The Benefits of Facebook Advertising to Local Businesses

Aug 31, 2010
Katrina Dayrit

: The Typical Facebook User - Paul Scott

Local businesses have much to gain from advertising on Facebook in terms of their overall internet marketing campaign and their offline capabilities.

Local business owners have many advertising options at their disposal: Print media campaigns like those in newspapers or magazines, local radio or television commercials, or staging events or seminars. Even better, there are a good number of online marketing platforms on which they can promote their products and services.

Nevertheless, many local businesses don't take into account the online possibilities in promoting their offerings, and may never go beyond the point of having a simple website built (and sometimes not even that). This works to the advantage of tech-savvy local entrepreneurs because they'll often find that advertising online in localized markets is tremendously less expensive than any local mass media platform can offer. For such entrepreneurs, a great place to start is on a service they may already use: Facebook.

Facebook Advertising's Targeting Filters

Facebook's advertising platform allows for internet marketing specialists and entrepreneurs to target their preferred demographic using very specific data including age, gender, location (either by country or by city), and marital status. If they want to offer special gifts or promos to birthday celebrants, they can easily do so by selecting the option to target users only on their birthdays. Furthermore, they can further filter their audiences based on where they go to school, what company they work for, or even what activities they enjoy.

Those who can successfully build a target profile of their average (or preferred) customer will be able to reach them precisely through their pay-per-click advertisements. That advertising functionality offered by this powerful social networking websites makes for more efficient PPC campaigns, as they will be cheaper and highly focused to internet marketing specialists' ideal market.

Taking Online Campaigns Into the Offline World and More

Facebook advertising will provide internet marketing specialists and entrepreneurs with an excellent opportunity to easily test different ad creatives or copy. Once they find something that works in this social networking platform, chances are those conversion rates will transfer into the "real world." They should use the data they collect to adjust their offline advertising campaigns to make them even more effective.

The data that internet marketing specialists gather from an inexpensive Facebook advertising campaign may also translate well into other online advertising portals or social networking platforms. They should consider seeking out local webmasters with similar traffic demographics as with what works in their Facebook campaigns. The possibilities to expand their online traffic and gather more real world customers is astronomical, especially if they're the only local business with the wits to utilize these useful tools.

Reaching Customers You Might Otherwise Not

With more and more media consumption being conducted online – especially among younger audiences – businesses might find that advertising with Facebook's platform has a significant impact on the effectiveness of their overall marketing strategy. They should think of the customers that use traditional media like television and radio less and less, instead obtaining their entertainment or content online – these are the kind of customers that use this social networking site. Local business competitors may not be able to reach these types of people, but they can.

Extending the reach of a business should be a goal in any successful marketing plan, and the popularity of this social networking website cannot be ignored as an excellent opportunity to interface with their target demographic. Advertising on Facebook's relatively new platform may seem intimidating at first, but with the wealth of information available dedicated to making a campaign a profitable one and a little determination, businesses can use it as a powerful addition to their currently existing marketing strategies.