Episode 2: 5 Reasons Your Local Business Facebook Ads Aren't Working (And How to Fix Them)

🎯 Why do most local business Facebook ads fail? As a marketing strategist who's helped 100+ local businesses master their social media presence, I'm breaking down the 5 biggest mistakes that are wasting your ad budget (and exactly how to fix them).

In this episode of Hometown Advantage, you'll discover:

• Why copying other local businesses' ad strategies might be sabotaging your success
• The simple ad setting mistakes that are killing your results
• What your ad creative is missing (and it's not fancy design!)
• How to create offers that actually convert
• The "magic" of retargeting that most local businesses ignore

JOIN HOMETOWN ADVANTAGE - MY 3 MONTH LOCAL ADS MENTORSHIP PROGRAM: https://hello.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/course

Whether you're just starting with ads or have been struggling to see results, this episode will help you stop wasting money and start turning social media scrollers into paying customers.

💡 SUBSCRIBE for weekly tips on Facebook ads, Instagram marketing, and local business growth strategies!

🔗 Ready to master Facebook ads for your local business? Join my 12-week program: [Program Link] 📱 Connect with me: Instagram: [Handle] Email: nicole@nicoleeldridgemedia.com

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to episode two of hometown advantage, the podcast for local business owners, where we don't just focus on views and visibility and going viral. We prioritize turning social media. Viewers into actual paying customers for your local business. I'm Nicole Eldridge. I'm a marketing strategist that supported over a hundred business owners with paid Facebook and Instagram ads. And here's the deal. If you're an expert at what you do, but marketing feels like a 2nd job, you're in the right place. Each week, I'm breaking down social media marketing strategies into simple actionable steps that actually work for local businesses. No fluff, techie setups, just letting you in on real strategies that are working for my clients right now and how you can get started today and start getting seen by your community. And turn that visibility in to revenue. Let's dive in. I am getting ready to take a solo trip to Florida with my one and three year old, and I am just feeling so intrigued by how this is all going to go between the flight and navigating the internet. Sports and sleeping situations, but my parents live there full time and it is ice, ice cold here in Michigan, and I was just so ready to get out of here and get into the sunshine. My husband wasn't able to join, so I just, I just said, let's just go for it. That's just kind of the way I roll dive head first into something that sounds fun, even if it will probably not be easy. Kind of like starting this podcast. I'll be honest guys. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'm just hitting record and we're just going to chat. Okay. So today I want to talk about why most people's local ads don't work. And I do have the five most common reasons that I'll lay out that I see ads not working. But recently, I've noticed and realized that one reason ads don't work for so many people is because they're copying other people's ads whose ads also aren't working. So, I just saw this quote before hopping on here that said, If you want to be in the top 1%, just do the opposite of what 99 percent of people do. Of course, there's nuance to that, but it just reminded me of the topic today. if we want to stand out and we want to have a competitive edge for our local business and our communities, we have to do things that other people aren't doing. a lot of local business owners haven't kept up with the times when it comes to social media, but the ones who have are thriving. And listen, I don't blame you if it's not your thing, but I'm telling you that running ads and using my ad strategy is the simplest and least time consuming way to go when it comes to tackling the beast that is social media for your local business. So, does learning it take time? Of course, absolutely. But you're learning a skill that will get you paid for life. Even if Facebook and Instagram goes away tomorrow, like a lot of the drama that we've been seeing lately, I'm recording this right after the weekend that TikTok went away and then came back. The marketing foundations you'll learn when you learn ads will make it so you can market and sell them. Anywhere on any platform and sell anything, like even if you were to go start a brand new business, right? But the ads platform is somewhat complex. You can obviously totally learn to run them yourself, but you do need to use These standard pride and true marketing principles that so many people just haven't learned yet or realized Because they don't have the marketing why and experience that us marketers do, right? The thing about working with a seasoned experienced marketer is that they can look at a campaign or a post or what have you and And kind of put pieces together of why it works and why it doesn't. This is honestly one of my favorite parts of my job because what happens is a lot of times local business owners come to me and they're like, I did this and I ask, you know, like maybe they'll say, I boosted post. I'll say, Oh, did it work? And they'll say, I have no idea. So honestly, that's like a huge first step at being successful in your marketing is just knowing how to determine if you're successful or not. Because the other thing I see is so many people just spinning their wheels, feeling like they're doing a terrible job when they actually aren't. Things are working the way they're supposed to, and they're just burning. Their energy and mental space out by thinking they need to constantly be doing new things. Anyways, let's dive into the 5 more specific reasons that most ads don't work. Starting with number 1, the ad creative sucks. I'm sorry, but I had to go there. A lot of times I see graphics that look like a flyer you would hang on a bulletin board at a coffee shop or something. There's so much text and information that no one is stopping to read on social media. Social media scrollers are coming from a different state of mind. It's usually relaxed, maybe a little bit lazy, a lot of skimming, and it takes a little bit of effort to catch people's attention and putting up a graphic. I keep doing that where I hit the microphone, putting up a graphic with a bunch of text is not going to get their attention. So. Graphics work, but they need to have very minimal text. They need to be so clear stating who you are, who you're looking for, what the offer is, and then you can put more context in the copy. It doesn't need to all go on the graphic. The other thing is reels that don't have text on it. This just comes back to attention, hooking them in. Some people aren't going to read The, the first line of the copy or the copy, like the video is what's going to draw their attention first. So you need to have a hook on your video that prompts people to want to watch it. A lot of times that means just putting your location. It can be something just your location, like no other words at the beginning of your video because that establishes relevancy for people who are Watching it, right? Otherwise, they could think that you're just some random Joe Schmoe from the internet, like, marketing the next thing. That's what they're used to seeing on most of their feeds, so we have to kind of create what's called a pattern interrupt, where we kind of, you know, jolt them out of that. Lazy scrolling focus and say, hey, you should pay attention to this. You have a good 2 seconds to hook people in and you don't have to be a graphic designer or hire a pro video editor. You just have to have strong hooks that includes your location and a look. To your graphic and video that looks clean and not too busy and not like. It's super. Number two, low lift. We gotta go somewhere in the middle, right? Reason number two that ads don't work is the offer that's being presented. Either there's no clarity around the offer or sometimes there's no offer at all. Your ads should be promoting one thing. A lot of times I get people who come to me and, most of us, offer. a bunch of different services, but the thing is when you leave people to choose their own adventure, a lot of times they don't choose anything at all. So I really feel strongly that your ads should promote one service. Does that mean you always have to run an ad for just that service? No, you test different things. Your ads are just a way to bring new people in. So think of an offer that people, usually start with when they find you or that they're really excited about, or that they're already familiar with. 1 example is I, have a med spa and they offer. many different cool services, but a lot of them are like new state of the art things that a lot of people haven't heard of yet. Those types of services aren't meant for it's because there isn't a ton of clarity. We can try and make things super clear in the ad copy and the video and all of that, but there wants to be some sort of understanding usually to just to begin with to get a lot of traction from it. So, we bring people in with offers like Botox and filler that they, you know, that we know people know about and want. And then once they're in the door, that's when you want to educate and sell them on all your other offers and services. Also, having some urgency does really help if it's a limited time offer. Reason number 3 that a lot of ads aren't working is that you're using the wrong ad settings. So, 1 kind of bullet point that would fit in this bucket is also your boosting posts, which is different than running Facebook ads. I should definitely do an episode on that. The training on that, if you go to my page and look for a post where I hook says something like raise your hand, if you've ever been personally victimized by the boost on Facebook or Instagram, if you comment boost on that. My little handy dandy bot will send you my boost training, boost versus ads. So using the wrong ad settings, this is one of my favorite topics to kind of dive in on because it's so common and it's such an easy fix that actually makes for major results. So one thing that a lot of people do is they choose the traffic objective and they send traffic to the homepage of their website. There is a known fact within the Facebook ads expert community that the traffic objective sucks and does not bring you results. It brings you a lot of clicks to your website and nothing else. Facebook takes your objective and your goal so seriously to the point that if you say, my goal is to get traffic to my website, you'll get some traffic to your website and that's it. You won't get leads, you won't book clients. That is it. Sending traffic to your website doesn't generate revenue. Instead, you usually want to use the lead objective or the engagement objective depending on the goal of your ad, depending on your budget. This is something that we dive into. In my program, I have kind of like a choose your own adventure. Course where you get one video that kind of lays out. Hey, these are the different types of ads and this is what you should choose. If this is what your business looks like, if this is the goal of your business, if this is your budget and it tells you exactly which ad you should run and then there's videos for each one. So you just go to the video of the ad that, you know, you should run. and it walks you step by step through how to set that up. But this is a big one. A lot of people use the wrong ad settings and one wrong click of a button or one wrong optimization that stays on when it should be turned off and completely tank your ad results, which is a huge bummer. It's just money straight down the drain. Reason number four that your ads aren't working is that you are sending people to the wrong place or making it hard for people to book with you. One is sending people straight to the homepage of your website. You really don't ever want to pay to send people to the homepage of your website. There's just so much that can happen from there. People can, you know, click around and go to your about section. They can go to your services. They can see your Instagram page and be like, Oh, let's check her out there, which is all fine and dandy, but it's going to lead to more people again, going to your website and not actually booking. You either want to send them. To messenger so that you guys can start a conversation. You can nurture them. You can answer questions or send them straight to a form or a booking page. Sometimes I have people that are sending their traffic to a form that has, like. so many questions and that just comes back to the same thing. Think about the state of mind people are in when they are scrolling social media. They don't want to, you know, give their whole life story in a form just because they clicked on an ad. Sometimes we have to get back on the number of questions, and get that information from them later. So, Just where you're sending people is super important. sometimes people just send straight to their Instagram page, which can be an okay strategy. I do teach the local follower ad inside my program as well, but there are copyouts to it that actually make it profitable and worth running. Okay, reason number five that a lot of ads don't work is just a lack of follow up strategy or no retargeting. This one's huge. This Very few people are doing retargeting, which is like the magic of Facebook and really just a core marketing foundation, especially on social media. You cannot just show up once and expect a line out the door. Right? People need several touch points with you. They need to hear from you several times in several different ways before they make a decision to buy very often. In Facebook, you can set up what's called custom audiences, where you can run ads to only people who follow you, only people on your email or customer list, people who've visited your website. So these are all people who already know who you are. You don't really need to do, like, the introductory visibility phase. Do lead ads for them or like my retargeting ad strategy just uses organic content to make sure that you're actually being seen instead of putting all that work into your reels or your posts. just for it to be seen by 37 people, right? So if you found this helpful, I'd love if you shot me a DM on Instagram, let me know what resonates. Have you made any of these mistakes? Do you want any further insight on your ads? I'd love to take a look. Or if you shared this podcast, your Instagram stories, or with a friend who owns a local business, I would absolutely love you forever. And if you're ready to blow up your local visibility and convert that visibility into paying clients and customers, I want to invite you to join me inside my 12 week local ads program. I take you step by step through each ad. You should set up based on your specific businesses. You will learn those foundational marketing strategies and you will get my support and feedback every step of the way so that, you know, you're setting things right a big thing is tracking and making sure you're profitable inside my business or my, my course. Send me a DM if you want to learn more about that program, or you can send me an email. My email is Nicole at Nicoleeldridgemedia. com. I'll put all the links in the show notes so you can scope them out on your own too. Thank you so much for tuning in