Social Media Ads for Local Business [A Must-Read Guide]

Here’s How To Create Social Media Ads For Local Business

We’re glad you’re considering running social media ads for local business because too many miss this low-cost opportunity to reach their customers.

Let us show you how to do it for the top social platforms. 

Join us on the inside!

A lot of our clients here in our agency are small local businesses who are trying to navigate the tricky waters of social media advertising. 

So today, we’re going to talk about how to run social media ads for local business. Topics include: 

• How to set up ads for local targeting for Facebook (and IG), TikTok, and Twitter
• Information on targeting options
• Ideas and best practices

Let’s get started! 

A Note On Google Ads

Before we get into the post, we do want to talk about Google ads for local businesses really quickly. 

We usually recommend our clients set up Google ads even before they run ads on social media.

These ads require much less maintenance than social media ads.

And with the dynamic ads option, you’ll want these running in the background while you’re doing the heavy lifting on social media. 

Now, we know many small businesses don’t have huge marketing budgets.

So it might be difficult to justify using both Google ads and social media ads for local business.

But you need to do it. 

Ideally, you’ll be able to spend at least $500 a month on Google and $500 a month on social.

This seems to work well for most small businesses (but the more you can spend, usually, the better). 

We’ve found that smaller budgets can work, they just take longer and you’ll get fewer results.

But, if you can start with a smaller budget and increase it in a couple of months, you should be fine.

It’s those tiny budgets extended for months that become challenging. 

Google ads are important for local businesses because you want to capture that foot traffic!

If we’re googling “cafes near me” in a town we’ve never been to, we’re going to click on one of the first few options.

You’ll also want to set up your Google Business Page, which is what you see here at the top of this results page. 

You’re missing out on a lot of potential customers (locals and folks just visiting the area) by not making Google a priority.

If you want to learn more about how much do Google ads cost, then read this post next.

Social Media Ads For Local Businesses

People in your town are on social media, so it makes sense to advertise to them there so you can get more business.

This is especially since it’s relatively inexpensive to do so, particularly when compared to print and television ads. 

Let’s look at your options on the top platforms.

1. Facebook and Instagram
2. TikTok
3. Twitter

But before we do that, be sure to also check out our new social media ads training course to help you master these social media ads. 

1. Run Location Targeted Ads on Facebook and Instagram

Quick Rundown of How

We’ll share a quick run-down of how we’d recommend you to set these up.

When you set these up in the Business Manager, you can run them on FB and IG, so we recommend doing them that way. 

Ad Types

• Store Traffic

These ads use location information to show the ads to people who are near your physical location.

These are a must if you have a store you want people to walk into.

• Engagement, Follows, Conversions, and Other Objectives

These ads allow you to target audiences based on geographic location including city, state, and country.

Targeting Options and Examples

As we mentioned above, for all objectives other than Store Traffic to a physical location, you can target by city, state, and country.

You also have additional options: 

1. Users who live in this location.

If you specifically want to target locals, you’ll use this option. Here’s an example:

• Offer a special punch card for locals to incentivize year-round visits.
• Announce events, show off your products, drinks, food, or spaces.
• Invite folks to like your page.

2. Users who frequently travel to this location.

Here are some examples:

• Restaurants, local businesses, hotels, real estate agents, and many other businesses can target frequent visitors.
• Local business? Advertise a promotion or coupon.
• Real estate agent? Promote an ad enticing folks to finally move to their dream location.

Check out this post next to learn more tips for your real estate marketing strategy.

3. Users who were recently in this location.

Here’s an example:

• Find events relevant to your ideal customer.
• Then run an ad in the days following an event (promoting your business) to users who were recently in that location.

Help with Setting up Ads in Business Manager

We’ve published a number of posts with full tutorials walking you through an ad setup on Facebook Business Manager, so be sure to check those.

If you’re looking for an agency to help you out, contact us today, we’d love to help you reach your advertising goals.

2. Geotargeting on TikTok

In May, TikTok announced geo-targeting on the platform. This is a great option to find new people for your local business. 

Quick Rundown of How it Works

TikTok utilizes DMA geo-targeting so advertisers can captivate a highly engaged audience in a safe and secure way. 

A DMA region is a group of counties that form an exclusive geographic area.

There are 210 DMA regions, covering the entire continental United States, Hawaii, and parts of Alaska. 

DMA geo-targeting uses standardized geographic areas.

So, businesses can share more relevant, interesting, and impactful content with their customers in geo-targeted areas.

Thus, saving them time and resources.

Targeting Options

When you run ads on TikTok, you get access to these targeting options (some targeting options are not available in all countries): 

• countries, 
• regions, 
• states, 
• provinces, 
• metro area (beta), 
• city (beta), and more 

Here are some location-type examples for you. As you can see, there are lots of options that should work for most advertisers. 

How to Set it Up

We’ll walk you through where to add your DMA targeting quickly now. 

1. Go to ads.tiktok.com and choose the correct ad account. 
2. Choose your objective and continue or pick up from a draft you started previously. 
3. Complete campaign details and click Next to go to Ad Group info. 
4. Fill out Settings, Promotion Type, Placements, and Creative Type. We suggest creative optimization toggled on.
5. Time to choose the targeting. Include and Exclude saved audiences here.

Under Demographics, in Location, you’ll choose your placements.

You’ll need to check USA on to enable DMA audiences. Uncheck any you don’t want to include. 

6. Complete demographic choices, set daily budget (you’ll need to use at least $20 a day), choose bidding and optimization settings, and select Next. 
7. You’ll complete your ad creative here and then Publish.

If you want to see the full tutorial of these steps, then watch the video a the top of this post. 

Best Practices

TikTok says, “the businesses that we see having the most success are those that embrace the creativity and authenticity of their TikTok community.”

For more on TikTok, here is our post on the top TikTok ad mistakes that we recommend you to read next. 

3. Local Ads on Twitter

Now, Twitter is the last platform we’d recommend if you want to use social media ads for local business (especially if you have a limited budget).

It’s almost never a good place to start.

But, we want to cover it in case you’ve seen some success on other platforms and want to try your hand here.

Quick Rundown

Now, even though we don’t recommend Twitter over the other platforms in this post, it’s not a junk place for advertising.

The number of daily active users continues to increase and ad engagement has increased 35% in 2020. In Q4 2020, cost per engagement decreased 3%. 

Targeting Options

Twitter’s targeting works off of someone’s recent location using GPS and other data.

They also use machine learning to predict a user’s location. 

Similar to the other platforms we’ve discussed, you can target specific geographies:

• countries
• regions
• metros
• cities
• postal codes

Setup

You can specify your location targeting during your Twitter ads campaign setup:

1. Navigate to the “Targeting” section of the campaign setup.
2. Scroll to the “Demographics” section.
3. Within the “Location” section, input the geolocation(s) you’d like to target. 

Now You Know How To Create Social Media Ads For Local Business!

Social media is a great place to find local customers for your business.

Always use the specific targeting options (unless you also sell products online) to use location-specific targeting.

DMA geo-targeting (available on FB and IG, Google, TikTok, and Twitter) is recommended by most platforms.

Now if you want to take your local business’ marketing a step further, check out our following marketing solutions:

• Local business advertising
• Local SEO services

Get in touch with us today to get started!

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