if I could only advertise one type of business on Facebook and Instagram for the rest of my career it would undoubtedly be local businesses because the opportunity for local businesses with Facebook ads and Instagram ads is absolutely enormous now my agency has run ad campaigns for more than 500 local businesses in just about every Niche you can think of and in this video I'm going to distill down everything we've learned running those ad campaigns for those local businesses into the best possible tips techniques and strategies that you can Implement to get better results right now
okay so the first point that I want to make when it comes to running Facebook ads for local businesses is that you need to make targeting adjustments I see a lot of local business owners get this wrong when they run Facebook and Instagram ads is they watch a targeting tutorial from someone like me um and they Implement advice it's actually designed for National or International advertisers you need to adjust things so the big difference when it comes to targeting for local business is that you are usually advertising to a much smaller population because you're only
going to be advertising locally and there's going to be far less people in that local area than there are in the whole country or in multiple countries in comparison to what some other advertisers may be able to Target that means you need to do things a bit differently now this is particularly important if you're using original audience settings where your targeting criteria are hard constraint so let's say you add in like an interest targeting option and you're only going to advertise to people who meet the interest targeting option criteria if you are a local business
particularly if you're not a local business operating in an area that has a large population like you could be a local business of advertising to the whole of New York or you could be a local business ad advertising just to your local town of 50,000 people but let's say you're not advertising to the whole of New York and you are more local than that if you then go and add in detailed targeting options like interests specific demographics behaviors that's going to make your overall audience size just too small if you are advertising a town of
just say 50,000 people or 100,000 people basically the only targeting option that you can go with is just everyone in that area just open targeting otherwise it's going to be too small and that's going to really hurt your results even if you're using Advantage Plus audience which most advertisers probably are at this point um where your targeting s targeting inputs are suggestions so let's say you add in interest targeting options that's a suggestion where meta still has leeway to go um outside of the people that are within that interest and Target other people if you're
advertising locally and the the population size in that area isn't very large I would still recommend that you uh go with much broader options so large interest targeting options if you are going to use LX you want it to be a 10% for sure um or to be honest often still go with open targeting otherwise your audence going to be too small and your campaigns are going to suffer and then the next Point that's related to that that's still to do with targeting is around the location targeting and that's that you want to set your
location targeting criteria in the area where you actually operate so only advertise to an area where you think it's realistic that customers will come to visit your location if you're that type of local business or where you are willing to travel to to serve as a customer um if you are that type of local business um I see a lot of advertisers think well my audience size is going to be too small if I just do say my local Town therefore I'm going to do my local Town plus 25 miles and it's like people aren't
going to drive 25 mil to sign up to a gym that's too far they're going to find one more local to them right so depending on your business you need to really have a think about what's realistic for most people that they are going to travel here or we're willing to travel uh depending on on your business type don't artificially inflate the audience size just to keep meta happy and when you do enter in your location targeting just to quickly clarify that if you're using Advantage Plus audience that is done in the audience control section
and that is a hard boundary So Meta will only advertise to people who live in or recently been in um that location so you don't need to worry about method all of a sudden putting ads in front of people on the other side of the country when it comes to location targeting every now and then there are mistakes and people slip through uh but for the most part that's not going to happen offers are really really powerful it's actually one of the things that I like most about advertising local businesses is that the Leverage The
competitive Advantage you get from having a offer is really Amplified and that's because of what the competition are doing so when you're advertising nationally internationally particularly in some of the more lucrative more competitive markets you are competing against brilliant marketers marketers that have read for example Alex homo's $100 million offers book and they are trying to implement these incredible offers to try and get lots of new customers so it can be really hard to stand out and in some Industries like the marketing space actually the offers are getting more and more ridiculous and the guarantees
are getting more and more impossible possible and you know that people can't deliver but those offers are out there in the world it's making harder for other people to to get leads and things like that but locally you don't have any of that so if you're advertising a local business you are only competing against other local advertisers right by definition now that means that there might only be a handful of other businesses that offer the same thing that you do that you have to compete against how many of those are actually advertising on Facebook and
Instagram maybe none maybe one or two let's say there are one or two how good are their ads probably not very good at all you can probably have the best ads there um relatively easily and you can probably go through something like Alex H 100 billion offers which a fantastic book by the way um and craft an offer that is way better than your competitors and allows you to just Hoover up that market share in in in your local Town um I gave this this example because I gave a talk in in Brighton in a
city in the UK and I gave the example of funeral homes being the local business low competition levels so we're in Brighton right now how many Funeral Service businesses are running Facebook ads in Brighton right now you think definitely less than 10 right I've heard a few nuns I I won't be surprised probably less than five they just go on the safe side let's say there are a couple running ads how good do you think their ads are they're going to be rubbish they really are like maybe there's someone who's you know maybe watched a
few YouTube videos and know what they're doing so how hard would it be to create the best funeral services Facebook ads in Brighton could you just win that little market honestly you could watch a couple of YouTube videos on how to run Facebook ads and you would be able to then create the best Facebook ads for the funeral service industry in Brighton what a good business that would be to advertise on Facebook and Instagram because you got really high average customer values so that helps um each customer is worth a lot of money and you're
also only competing against probably no businesses advertising on Facebook Instagram and if you are you can create the best ads there and you can come up with a great offer so think if you are a local business whether you're a service provider going to people you have a location people coming to you then think about your offer I mean there almost certainly discounts you can give a guarantee of service that you can give a lot of um local businesses where you are a service provider you can offer a guarantee of service that is much better
than your competitors and that makes a huge difference everyone's nervous about hiring a a local Builder a local Contracting Company because they're worried that they're not going to do a good job and they're going to overcharge like you could just your offer could be we don't charge more than our quote that's actually quite a good offer for for like a local contractor a local Builder and that would be a terrible offer in other Industries they'd be like well of course you're not going to charge us more than you quoted like you quoted it but in
that industry because of what your competition do that's a pretty good quote cuz most of them do try and charge more we promise to finish on time if we don't we give you 20% back that's an amazing offer for a lot of local service based businesses if you're trying to get people to your location you can offer um special deals for certain people certain days of the week discounts if you come in and become a member we give you X special offer there's all sorts of ways to to come up with offers but offers for
local business are just so powerful because your competitors almost certainly aren't doing it it and even if they are their offers are probably pretty rubbish and you can probably come up with a better offer and combine with the fact that you might be one of the only ones advertising on the platform but you know your customers are on Facebook and Instagram because almost everyone is on one of those two platforms um at least one of those two platforms then you get massive competitive advantage and the next Point actually ties into that which is the same
thing in that you get massive competitive Advantage by having a great offer when you're advertised locally it's the same with high quality ad creative most of your competitors even if they are advertising on the platform probably got pretty basic ad creative stuff they put together themselves using canva using an iPhone to take a photo of something like just spending a little bit of money on getting a professional to create some nice ad creative for you or doing it yourself if you have the skills is going to really Elevate you above the competition be like ah
that looks really cool and that's going to make a big difference some areas for really nice competitive advantage and that's one of the reasons why I love advertising local businesses now one thing you do need to do with local businesses is you need to refresh ad creative more often and that's because you're advertising to smaller audiences in comparison to National International advertisers you're going to get ad fatigue faster if everyone within your target audience sees you an ad from you on average once a week which that's great like no not a problem with that at
all it just means that you know every month or so that ad starting to become a bit tired people have seen it they've either taken action based on it or they haven't um and you're going to want to refresh those and create new ad creative more often potentially than a than a an advertis that's advertising to a much larger audience could sort of more set and forget it if they're operating with relatively small budgets um because there's just so many more people to to show that that too now there's another point I'm going to mention
later on about um tying in special offers and things like that that would naturally allow you to create new creative on a regular basis um so that kind of takes care of that but it's just something you need to be aware of of if you've created new ads and they're working really well right now that probably won't run for 6 months as is it might do sometimes but probably won't so you are going to have to think about we need new ads going to have to do things to to keep this fresh new formats new
ad creative new imagery new videos um otherwise you get a fatigue and when you get a fatigue results drop off now I've got some other great tips when it comes to running Facebook ads for local business in a minute things on scaling and all that sort of stuff before I get into just want to quickly let you know about Facebook ads Mastery so Facebook ads Mastery is my brand new course with Community it's all brand new uh course material there's stuff in there specifically for local businesses and it comes with a school Community with the
school Community there's tons of interaction from the other Facebook advertisers all looking to help each other out which is fantastic we've got over 450 members as of the recording um of this video um and that's increasing all the time which is great also me and my team are in there like all the time all day every day answering questions interacting so the community angle is really strong we do live calls and live trainings um in Facebook ads Mastery so you get access to those you obviously ask specific questions and all that sort of stuff um
so yeah so if you're interested there is a link in the description you can click through and look to go ahead and join find out more information but I think if you're looking to level up your Facebook and Instagram ad game get better results I think You' find it really really valuable so one of the issues that local businesses often run into with their Facebook and Instagram ads is when they look to scale that's clearly very difficult particularly if you're only advertising in an area with a relatively small population there's only so much you can
spend on your ads before you're just putting them in front of everyone and spending anymore is a waste of money right so what I've seen local businesses do is they try and change their business model to allow them to scale but that then changes what worked for them initially so let's take the example of like a garden center okay so garden centers are local for the most part you can obviously have National chains and things like that but but you know a single individual location is is going to be local let's say your ads are
working really well you're getting lots of people in you've got great offers things are going well and you think we want to scale I know what we'll do we will sell our products that we sell in store we'll sell them online and we will try and advertise um and scale that way that's a change of business model and that's really difficult cuz as soon as you start doing that you are then competing against other advertisers that are selling plants and flowers and compost and Patio slabs and all the various things that go into a garden
that specialize in selling those online they do it at bulk and they National advertis and they really know what they're doing and they have great offers and it's really really difficult what I think a much better approach for business like that usually is if they want to scale is to open other locations and then advertise those locally because then you are keeping the same structure the same setup and the same competition Dynamics where if you're advertising to get people into your local Garden Center you're only competing against other garden centers within that local area that
they could go to instead so when you open a new location that same thing is going to be true for the new location you are only competing against other garden centers that are advertising to get people in store around that Garden Center obviously it's going to be a different location from your first so that is a very different Dynamic and if you've got it succeeding in one place first and you want to scale usually that's the only reason why you would scale is cuz it's work in one place you want to replicate that as closely
as possible in another place as opposed to trying to sell online uh local businesses that offer a service often do the same thing so you might have someone that is say u a physiotherapist okay and they've done really well advertising their services and they get people to come in and see them but they've kind of Tapped Out the local market they've got a physiotherapy practice they might think right we're going to start offering online sessions that's how we're going we're going to change our business model and we're going to expand and again that's really difficult
cuz then you're competing against all the physiotherapy companies that could offer online sessions which is every physiotherapy company in the world and that's really difficult to do and they're going to be some that specialize in that and undercut you on price or that sort of thing much better to go up and open a new physical physiotherapy practice in another location and then keep all the Dynamics um the exact same thing and you could have the same things even if you don't have a location right you could if you're a plumber you could have like a
branch that operates in one location and then open you know hire people in another location and get you know some guys to operate in that locality and just keep the Dynamics the same um is something that I would I would strongly recommend you look to do first before you try and change business model and you can absolutely have I think a lot of people think that you can't have a massively successful local business that operates at massive scale that is not true at all I mean think of a lot of the franchise businesses that you
know of those are businesses that operate locally to them like subway they all people either buy directly from the Subway or they might use a delivery or like some food delivery service but it's all really local around that location and how did they grow they build out more locations in lots of different places loads of businesses like that I think that's underappreciated as a scaling method and it can work really really well um with Facebook and Instagram ads so this next Point sounds kind of obvious but I see a lot of local businesses that are
running Facebook ads not do this and that's that in your ads you should make it very very clear that you are local don't assume that people will know that immediately from seeing it i' I've just reviewed a lot of ads and I'm like you haven't actually got the name of your town or your location in here and you want people to come in um even if you're offering a service where you go to people absolutely include the name of the place that you operate in because if you're scrolling through let's say you're you're a potential
customer of yours you're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram the ad that has the name of the place you live in is definitely going to grab your attention more than the equivalent that doesn't and we're all seeing ads and that seem somewhat generic and it's like maybe we're interested maybe we're not we're going on and then something's like oh that's literally like the village that's the town that I live in that's going to grab your attention and then obviously you're much more likely to get that person uh if they get their attention you're much more likely
to get them to interact with the ad and go through and convert and become a lead or or take the next action take the next step that you want them to take so that's just a little bit of a no-brainer but absolutely include it in there for a lot of business to have physical locations include your address people may have heard of you if they see it oh yeah I've heard someone said something about this business a friend of mine recommended it but where actually is it oh okay oh it's just around the back of
like that's just really useful information remember you're advertising to real people and if they know where you are they know it's relevant to them they're more likely to take the next step effectively when you advertise locally testimonials and reviews carry extra weight so if you use those in your advertising I strongly recommend that you do um because they are so powerful make sure it's very clear that the person leaving the testimoni or the review is local to the other people that you're advertising to and there's there's a technique that the news um has used for
a long long time where they have all these techniques to make something more relevant and make people more interested in a new story and one of the core component of that is local and the idea is that if there was a you know some sort of event happened on the other side of the world it's way less interesting way less relevant than it happened on your street you're way more like to be interested happened on your street so that's like an extreme example but you can think about if if I know that there's a testimonial
for a garden center that's fantastic someone left a review it's brilliant uh you should go in if that person lives in my local Town that's going to carry more weight than if they've live in a compet different place because when someone lives in your town to you and you see that they've left the reviewer testimonial you assume that it's more likely to work for you as well you're more likely to enjoy it as well because someone who is more similar to you had a good experience with it as opposed to someone else from another part
of the world where you're like well they might not be into the same things as me they might not have the same priorities they might not have the same standard where someone in your local Town you're more likely to think that they have those commonalities think about when you're on holiday you're on vac and you meet someone from your local area right and you almost feel like there's like this connection even though you're in a different place there's like this connection to that person because they're from the same place you are even though there's obviously
loads of people that live in the same place you are and you'd never if you bumped into them you'd never be like oh how funny that we live in the same place live in the same city you know let's chat or whatever you wouldn't do that but when you're away in somewhere else you have that that that connection it's kind of a funny thing and you're drawing on that same thing when you're using testimonials and reviews if they are from other local people make that very very clear in the ad you can like literally put
the name underneath a testimonial or review and then like comma their location right and that's going to that's going to show that and and carry more punch and help people get over there and help people convert so here's a technique that I love when it comes to advertising local businesses and that's to tie in special offers with local events so I'll give you an example right so I live in a town called chelam as I just mentioned now there is an event called the chelam races here every year it's a big horse racing thing is
one of the most um famous ones in the country local businesses do and it's absolutely a good idea to run special offers and promotions around the time of the chelon races um using that Lang language and that messaging within their ads within their copy and AD creative even if obviously they have nothing to do with horse racing or anything along those lines it's just something that's fun that's going on locally I think it kind of TAPS into the fact that you have a local presence and that you're connected to the community and that you're aware
what what's going on and what people are doing um and again if people within this town are looking at ads and they see chel races in there that's more likely to grab their attention than like a generic ad from a national or even International Advertiser that's just advertising a regular product or whatever that's going to grab their attention more and tie in and make people more um Keen to take part so I think it helps make it very clear that you're a local business and it helps grab people's attention and then it helps give that
connection to local community which will help convert into sales new customers even if what you're offering is not related to anything to do in this case with horse racing and local areas have all sorts of different events and you can create new ads and and that's a good way as I mentioned earlier this is the point that I wanted to come to around having to refresh ad creative quite often when it comes to local advertising because your audience size is small and you run into ad fatigue issues well if you are repeatedly tying things into
local events um even if they're really small and like like in Cham there's a Cham races but every summer there's a food festival every uh spring there's a jazz festival like there's going to be various things that that happen in your in your locality tie these things in we got a special offer uh you know to celebrate the food festival we've got a special offer on our whatever whatever whatever come in and check it out or people can sign up to a new gym membership free um it doesn't need to be related it just the
fact that you are local and you're advertising to local residents and it is a local event that's connected enough for it to make sense so a good way to uh connect with the community and and have get that that added trust Factor that's one of the things that local really helps with is your prospects are more likely to trust you if you they know you operate in the same place that they live um and also helps with naturally helps with creating new ad creative and pres preventing ad fatigue because you're only going to run that
promotion for a couple weeks maybe a month around that local event now one of the absolute best things about advertising local businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads is that you can expect your results to improve over time and that's because positive customer interactions compound and they compound more with local businesses than they do with non-local businesses so so let me give you a couple examples right so let's say you're a local restaurant now if you advertise and you get people to come in that might be relatively expensive initially it might be quite difficult to get
those first few people in but if they do come in and they love the food and think the service is fantastic they are far more likely to tell other people about it if you think of the recommend recomendations you hear from friends family Etc and you think of the recommendations that you give yes you do that with national International businesses but you're far more likely far more likely to do it with local businesses so let's say someone comes into your restaurant you've advertised to get them in they had a great experience they tell people about
it well those people might directly just come in which is fantastic that's like exactly what you want um but also if your ad is put in front of someone that has heard about your restaurant from a friend of theirs that ad is more like to be successful because they're not just going oh what's this oh a new restaurant in town interesting they're going oh yeah this restaurant yeah yeah yeah my friend was telling me about this the other day they said that the such and such was fantastic look they've got a special deal on right
now where kids eat free or whatever happens to be let's go ahead and let's go ahead and and eat there and they're far more likely to convert so that really helps and that builds over time so the longer you do that the more good customer interactions you have the more likely they are to recommend it to other people the more effective your advertising will be and honestly you can often get to the point where you don't need to advertise at all because you've used the ads to get that initial customer base they come back cuz
they love it they tell other people um All About It uh who then come in and you've got a customer base and and Happy Days things are working really well and the same would happen for other types of local businesses like if you're a local plumber for example and you advertise to get your first few customers you're thinking oh these are really quite expensive uh we didn't make tons of money on that one should I keep running the campaign well it's going to get better over time as long as you do a good job because
yeah you might have paid let's say you've paid a reasonable amount of money to get that first Plumbing client and say you've broken and you haven't actually made any profit on it but if they go and recommend a couple of people brilliant that's where and then and then they recommend a couple of people and then you go on and on and on so provided the service that you deliver is good you can actually afford to pay quite a lot to acquire those initial customers locally because there's a much greater chance that you will get those
referrals and recommendations and that your initial marketing investment will be Amplified by That Word of Mouth effect so something there Absolut a huge competive Advantage for local businesses that you just you don't get that to the same extent with other types of business business where you can all think of things that products say that you buy online that you're say a hobby into like that's one of the things that you're into and you purchase products in there you're only going to recommend that to friends who are also into the same thing whereas if it's like
a local restaurant or you know there's a new gym down the road that you've been to or whatever you are far more likely to give a recommendation to people everyone at some point needs a plumber right you are far more likely to recommend that to anyone that you know that needs a plumber um so yeah something to really consider when you first start running this campaigns if it looks expensive initially don't immediately discount it and give up think that okay we're acquiring customers relatively expensively but and by the way it doesn't have to be expensive
you might acquire customers relatively cheaply I'm just saying that if you do acquire customers relatively expens expensively that might still really work out for you long run because you know you get them coming back you get work from them again and the referral word of mouth is is really really powerful now something I haven't discussed in this video which is obviously something really important uh for local businesses to get right with with their Facebook ads is is campaign structure and that's because I've created a brand new tutorial showing my new and updated recommended campaign structure
with all the changes that happened to meta ads um over the past year or so we've now got a new way of doing things a better way of doing things when it comes to campaign structure and in this video here you can see all the details I've created the full tutorial so you can walk through my exact campaign structure it's only a short video it's well worth a quick watch
