thing i want to mention which is free is our facebook ads mastermind group so facebook group with 66 000 members as of the recording of this video amazing community full of facebook advertisers just like you i do

11:35free live trainings in the group it's free to join links in the description go ahead and get involved ask your questions and there's tons of people that will help you out there and it's becoming one of the largest facebook advertising uh one of the largest communities of facebook advertisers in the world so um yeah if you wanna be part of that we'd love to have you in there thanks a lot guys best of luck with your facebook ad campaigns and i'll talk to you soon bye for now bye-bye