Facebook has become the most powerful advertising platform for small businesses. The combination of being able to reach people by their interests, social connections, pages that they’ve visited, as well as by their location makes them a very effective and powerful option for small businesses to reach new prospects and customers, and grow their attention and revenue.
Facebook has four primary location targets available that allow you to create very powerful, local-focused ad campaigns.
Facebook’s Help articles define them as the following:
Reach everyone in this location
You can ‘Reach everyone in this location’, which is the default option. This option allows you to reach people whose home or most recent location is within the selected area. You might want to advertise to large fairs or high-profile sporting events.
For example, to everyone in a particular location. Let us say, everyone in Leeds. It will automatically advertise to everyone in Leeds.
People who live in this location
The second option is people who live in this location. This includes people whose home is within the selected area.
You might want to advertise a retail business. For example, to people who live in a specific location, perhaps an estate agent would want to advertise only to people that live in a certain location.
People recently in this location
People recently in this location, is the third option.
With this option, you’re reaching people whose most recent location is within the selected area that you’re advertising to. You may want to advertise time-sensitive sales. For example, to people who are recently in the location that you choose, say, ‘People who are in Manchester’.
People travelling in this location
Finally, people travelling in this location, is the fourth option.
This includes people travelling in the selected area who are more than 125 miles from their home location. This is determined by the device and connection information that Facebook collects.
This would be a powerful option for advertising rental cars or hotels to people that are travelling in a specific area.
Facebook the powerful
That’s four different options that Facebook gives you for creating very powerful, targeted local advertising campaigns. Depending on the nature of your business, consider those four different options and how you may use them creatively to reach the ideal prospects with the ideal offers while they’re in that given location.
I’m Nick and I’m the owner and Chief Bottle Washer at Traxxon Digital Marketing. We help businesses increase their sales and profits using the Internet.
I’ve been doing this digital marketing thing full-time since 2002 (that’s 74,000 hours in the trenches, testing, tweaking and improving online marketing strategies and tactics – I did the math!)
I’ve authored or co-authored 8 books on different aspects of digital marketing which have been recommended by organisations such as the Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Businesses hire me and my team to come up with traffic and conversation strategies using a combination of Media Buying, Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Marketing. So if that’s you, get in touch and maybe we can help.