Hometown ADvantage - Local Marketing

Ep 8: The Low-Down on Retargeting Ads

• Nicole Eldridge

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🎙️ Are you wasting money by missing the most powerful type of Facebook ads? In this episode of Hometown Advantage, I break down retargeting ads - the secret weapon that turns social media scrollers into actual customers for your local business.

You'll discover:

  • Why running a single ad or boosting posts doesn't work anymore (and what does)
  • The difference between cold and warm audiences (and why you need strategies for both)
  • How to set up custom audiences and Facebook pixel tracking (simpler than you think!)
  • The exact types of content that convert best for retargeting campaigns
  • My "touchpoint machine" strategy that keeps you top-of-mind with potential customers

Whether you're new to ads or have tried them without success, this episode reveals how to create a self-sustaining marketing cycle that consistently brings in new customers without posting every day.

🔥 LIMITED TIME OFFER: $300 OFF Hometown Advantage for the month of May! Learn my complete local ads system including retargeting.

💡 Resources mentioned:


Welcome to Hometown Advantage, a podcast for local business owners where we don't just focus on getting more likes and views on our posts. We prioritize turning social media scrollers into paying customers for your local business. If you don't know me, my name's Nicole. I'm a marketing strategist who's supported hundreds of business owners with Facebook and Instagram ads, dozens upon dozens of local business owners, plenty of non-local business owners as well. I love working with local businesses specifically because one, I think there's not enough education and content and support out there for local business owners who aren't trying to spend tens of thousands of dollars on ads, especially when they don't know how they're going to perform. And ads just work different for local business owners. So my heart is with local. I started my. Social media journey by starting a local blog where I highlighted different local businesses, visited different local businesses, visited different local events, and that is what I just loved to do, and that's what has led me here today. I have a local business program where I support you through running your own ads. And I teach you step by step, the exact strategies I use with clients, but bringing it down to being able to use smaller budgets. So that's a little bit about me. I'm also a mom of two. My kids just celebrated their second and fourth birthdays. We had a birthday party for them this weekend, which was just. It is so much fun to see them celebrated, to see them having the best time ever. I'm glad it's over, I'll say that. But we're back at it today and we are gonna be talking about retargeting ads. So let's dive right in. Okay, so starting with, what are retargeting ads? Retargeting ads are simply ads that go out to people who already know you. So what's so great about them is that you're only paying. To get seen by people who are already considered warm to you. So there's two main types of people when it comes to who you can sell and advertise to in your business. There's a cold audience and a warm audience. Some people might say there's like a hot audience too, but to keep it simple, we're gonna say cold and warm. Your cold audience is people who have never heard of you before. So if you've ever heard me talk about visibility ads. Those are going to a cold audience. That means we have to create different types of content for those people versus our warm audience, which is people who already know us, they're already familiar with us. Maybe they're already somewhat interested in buying from us, maybe they've bought from us before. We need to advertise to both types of audiences, but the content that we use for each one is going to be different. Advertising to your warm audience is super important because since they're already starting that process of knowing, liking, and trusting you, they're more likely to buy from you than your cold audience. So we don't just wanna forget about them and fall off the face of the earth once they know us. Because just because they know us doesn't mean they aren't gonna just buy. Right. We have to stay top of mind. So it kind of works like a cycle. Like we need new people to be learning about us every single day, but we also need to be staying top of mind to all those people that are learning about us. If we're just running visibility ads or we're just trying to get more reach on social media and get more followers to get more new people, that's great for step one of a marketing strategy. We have to keep the cycle going and we have to be staying top of mind to those new people that we're bringing in from our visibility ads. So this is where retargeting ads come in. And in summary, retargeting ads are just ads that we run that only go to your warm audience, not to brand new people. So when you're targeting. I always like to say that retargeting ads work as your touchpoint machine. So there's all these different numbers and statistics that marketing websites will throw out there. Like years ago when I got started in the marketing world, they said, somebody needs to see your offer or see your business seven times on average before they buy. So that's the average, right? Some people might see it once and buy. Some people might see or hear from you 20 times and buy, but on average we want to make sure people are hearing about us seven, seven different times in order to make sure that we're getting the most people coming through and buying. Now that number every single year goes up and up and people are coming up with some crazy numbers now, 40 something like someone needs to see our business 40 something times. So that might be more of an online business type number because I don't think that's the same for local business, but they do need to be seeing us and hearing from us. More than once, which is why running a simple ad or boosting a post here and there doesn't work. That's why you will boost posts or run an ad and get clicks, get likes, but not get any new customers. That's because running one ad about one offer one time doesn't bring in conversions from social media. At least not anymore. When our feeds weren't super saturated with all these ads and business content that might've worked, but now we have to make sure that we're going through that full cycle of bringing in new people and then staying in front of those new people for a strategic amount of time, basically. Forever. If we want a marketing machine that just works on autopilot to bring in those new people, have those new people become leads, and then. Keep staying in front of the new people who aren't becoming leads to get more and more leads coming in. And it's like a cycle. If you, you probably can't see me right now if you're listening to the podcast, but I'm like doing circular motions with my hands and arms to show that this is all a cycle that just keeps going and going and going around. And when you have your ads set up correctly, it'll work on its own, right? You don't have to be posting every day or doing all these crazy things to make sure that this is happening. Once you have your ads set up, your visibility ads, your lead gen ads, your retargeting ads, using the framework that I teach inside my program, this is how it works like a machine over and over again, bringing in new people, converting those new people, bringing in new people, converting those new people. So how do retargeting ads work inside the Facebook ads Manager? Well, you have to set up something called custom audiences. We have set ones that we create for local businesses specifically, and it's all based around people who follow you on your different social media pages, people who engage with you as well as your website visitors. So your website visitors are tracked through something called pixel tracking, and whenever I say this, people tense up and they're like, I don't understand. That sounds confusing. So if that's you. I want you to take a breath'cause it can sound scary and complicated at first, but I promise you it's not. This is part of the magic of Facebook ads. Facebook ads don't just work because people are seeing your content. Facebook ads work because the targeting that they're able to do from the data that they're able to track and. Keep track of from people is so top notch for optimizing who your ads are going to. So the Facebook pixel is this little piece of code that you have to get from Facebook Ads Manager and copy and paste it into a certain part of your website. And when you do that and it's set up correctly. People who visit your website are going to be quote unquote tracked by Facebook. So that one, maybe if they visit your website from Google or they see you when they're out and about and they wanna learn more, or they're looking for something blank near me and they see you on maps or any of that. Next time they go get on social media, Facebook or Instagram, when you're running retargeting ads, your ads are gonna pop up for them. This also works just for the collective because Facebook's able to track behavior and things that are happening on everyone's website who has a Facebook pixel set up, which helps teach their algorithms and their AI about who to target for your ads. So if you don't have your Facebook pixel set up, this is something you're going to want to do. Even if you're not running ads yet. It's good to get this set up to start to tracking, because Facebook will start learning about who your right person is by tracking those people who are landing on your website. And it's going to make things even more optimized for you once you start running ads. At the end of this episode, I'm gonna talk about my Facebook ad intensive as well as Hometown Advantage, my local ads program, and those are both opportunities that I can help you get your Facebook pixel installed if you need it. But the last thing I wanna cover on retargeting ads is what type of content to use. So this is not necessarily the place that you're going to do your lead generation. You're gonna put your offer in front of these people. That's because this audience is going to be small. And this is just some math on the Facebook ads tech side of things. We are going to use our lead generation ads to go to everyone in our town, but we're gonna use retargeting ads to help the lead generation ads convert more leads. All your ad campaigns work together seamlessly when you have them set up right with the right type of content. So for retargeting ads, we're gonna do some more of that. Uniqueness, content, we're gonna talk about what makes you different than other people in your niche. We wanna do storytelling, like testimonials and reviews. That's a really, those are really good. Types of content to use for your retargeting ads, and I don't mean a graphic with text of your review. We have to find a more creative way to share reviews these days. So whether it's writing out the story of the client and then sharing what they said specifically, so saying so and so. Came in, wanting highlights and so we did this, this, and this, and here's a picture of how it turned out in her review. We can't just do a simple graphic with words. People really don't read those things anymore. Maybe it's a real, where you share a screenshot of the video, of the review, and then you have video in the background of what it looks like. To work at your business or to do business with you. The other great type of content to use for this is what I call the other great type of content to use for this is what's called objection handling content. So an objection is a reason someone might not want to buy from you, whether it's something to do with you or something to do with them. So the most common objection is money, but we wanna go deeper than that and think about other reasons besides money that someone might not be buying from you, even if they see the value. So I'm thinking about how we really need to get. Our lawn mow soon we don't, but like, I'm just looking at my lawn, so I'm like, okay, what objections do I have to hiring a lawn service? One? Our lawn is small, so maybe I'm thinking it's just not worth it to hire someone to come mow our small lawn. So it would be great if I was following a land local landscaping company and they ran retargeting ads to me that talked about how. They do small lawns and why it's a good offer or a good deal. Maybe another objection is that I don't wanna commit to a certain timeframe of services, so the content can talk about how I can get a one-off service. Maybe someone's objection to hiring a lawn company would be that they don't think anyone's going to do as good a job of as them or something like that. So you're just thinking about what are common things that come up for people and why they say that they don't want to join, don't wanna buy, don't wanna book. We wanna answer why they may be wrong and why booking with you is the right option through our content, and then run that content as retargeting ads. Oh, okay. That is my quick and dirty summary on retargeting ads. If this is something you wanna get set up for your business. I actually have a really fun little funnel that's been working really well for people where we set up a local follower ad first as our top of funnel. To get more visibility and get more followers and then set up retargeting ads to retarget those new followers. That is something we can do together in our, that is something we can get set up together. In my two hour Facebook ad intensive, I opened up six spots between May and June, and the May spots are already taken, so there's three spots left all in June. Where we could get this set up for you, including the pixel if you need it. The Facebook ad intensives aren't just for this, they're for anything that you wanna get done with me. Two hours when it comes to your Facebook ads. Also Hometown Advantage. My local ads program that takes you step by step through self-paced videos. How to get this entire local ads system set up for your own business is open right now. I'm offering$300 off for the month of May, so you can get the link in the show notes or send me a message on Instagram at Nicole Eldridge ads if that is something that you're interested in. You can get the link in the show notes or send me a message on Nicole Eldridge. No. You can get the link in the show notes or check me out on Instagram. My handle is Nicole Eldridge ads. If you're thinking about joining but you're not sure how it would look for you and your business, please send me a message. I love to talk through these things with people, and until next week. Get those ads launched and I'll see you soon. know me, my name's Nicole. I'm a marketing strategist who's supported hundreds of business owners of Facebook and Instagram ads, and we are gonna dive right into today's topic. And that's retargeting ads. Oh, I wanna start over.