How To Set Up Effective Facebook Ads Campaigns For Your Small Local Business

If you are a local business, you need to reach qualified prospects in your immediate area. It can be a very intimidating task without the proper experience, and you don't want to be putting your budget to work on something that won't be effective for your business. In this article, we will show you how to set up an effective Meta ads campaign for advertising on Facebook and Instagram for your business. We will also show you some simple setups and strategies you can start using today. Lets get into showing you how to set up effective Facebook ads campaigns for your small local business.

As a small local business, depending on the nature of your company, you may be breaking your advertising into two segments: Local (or tri-state area) and National. For this article, we will be focusing on the local segment only. With that said, if you are also advertising nationally we would recommend splitting up your campaign structures to separate national and local targeting. Let's get into it.

Before you start your ad campaign setup there are three things you want to have figured out:

• Your Ideal Customer

You should come up with a profile of your ideal customer. Even if you already know this, it's a perfect time for a refresher. Start with identifying their core problem, how that makes them feel emotionally, and what your solution is. This will help us build our targeting and journey. You should also know what your desired action for them is: a lead form completion, a phone call, download, etc.

• Target Location

What area are you targeting within? How far out can your business service? Are you trying to get people to come to your physical location or will you be traveling to your customers? These will all affect the size of the radius you're targeting.

• Ad Creative

Before you make your creative, think of an offer that prospects will think is so good its almost a no brainer to try your services. Leverage this in your ad creative and the copy and headline text.

For example, you may be servicing pools in your local area. Maybe you've discovered your average client stays with you for a minimum of 3 years. If you have low enough costs, consider offering their first cleaning free and giving 50% off chemicals (or some sort of discount) for each referral they bring you after. If you do good work, you'll draw long term clients at significantly lower costs than you would without this offer.

Now that we have your customer, target area and creative established, it's time to set up your Meta Ads campaign! We'll assume you want to target both Instagram and Facebook, and your prospect's age is 30-55. For this example, we'll also assume you are looking for your prospect to fill out a lead form on your website and that you only have one static image creative. There are many more advanced strategies we can get into even with just this, but for the purpose of simplicity and effectiveness within a budget, we'll just be setting up one campaign.

Let's dive into it:

1. Create your campaign

In Meta Ads Manager, click create a campaign and select the "Leads" objective.

Select manual setup. In this simplified example, we will leave "Advantage campaign budget" off so we can manually dictate spend between our ad sets.

2. Create your ad set

Under "Conversion location", since this form is on your website we'll select "website", maximize conversions and select your pixel and "Lead" for conversion event. If you do not have your pixel or conversions API set up yet, you can refer to these articles here and here. Note that you'll only be required to have your pixel set up, but the conversions API is highly recommended if you can.

From here, you can set your budget and start + end dates. If you would like the campaign to be ongoing, leave "end date" checked off. If you want to use a lifetime budget for the campaign instead of daily budgets, you'll need to select an end date.

3. Set your audience

Meta has recently made a big push toward their "Advantage+" audience with less targeting controls. This doesn't make much sense a the moment for a small local business, so we will be clicking "Switch to original audience options" under Advantage+ audience.

Under "Location" we'll add our target location and define our radius and ages.

Pro tip: if you select a city, you'll only be able to go as low as a 10 mile radius. Select an address if you'd like to get more granular, as low as a 1 mile radius. We recommend making sure you have a healthy audience to choose from. For that reason, especially when starting off we would suggest going as broad as your business can handle. Limiting your audience too much could lead to over saturation and high costs on your ads.

We'll further define by setting an interest and language.

From there, you can select your placements. For this example, we'll be just using Facebook and Instagram.

3. Add in your ad

You're finally ready to add your creative. Using the ad and offer you made earlier on, add these into the "Ad creative" section.

Also choose your CTA and add the link to the page on your website you'd like to drive to. You can test a couple different CTA's to see which gets the best results for you.

4. (Advanced) Add a Retargeting Ad Set

You will want to be re-marketing to people who may have showed interest on your site but did not complete a lead form. Maybe these people are considering, or not in the market at the moment so it's a good idea to continue to stay visible to them. Retargeting audiences often tend to lead to higher conversion rates.

A simple way we can set this up is through a site retargeting audience. In ads manager, go over to "Audiences" and create this audience to add into a new ad set. For help doing this, see Meta's resource.

Create a new ad set and add this in under "Custom audiences" along with your location and age parameters and you are all set. You'll want to run your retargeting ad set at a very low budget while you're building up your audience when you're starting out, otherwise you'll be hitting these people too many times while the audience grows. Often times, you can even wait on this for a bit while the audience builds up.

That's it! This is a simple way you can get started with running effective Facebook and Instagram ads for your business. There are obviously many more factors here, but this will cover a strong foundation for your Meta advertising efforts.

At RCKSTR Media, we can do this all for you. We can leverage our extensive experience to bring results to your small business. We work with businesses in any location.

Let us take that time off your hands so you can focus on growing the rest of your business. Book a free consultation today (absolutely no strings attached) and see if RCKSTR Media could be a fit for you.

We're an agency passionately driven by data and pride ourselves in being the most progressive agency specializing in Meta ads in the industry.

Book a free consultation with us now and see what we can do together.

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