Facebook Marketing for Local Business

Social Media Marketing with Facebook for Local Businesses

What’s All the Facebook Marketing Hype and How Can Businesses Benefit

As business leaders continue to focus on local marketing and the best methods of reaching customers, social media marketing has become one of the fastest growing ways.  Since Facebook happens to be the largest social media community in the world with over 1 billion users today, it gives most local marketing focused businesses the great opportunity.  So, how does Facebook marketing really help local businesses with marketing?

Local marketing normally focuses on a personalized message to an audience in a local community with unique messaging focused heavily on the local market area.  Since the average Facebook community for any one person is made up of friends and neighbors, this gives marketing firms and local business a great place to market and reach an audience in a defined area.  We must remember the ultimate goal of local marketing is to obtain customer or referral that helps a local business grow a brand in the area.

Facebook marketing normally comes in the form of ads and promotions.  While Facebook ads have been the primary method of helping local marketers achieve their social media marketing goals, Facebook promotions are also good for helping to promote contests, specials and more.  So let’s start with Facebook promotions which is newer and less proven.

Facebook promotions are low cost ways of promoting posts and events that allow the promotion to be viewed by many more people than normal.  In other words, by paying $5 or $10 for a post on a topic on window replacements, you can have many, many more views allowing your post to reach a larger audience at a lower cost.  Again, Facebook promotions are newer and so far have been most effective for awareness more so than conversion.

Facebook ads on the other hand have been around since late 2007 and has grown significantly over the last 12 months.  In fact, Nanigans predicts Facebook ad spending in the United States alone to be around $2.4 billion in 2012 and grow by over 50% by 2014 to $3.75 billion.  One of the primary reasons is Facebook’s ability to narrowly define your target market so only those people who fall into those set demographics will see your ad.

So, let’s walk through a scenario where Facebook marketing could help a local business.  Let’s say a home improvement contractor is opening a showroom in Southlake Texas. In addition to having a ribbon cutting ceremony with the Southlake Chamber of Commerce and publishing a press release, this home improvement contractor uses Facebook ads to target homeowners who live within the 76092 zip code.  Now when those homeowners get on Facebook, they see the Facebook ad for them and some click on it to obtain more information.

Before launching any marketing campaign, but specifically a Facebook marketing campaign, most marketing firms will advise you to identify your audience as specifically as possible including age, gender, household income, marital status and location.  Come up with the list of 20 phrases current or future customers might use to find your products or services.  Make sure you’re providing a solution to your audience’s needs. Then establish a marketing budget for your Facebook and other ads and write some creative ads using the phrases you identified.If you have challenges with your Facebook marketing or other local marketing campaigns, Social180 helps local businesses with Internet marketing and social media marketing helping them get found, communicate and grow.  To learn more, connect with us on Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn and see what our clients say about our services… or Give us a Call at 469-420-0180 and Get Started Today!