For local business owners one of the biggest drawbacks with online advertising has been the crude (or non-existent) ways in which you can target the reach of your ads. Placing an ad on a high traffic sight virtually guarantees getting hits from people you have no interest in reaching. And this alone can make online advertising inefficient and overly expensive.
Pay Per Click (like Google Adwords) solved this problem by allowing advertisers to target by keyword. But many local businesses cannot take advantage of keyword targeting because of the relatively small size of their target market. There simply are not enough searches done on keywords such as “Toledo sump pumps” or “Richmond Hill Indian food” to get enough clicks to justify the effort.
Of course this is not always the case, but you get the drift. Pay Per Click tends to be efficient when you can accurately target a fairly broad target market. You need to get enough clicks to make it worth your time, without getting a lot of irrelevant clicks. Those clicks can quickly make the campaign prohibitively expensive. Finding just the right mix can often be impossible for local businesses.
Targeting with Facebook ads
Facebook advertising changes all this, at least in theory, and at least as long as Facebook continues to be a regular destination for its millions of members. Why? Because Facebook lets you target your ads to narrow segments based on the information in member profiles.
For local businesses the most important targeting factor is location. Combined with other relevant factors (interests, hobbies, leisure activities, etc.) this allows you to get significant exposure to the narrow market segment you are trying to reach.
For example if you sell sports goods in your city you can target people who have indicated “sports” as an interest. Or “hockey” or “soccer” or “baseball”. Or if you want to target people interested in “ferrari” in Toronto, it’s no problem. Currently there are 2920 of them.
As Dennis Yu points out in a recent post about Facebook advertising you can even use the information in Facebook profiles to target customers of competitors.
The other nice thing about Facebook advertising is that it is cheap – at least compared to the alternatives. You can set up a campaign for a few dollars a day, let it run for a few days, and then fine tune it or replace it with something else.
You can also include a simple, non-provocative image in your ad. This not only helps you get clicks, but choosing the right image can enhance your brand and grow your presence even if nobody clicks on your ad.
