Ep 10: Facebook Ads for Local Business: Back to BASICS

In this episode, we’re taking it all the way back to basics. If you’re a local business owner who’s tired of posting every day with nothing to show for it, this one’s for you.

I’m walking you through:

• Why organic reach is down (and it’s not just you)
• The 3-part ad framework I teach every client
• How much to actually spend on local ads
• The real reason your boosted posts aren’t working
• What Facebook’s algorithm is doing behind the scenes
• Common ad myths that are costing you time and $$$

And if you’re ready to stop throwing spaghetti at the wall with your social media — I’ve got a free training coming up that breaks this all down step by step.

🎯 Sign up at nicoleeldridgeads.com/workshop
 Or just comment “WORKSHOP” on Instagram and I’ll send you the link!

Transcript

0:00

Hello, hello. Welcome to Hometown Advantage, the podcast for local business owners who want to learn how to make social media work for them, not how to have to work for social media for the rest of their life. Right? So today on the podcast, we're taking it. Back to basics. In case you don't know, my name's Nicole. I'm a Facebook and Instagram ads expert that specializes in supporting local business owners, learn how to launch profitable Facebook ads so they can get more visible and get more local leads from social media without breaking their backs. Trying to post content every single day and wondering why it's not converting. So today I wanna do a high arching overview. What are the most basic, but most important things you as a local business owner need to know about running Facebook and Instagram ads so that you don't waste money and you don't waste time? Two of our most precious resources as local business owners, right? So we're gonna jump right in, and I wanna start by talking about how things work on social media right now. So the thing about social media is that it's constantly changing. Things that worked three years ago, four years ago, five years ago, even one year ago, don't work the same. Now as a local business owner, it's impossible for you to keep up with those things. So that's why I am here and why I suggest you do. Things the way that I do and the way that I'll talk about in this podcast because my framework for local social media doesn't rely on keeping up with how social media changes the way we set up our profiles, the way we create our content and the way we create our ads can work and will work as long as Facebook and Instagram exist. So let's go through like the who, what, when, where, why, all that good stuff. So here's the thing. Everyone is on Facebook and or Instagram. Of course, when I say everyone, I don't mean every single human, but a majority of humans are, whether it's old people, young people, dog people, woo woo people, whoever your people are, a majority of them are on Facebook and Instagram. I'll get people coming to me and saying, oh like majority of my audience is older, or majority of my audience is younger, so they're not on Facebook. Two things to say that one. Whenever I say Facebook ads, I really mean meta ads, which actually means Facebook and Instagram ads. Okay, so whenever we're talking about Facebook or meta, we're talking about Facebook and Instagram. Now, you would be surprised at the amount of older people on Facebook. I only know this because there are targeting options and the targeting options inside the ads manager go from 18 to 64 plus. And whenever you pick that 64 plus option, the audience gets huge because there's a huge 64 plus audience on Facebook. And they click on a lot of things. So when that audience is on. You get a lot of engagement and link clicks on your stuff. And then sometimes people being like, I didn't mean to click on this. Why are you messaging me? Or why does my ad keep showing up? Which is a whole different story, but same thing with the younger generation. A lot of people say Gen Z. Are not on Facebook, but the reality is that actually most of them are. Here's the caveat. Most people, not even just Gen Z, are mostly on social media right now just to consume content, whether it's to be entertained, to learn new things, to keep up with what's happening in the community, but they're not necessarily engaging on content. I want you to think about your own social media behavior. Are you going through and commenting on tons of your favorite businesses posts? If you're not, you should consider it because you know how it feels as a local business to not get any engagement on your posts, but also. If you're not, like most of us are not like actively just going through and liking and commenting on all these posts that come on our feed, then that should help you understand that it's not just you and your content. This is just user behavior on social media. This is something that is gonna constantly change based on what's happening in the world based on just where the world is going. And we've just gotten to this point where people are just consuming content, looking to check out when they're on social media and they're not really engaging as much, especially on Facebook and Instagram. And so here's my next point. Just like most people are on either Facebook and or Instagram, almost all businesses are also on Facebook and Instagram now too. So the competition when it comes to getting visible compared to other businesses is fierce. On Facebook, there are two different types of pages. There's a personal page and a business page. In order to run ads, you have to have a Facebook business page, but posts from Facebook business pages don't get pushed out to personal pages. Like personal pages do. So when you post on your personal Facebook page, a lot of your friends are gonna see it. Not all of them, but a lot of them. When you post on your Facebook business page, even though people have liked and followed your Facebook business page, not a lot of them are going to see it because Facebook is prioritizing the posts from those people's personal friends. So that's why Facebook started to see a downhill of just organic marketing results because pages were posting and not getting results because they weren't getting seen. So that's when a lot of people started, depending more on Instagram, because on Instagram they don't have separate pages like that. You can pick a. Profile type, whether it's like business creator or personal, but they don't specify it in the algorithm by type. So Instagram was always a better place to get more reach. Now, while I feel like that is still the case, Instagram is heading the same way as Facebook, where it's just becoming so saturated. They're messing with their algorithm so much because they're trying to keep up with TikTok. Where a lot of people are noticing that their posting and their views are very low, their engagement is very low, and just their overall results and responses from social media are so low. That's why I believe that Facebook and Instagram in general are truly a pay to play deal. Now, yes, organic marketing is important. I'm not saying it's pointless. I'm gonna talk more about that going forward. But if you wanna see noticeable results, you need to pay for advertising. That's my 2 cents. But good news is as local business owners, you don't have to pay that much, but it's so worth it to pay it and to run ads effectively because your ads can make a huge difference. You can go from. Reaching a hundred people to reaching thousands of people, and the ads algorithm is so much better than the organic algorithm. You can target exactly who you want your ads to go to. The ads learn so much better based on who's taking action from your ads. The organic algorithm is like this big mystery. No one understands how it works. It changes every day. The ads algorithm is not like that. You can learn how it works and you can play it to your favor. I am gonna talk about how I teach my clients how to do that a little bit later in the episode. But next I wanna talk about some common myths with social media and ads, especially because I hear a lot. So I run ads for my program and for my business. I talk to tons of local business owners online, and I get people saying the same things to me over and over again. And I'm always left wondering who is teaching these things? The problem is there's so many people out there posing as experts or just regurgitating things they've heard from other quote unquote experts. They don't actually know from running the ads themselves. So that's how I differ from those people. Let's get that straight. The things I teach are from things I've learned from being in the ads manager and being on social media all day every day in all different types of businesses, spending all different amounts of money. For years, I've worked for myself and taught my own things. I've worked for other marketing agencies and learned from other marketing experts directly under them, not just from a course. And I've been in the game actually placing ads, actually creating content, actually analyzing how that content and how those ads do, like I said, for years. So I wanna clear up some things I hear so often that are simply not true. One is that ads are expensive. Or that you as a small, local business aren't ready, quote unquote, to run ads. I have clients inside my program getting such. Exciting results from$2 a day in ad spend. Now, is that going to be the amount I suggest for you to spend? No, because if we spend more, it's more likely you will see good results. But the fact of the matter is that I have clients in my program spending as little as$2 a day staying consistent following the steps. And they have an influx of new actual local followers and people inquiring with their business saying, I saw you on Facebook and Instagram when that never used to be the case before. When you are paying Facebook. Two place ads for you on people's feeds. You are paying per feed, so to speak, so the more money you pay, the more feeds you show up on. So let's take me and my business, for example. I'm targeting people all over the United States and Canada when I run my ads, who own local businesses. That is a lot of people. So if I wanna try and get in front of all of those people, it's going to cost me a lot of money'cause I have to pay to get in front of all of those people. Versus when you run a local business, you don't have that large of an audience. You can pay the amount I pay. Facebook will take your money. But the fact of the matter is that you're gonna be like double, triple quadrupling up, meaning eventually you're gonna run out of people to target, right? So if you keep paying these high budgets for a small audience, Facebook will just keep putting your ad again and again on someone's feed because that's what you're paying for. So when you run a local business, you don't have to pay 30, 40,$50 plus a day in ads because when you spend less than that and you're consistent, you're gonna get on everyone's feed that you need to. Does that make sense? When it comes to being ready, I haven't run ads for people who don't even have a website yet, but they needed clients and customers. Again, that's not something I'd say. Yeah, definitely go run ads without a website. No, but as long as you are taking new clients and customers, you're ready. The second big myth is that targeting is super complicated and this crazy thing. It actually used to be the case where targeting was complicated. There were so many options. And that is something that's actually gotten easier as time has gone on because Facebook has collected so much data and their AI has gotten so smart when it comes to targeting that. Actually the only thing we need to tell it is location, age, and gender. Of our most ideal clients, and then they do the rest for us. They can read your ad copy, they can read over your ad creative, whether it's a reel or a graphic or what have you, and then they can go find the people that are gonna be best to be served your ad better than whatever we can tell them. Okay? So targeting's not something to worry about. Something I do need more people to worry about though. Is this fact that more visibility equals more sales. That is a myth. Here's another thing. I get so many people showing up in my DM saying, I ran an ad, it didn't work. I boosted a post and nobody bought. I spent$300 on ads and I didn't get any leads, so Facebook ads don't work. People are saying this because they believe that more visibility means more sales and results, and that's simply not true. I am just like picturing standing in a huge gym with a bunch of kids.'cause I used to be a teacher and I used to be a camp counselor too. So I would have to get kids' attention and be super clear in my directions.'cause I would be in charge of running an activity for 150 kids. If you can imagine. And I'm just picturing if I didn't have the right message or the right directions for the kids, it wouldn't matter if I whispered the directions in this loud gym or if I used a blow horn and yelled them as loud as I could if I'm not saying the right thing at the right time and in the right way. They're not going to do what I want them to do. I can whisper it or I can scream it as loud as I can. It doesn't matter. Okay. That kind of reminds me of this whole concept of visibility. More visibility equals more sales, which is not true. You have to know what to say. You have to know how to say it, and you need to be appeasing the ads algorithm with your settings and the ads manager in order to get results. So if you're not doing those things and you're like, oh, maybe I'm just not spending enough money. Let's spend more money, or let's boost more posts, and you spend more and more, you're gonna continue to get crickets no matter how much you spend. More visibility does not equal more sales. You have to get strategic with that visibility, and that's something that I help you with. The last myth is that boosting posts and running ads are the same thing. Boosting your post is very much, using the blow horn in the big gym to, to spread the wrong message or to reach the wrong people. It's very much just taking your post while lasting it out to as many more people as it can. They're not taking into consideration if these are the right people for the goal you are looking for. Even though you're setting location targeting, it's not all about that. They're not looking for people who are gonna take the action that you want. So boosting posts is not the way to go. Let me teach you how to run actual. Legitimate advertisements, which leads me into my last point here, which is just the basic ad framework that I teach. So one ad is not going to be enough, just like one boosted post. Not only do we need to test different things, like different graphics, different messages, different angles, but we need to run different types of ads. That all have different goals. Okay, the first ad that we run is my local visibility ad. This ad is just getting new eyes on your business, so we're really strategic about what we're saying in it. To make sure that we're not just showing up on people's feeds, for them to scroll right on by. We wanna make sure we're showing up on people's feeds, we're stopping their scroll, we're catching their attention, and we're saying something they're going to remember. They're not necessarily gonna respond right to this ad and say, yes, sign me up. I wanna work with you. But they are gonna take note of your ad and be like that is something I need. Or maybe it's that's something my sister needs, or, oh my gosh, they seem so fun. They seem so interesting. Or, oh, I haven't heard of them before. Good to know. I have that in my local community. Or maybe I should send them a message or I should talk to my husband. We should inquire with these people. It seems legit. The other really good thing about the visibility ad is that it brings in a lot of new local followers. Okay, so followers aren't everything. But they are important in my advertising strategy because the next type of ad we run is the retargeting ad. So retargeting just means paying for ads to only go to people who have now heard of you and already are starting to know you and like you. Retargeting ads are great'cause you don't have to waste money. Sending your ads to people who don't care or will never buy from you, right? This is why things stay so affordable. The visibility ad is very low lift. It's not asking for people to buy something from you straight from this ad, so we only have to spend a one or$2 a day on it. The retargeting ad is a very small audience. It's only people who follow you or who have engaged with your content. Or who have visited your website or bought from you. We can create all those audiences in Facebook. Ads Manager, if you have like a client list, a purchaser list, customer list, email list, and then you need something called the Facebook Pixel on your website. I'm not getting into that today, but basically it just tracks people who go to your website to check you out. So even if they're just searching. On Google for what you do, and then they find you, or they see you out in the public and then look you up. They will then get targeted by your ads when they log into Facebook and Instagram. So we use retargeting ads to stay top of mind because people say, now, whoever these people are marketing gods, I don't know that we have. To have several touchpoint in order for people to actually make a buying decision from us Online. Touch points just means different times that people see us online. So if you post even once a week and that's all you do on social media and you're wondering why nothing's converting, it's because you are not giving your audience enough touch points. These retargeting ads do it for us. We set them up once and we let them run for one, two, even up to three months. We don't have to touch them, and they are just running as a touch point machine for us. People who've heard of us and now they can't get rid of us and we only have to spend a dollar a day on it. Lastly, our money maker. We run lead generation ads. This is where people have the opportunity to either send us a message, give us their name and phone number, or email, buy something, book an appointment, all of that straight from our ad. This one costs a little bit more than the visibility and the retargeting ads. I have different types of these that I teach on, and it's all based on either your budget or like your business model. Do you take phone calls? Do you do free consultations? Do you do like first class free if you're like a gym or a fitness studio? It depends on your business model and then your budget. I have a lead generation ad that will work for you and I teach you exactly how to set it up inside my program. So the lowest we can usually go on this is$5 a day. I've actually had people do lower and do okay, but this is where we can really work our budget based on how our ads are doing. But this is where we're gonna spend most of our ad budget. Honestly, I have people do just the first two, the visibility ads and the retargeting ads, and see excellent results. But this third one is where we really pick it up a notch. Now, one thing I forgot to say is that before we do any of this, we focus on optimizing our profile, which can be done in a day, and really honing in on our organic content and making sure it's the right type of content for what we're trying to do. Because what's gonna happen when you start running these visibility and lead generation ads and the retargeting ads is you're going to get an influx of traffic. To your organic Instagram and Facebook page, and what's happening is people are going to your page, they're taking a quick look and they're figuring out is this interesting to me? Do I want to go ahead and do this? Or do I wanna say nah, they seem like they're closed. They haven't posted in a couple months, or they're only posting graphics of promotions going on. This isn't teaching me anything that I wanna know. It's not answering any of my questions I have about this service, so I'm gonna move on. So we always do that first before we run ads. Okay. So some key takeaways here are that social media ads are the best way to advertise as far as affordability and effectiveness because your people are on social media and you don't have to pay a lot to get in front of. We just have to do it right. Your ads have to be set up right if you really wanna see the biggest bang for your buck. And then using my three local ad framework gets you more eyes increased brand awareness and a list of leads raising their hands, saying that they want to do business with you so that you don't have to feel like you're behind'cause you haven't posted in a week. Or like you're just throwing spaghetti at the wall, being like, I have no idea what I'm doing here. I'm just gonna keep wasting time and money and praying something works. If this resonated with you, you definitely wanna sign up for my free training happening on June 10th at 12:00 PM EST. I am gonna be talking through my profitable local ads formula. I'm gonna be showing you some of my clients and students ads and talking about why they work. And then I'm gonna be talking about more of these common mistakes that I see in local business owners ads and how you can avoid them when you go to launch your own ads so that you don't waste ad spend. After I go through that, I'm also gonna be talking more about my program Hometown Advantage, and as soon as the workshop's over, I'm gonna be offering a$400 off discount and a done for you ad account setup bonus for anyone who signs up within 48 hours of the workshop. So come learn about my ad framework, come learn about how I can support you if you have questions. In the meantime, send me a DM on Instagram. My handle is Nicole Elridge ads. The link to sign up for the workshop is Nicole Eldridge. The link to sign up for the workshop is nicole eldridge ads.com/workshop. I'll put it in the show notes. It's in the link in my bio on Instagram. I've been sending emails about it. Make sure you're signed up. I would love to see you there and have a great rest of your week.