Facebook Has Two New Tools To Help You Improve Local Marketing

Facebook is on a mission to stay the dominant social network for business owners. If you don’t believe me, let’s look at the facts shared by Mark Zuckerberg;

– 45+ million small and medium businesses using pages
– 1.55 billion people on Facebook each month
– 1+ billion people on Facebook each day
– 925+ million people using groups
– 8+ billion video views each day

Now with the release of two new tools for local businesses aimed at helping them better understand the foot traffic in their area while also allowing those with many locations to target ads for specific stores, Facebook is doing everything in its power to stay relevant to business owners.

Let’s take a closer look at these two new tools, as according to a Facebook announcement:

1. Better insights about your potential customers
When businesses want to understand more about the people visiting their Page, they go to Page Insights. And now Page Insights has a new tab with information for local businesses who want to understand more about the groups of people near their store. Local insights tell businesses the aggregate demographics and trends associated with the people nearby, so they can better understand and cater to the needs of the people in the area.

Businesses can discover the neighborhood’s busiest days of the week and times of day, so they know when people are most likely to visit their store. And they can see aggregate demographics of the people nearby, including age, gender, tourist and local residents. So, if their business serves tourists or people of a certain age group, they know when they have the best opportunity to connect with those people. Insights of this kind empower businesses to tailor their marketing to the people nearby and drive more people to their store.

Additionally, local businesses who run ads have historically had a hard time figuring out if their ads are reaching the right people—the people near their store. Now, for the first time, advertisers can see the percentage of people nearby who have seen their ad, helping them understand how well their ads are reaching their potential customers. Over time, this new metric can also help advertisers draw a connection between reaching a larger percentage of people nearby and accomplishing the business outcomes they care about.

Local insights was built with privacy as a top priority and only includes data from people who have location services enabled to show trends about people near your business. To protect the privacy of people on Facebook, data is anonymized and only shown in percentages and overall trends, not absolute numbers. Local insights does not share location information about individual people with businesses.

2. An easier way to create locally-relevant ads for all your locations
Ads work best when they’re relevant to the people that see them, and now local awareness ads have new features that make it easier for businesses with multiple stores to create highly relevant ads for each of their retail locations.

New updates to local awareness ads allow businesses using Locations for Pages—a tool for connecting and managing business Pages with multiple store locations—to use information from each of their Pages to add dynamic ad copy, links and call-to-action buttons to their ads, so each ad is localized for its corresponding store.

For example, if a cafe with multiple locations in the Bay Area decides to run local awareness ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are. So, people in Menlo Park would see “Join us for lunch in Menlo Park,” while people in San Francisco would see “Join us for lunch in San Francisco.” Call-to-action buttons are also dynamic, so when someone clicks on the “Call Now” or “Get Directions” button, they’re connected to the store currently closest to them. This helps advertisers spend more efficiently, since they’re only connecting with people likely to visit the store and the information they share is hyper-local and relevant.

These updates to local awareness ads also simplify ad targeting. Because each store Page has an address associated with it, advertisers can now simply select the stores they want to run ads for and choose a targeting radius around each of those stores. And, ad reports are now available for each location, giving businesses greater insight into ad performance than ever before. Location-specific ad reports help advertisers find out which locations are performing best, empowering them to advertise more efficiently by focusing their ad budgets on the best performing stores and ads.

Since Facebook already knows a lot about where you go online, and a lot about where you go in the real world, in an effort to help businesses improve local marketing it’s starting to share some of that relevant information with marketers. With these much needed updates, businesses of every size can easily connect with the people in their area.

Courtesy: http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/2015/11/facebook-new-tools-improve-local-marketing/