Overview
With Facebook and Google Ads, you can advertise locally and increase your message’s visibility
Local Advertising, Past and Present
Local and regional advertising has been around for a very long time. In times before the internet took over the world, people mainly advertised with flyers and in popular magazines. And those options are still in use today, despite some obvious downsides.
Both flyers and advertising in magazines are rather expensive. And in most cases, people won’t even look at your message. They are so over promotional material, that there have even been letterbox stickers designed with the purpose of avoiding it.
But the biggest downside of these traditional ‘offline’ methods of local advertising, is that you can’t check the conversion rate or ROI of your campaigns. So each year, you’re spending a lot of money without knowing if it is worth it or not.
That’s completely different in online marketing, because everything can be stored on the internet. Both Google and Facebook have useful analytics and insight tools that will do their best to drown you in data and statistics. It might be a bit unfamiliar to laypersons, but it’s a valuable source of information to an experiences marketeer. That data is the biggest advantage of online advertising. Because knowledge is power, and that goes for local advertising as well.
It won’t come as a surprise that more and more local businesses are discovering the benefits of online advertising. For example, for the promotion of open days, or to build a name for themselves in their own town.
Local Advertising With Google Ads
Local advertising has really improved the past few years. You can make your targeting as wide or as specific as you want. For example, you can select the entirety of Europe, or just a few districts in Antwerp. It’s even possible to advertise in a radius around one location. This location can be a specific address or a street, but Google Ads’ minimum radius is 1 km.
Are there any places that you don’t want to advertise in? Make sure to exclude them from your campaigns. In the image below for example, we’ve excluded all neighbouring countries. Excluding irrelevant locations is just as important as including relevant ones. Otherwise, you might be wasting money on visitors from places you don’t service.
When you’re creating those local adverts, be sure to include the place name in your ads. This will give the people who see your ad something to recognise.
So, use headings along the lines of:
- Your Plumber in Antwerp
- SEO Expert Antwerp
- Best Locksmith in Brugge
Take a moment to consider the keywords you’re using in your adverts. A combination of the product or service you offer and a location generally works best. A small example, if you have an Italian restaurant in Wevelgem, advertise for ‘Italian restaurant Wevelgem’ instead of the basic ‘Italian restaurant’.
By using more specific keywords, your advert’s quality score will be higher, and average CPC lower, all while you’ll still rank higher in Google.
Local Advertising With Facebook
Local advertising with Facebook is similar to Google Ads. And Facebook’s targeting accuracy has also greatly improved over the past few years. Where the minimum radius used to be 10 km, it is now only 1 km.
Location targeting is not the only factor you can use to identify a target audience on Facebook. You can also use demographics, and areas of interest. Facebook does not use keywords, but a bunch of settings to select who sees your advert.
This way of working offers the possibility of very accurately determining your target audiences and campaign strategies. Perfect for local advertising!
Knowledge Is Power
The main benefit of online local advertising is the data you collect. Knowledge is power, so by analysing your campaigns’ performance, you can truly optimise your adverts. You’ll get insight into what does and does not work, which text boosts conversion, which locations are irrelevant, what days and time of day you’ll get more clicks, etc.
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