I can’t remember the last time I saw an advert on Facebook for a business local to me here in Cardiff. Either i’m not a target for any of my local businesses or none of them are using Facebook to promote themselves via paid adverts.
This seems like a very strange thing to me. Every time I listen to my local radio stations (we’ve got 4 or 5 here in Cardiff) I get annoyed by the continual adverts peppered between the music and the chat – adverts from local businesses spending thousands on adverts that they hope will drive customers to them.
I’ve highlighted the word HOPE deliberately because it’s very hard to really quantify how successful a radio ad is for your marketing. You would need to ask every customer how they heard about your business and then hope that they remember. You could create a unique telephone number that only appears on that ad but as most people listen to adverts in their car and then look the business up on the net when they’re ready to buy that’s not going to be a reliable way to track the success of your advert.
So I want to make it our missing at Lobster to get businesses using Facebook Adverts to promote themselves. Why? because they’re cost effective (I can advertise to 200,000+ Facebook users in Cardiff for the same price as a typical radio advert or set a lower budget I can afford) and best of all, I can track every impression and click on the ad so I know how much traffic the advert is driving to my site.
If I want to focus on a specific audience (say middle aged men) I can limit the ad to just show for that demographic, reducing my spend even further.
Why aren’t businesses using Facebook Ads locally? I suspect it’s because they don’t understand the potential of them.
In the video below I show you how quick and easy it is to set up a local Facebook Ad – why not give it a go for your business and let me know how successful it is for you.
