Ep 22: Behind-the-Scenes: Top 5 Local Ad Strategies I’m Seeing Work Right Now

In this episode of the Hometown Advantage Podcast, I’m taking you behind the scenes on the real Meta ad results my clients are getting right now — and the exact things happening inside their ads (and their businesses) that are making them successful.

I’m sharing what’s working in local ads heading into 2026, including: how to choose a clear front-end offer, why Meta lead forms are converting better than they used to (hello $15 leads 👀), why real people on camera is non-negotiable, what “creative diversity” means after the Andromeda update, and how to manually optimize ad spend by turning off low performers.

Then we go deeper into the business owner side of results — the mindset + traits I see in my highest-performing clients: playing the long game, knowing their customers inside and out, putting people-first marketing first, being willing to buy back time, and using data (not vibes) to make decisions.

Want my full framework for local ads that convert in 2026?
Join my free live Local Ad Strategy Session on Wednesday, January 7th at 1:00 PM EST. I’ll walk you through your winning ad plan, what to say, what to run, and how to track + optimize. Come live and you’ll also get my 3 highest converting Reels ad templates.

Sign up at: www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/localads

Or DM/comment “STRATEGY” on Instagram and my bot will send you the link.

And yes — I’ll also be sharing details about my 4-month mentorship Hometown ADvantage (plus the limited-time bonuses + fast action ad account setup/audit)

Transcript

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Hello, hello. Welcome to the Hometown Advantage Podcast. If you're new here, I'm Nicole. This podcast is all about local ads, running ads to our local base, business tips, tricks, strategies, all of the things. I also talk a little bit about what's going on in my online business, behind the scenes, things that are working for me, things that are working for my clients. So no matter what type of business you run, if you are interested in growing, scaling, and especially with using meta ads, you are in the right place. I am excited for today's episode because I am going to be taking you behind the scenes on the real meta ad results that I'm seeing right now from my clients and the actual things that are happening inside their business and inside their ads that is making them so successful. Before I dive in, I will mention I am hosting a live free local ad strategy session on January 7th. It's a Wednesday, 1:00 PM Eastern. This is going to be perfect for any local businesses or marketers that work with local businesses that want to know what it takes to run converting ads in 2026. I'm gonna walk you through. How to create your winning ad plan. There is going to be a link in the show notes, but if you go to my Instagram and you either comment on any of my posts or message me the word strategy. Then my fun little bot will get you all signed up for the strategy session. You do not wanna miss this. It's gonna be amazing way to kick off the year and get super clear on how ads can help you scale. Okay, let's just dive right in. So I'm a huge goal setter. Okay? I think it's because. I'm a very visual person, so having tangible set goals on a piece of paper or in my notes app or what have you, feel really good for me and it gives me some purpose and direction, and I need that because I have an A DHD squirrel brain. I need to know what am I working towards exactly, and what are the exact steps that I want to take to get there. That's why I love ads so much because they actually help me get to that goal a lot faster. So when I was setting goals at the end of 2024, I had just launched my program. I had three people go through it, and three sounds small, but the transformations and the work of those three people were good, so juicy. I knew that this program would crush it for other local, small business owners if I could just get in front of more people and have more social proof, more of those results that those three people got. So I ended up setting the most insane goal of enrolling a hundred people in 2025. I really just had this mentality of, okay, shoot for the moon. That's astronomical. You've only had three. How can you expect to do a hundred in a year? And I figure if I don't hit it, no big deal, at least I will have shot my shot and I will likely get close or at least get more people through the program. That was my goal. We are sitting here mid-December 2025, and I am just celebrating that over the past year I've actually enrolled 120 people into the program. And then more so than that, I've gotten to truly help so many small businesses get started with ads, scale their ads, turn their ad results around so that they can create the business that they want and really become the business owner. Stepping into that CEO role instead of just letting their businesses and their lives basically drive by because they don't have time and space to figure this out because they haven't created the time and space to figure this out. So in 2026, we're going for double that. We're going for 200 and ads are going to be the way that I make that happen. So all of that being said, this episode is going to be a reflection of the qualities I see in my most successful clients, them as the business owner themselves, and also add specific strategies that are working really well for them. So let's jump right in. We're gonna talk about ads specifically first. The first thing that all of my successful clients have are a very clear front end offer. Okay? So sometimes this takes some time and some testing and brainstorming and finicking to figure out, but a lot of the times. You can have one or two, maybe three different front end offers that you run at different times of the year to bring people into the business. That's what ads are for. They're really forgetting in front of new people. Now, a byproduct and something that's helpful is that your ads will also get in front of existing customers, of course, and remind you that you're there. But we have other ways that we can do that too, with. The text automations that my co-coach teaches inside the program, keeping up with an email newsletter for current clients, things like that. We're talking about ads, right? And you need a very juicy, clear offer on the front end to bring people in. Think about what it takes for you. To inquire with and do business with somebody brand new. It takes time, it takes research. You have to be really facing a pain point if you're gonna go and search out someone and try and find the best person. So we have to make it so simple and so easy when we're spending money to get in front of people for them to say yes. So if they've never met you and you're advertising a$3,000 package to something, and then you're coming to me and saying, nobody bought from my ads that might not be the right front end offer for your ads. That could be the ultimate goal that we're trying to get people into. Okay, but maybe we need to think about running like a mini offer of that to get people in. Maybe we need something free, like a consultation or a quote to get people in the door. And I wanna clarify because a lot of times when I say, what's your offer, what's going to be. What are you gonna be advertising? People will say, well, I don't do promotions, or I don't do discounts, or whatever, which is silly, but we don't have to get into that right now. It doesn't have to be a discount. It can literally be, I will clean your house for you once a month if that's what works. Everybody is different. Even my clients who do offer like those home services or those things that are reaction based, like plumbers, pest control, junk removal, like something has to happen at your house or you have something at your house and you really need someone to come take care of it. They are still running frontend offers, like free quotes and things like that. If you're offering something that's not as much of a need, but it's more of a want or a luxury. So I'm thinking people in the beauty and the wellness space, unfortunately. We need to advertise an offer. That one is gonna be clear, is gonna provide a clear transformation for people, and is a quote unquote, no brainer for them in order for our ads to convert on the front end. For example, I had a Botox client. Who would offer on the front end of her ads come in and get one area of your face treated for$200. Now, people would come in and then they'd say, oh, I want these other areas too. She'd quote them and they'd end up spending much more than$200. When you start getting complex and saying, well, I'm gonna do this service and I'm gonna bundle in this service and it's gonna be this high drug glow. Boost, chemical peel, all of these things. That stuff just starts sounding a little over complicated. And while I'm sure it's an amazing offer and that people would love it, you have to be clear as heck in your ads in order to see people convert because they're clarity breeds conversion. An unclarity results in people scrolling past. Think about our brain space on social media and how our brain is behaving while we're scrolling. We're actually there to try and think less, right? So we gotta make it super simple for them. That leads me into the second thing that's working really well with a lot of my clients' ads, and that's in lead forms right now. So a big question inside my program is always where should I send people from my ads? How should I collect my leads? Should I send them to a landing page where they have to put in their name phone number and email? Should I send them to my Facebook messenger? Should I send them? To a form on meta, I used to be a hater of the lead forms because we'd get so many bot and just unqualified leads from it. It's hard to say exactly why that was, but Meta's made some changes on the backend and there's more things we can do inside of the lead form that help pre-qualify people. I've been having a lot of clients, have a lot of success with it. My client, Dana, owns a interior paint company. She's been using those and she recently signed an$18,000 job from, which I think she ended up telling me on a call, it's gonna be more than that, a specifically, my client, Danielle owns residential cleaning company. She is getting leads for around$15 a lead through lead forms, which is a really good cost. And then she's converting 50% of those, which is an incredible conversion rate. So I know that sounds like a lot of numbers, but if you were to just do the simple math on that for yourself and think. If I spent, let's just say$500 and I got leads for$15, you can do 500 divided by 15, which comes out to around 33 leads for a month. So think about whatever your business is. Think about if 33 people responded to your ads saying, I'm interested, I'd like to have a call with you, or do whatever the next step is, and then 50% of those people, so 33 50% end up becoming new clients. So 50% of 33 is 16 new clients in one month on$500 of ad spend. Of course, everybody's price point on things is different, but for the most part, the math is gonna math there, that is extremely good profits on your ad spend. The third thing that all of their ads have are real people in their ads. So I'm gonna do a whole nother episode on how you need a spokesperson in 2026 in order to see converting ads. And if you are a one person show, we already know who the spokesperson needs to be, but this is the reality of social media now. We cannot get away with all stock images, stock video. Even going the other way and thinking of these AI twin clones people are using in their ads. I don't know if you guys are familiar with these, but there is software out there where it will quote unquote clone you and then you can feed it prompts or scripts or what have you, and it won't read it. The thing about those is that, of course, most people can tell when it's clearly ai. And I don't think using AI is a bad thing, but there's a whole trust recession that the online space is going through right now where people's trust in responding to anything from social media is down and we have to work to cut through that. And I think that using an AI clone twin is going to hurt you more than it's going to help you. Because it's going to create distrust. Why are you using a robot? Are you even a real person? Right? I had someone reach out to me asking if, I would be interested in them creating that for me, and I even for free or super low cost. And I said, no, I absolutely cannot do that in my industry. Like how many times are business owners inundated with cold calls, cold messages, ads about this next shiny marketing strategy that's gonna work for them? It is everywhere, and I need to work really hard to gain trust from start to finish. I need to show that I'm a real human. I need to show the real behind the scenes of my life and business. I need to show real client results. And having an AI twin or using stock photos and videos isn't going to do that. So you need to have real people in your ads. It can be photos, it can be. What we call b-roll footage where it's just a phone set up or somebody holding a phone and it's just you working or doing things behind the scenes. And then it can also be face to camera talking, which I know is a big step for people, but can be really good for building trust from the jump and also just making that human to human connection. The next thing that a lot of ads most recently have and need. To see really good results right now is what we're calling creative diversity. So let me explain that. Depending on how tapped into the ad world you are, most people aren't very tapped in at all and that's why they're coming to me. There was an update to the ads algorithm that is scaring people, is sounding super complex, but it's not. It is called Andromeda. I'm gonna do another episode all on exactly what's working post Andromeda update for me and my clients, probably in a couple weeks'cause I gotta give it more time. But the big takeaway of what's working right now post Andro to update is having a lot more ads inside of a campaign. So if you're somebody that creates one reel or one graphic and you run it as an ad, you are not going to see the best results. In case you're brand new to Meta Ads, what happens is you set up a campaign and you tell ads Manager, I have a goal for this campaign. You might tell it. You want leads, you want engagement, what have you. That's all something that I teach inside the program is choosing what type of ad is right for you based on your budget, your goals, your business model, all of the things. And then within that goal, you set up individual ads and you can have as many ads as you want. Of course, there's like a go-to good number based on those same things, budget, goal, et cetera. I used to really lean towards the number of three ads in an ad set or in a campaign a great place to start. But since the update, we need a lot more diversity in our ads. We need more angles. We need a mix of types of ads like reels, graphics, carousels. And to put it plainly, we just need more content in order to feed the algorithm what it wants. And there's a lot of technical reasons on why this is what's working better. Now, I'm not gonna get into that either. The big thing I wanna say is that even though we need more content, which makes people wanna moan, groan, and roll their eyes cry, the actual trick is just having a system to creating that content quickly. And systematically so that every time you go to run a new campaign, it takes an hour or two to get everything prepped and ready, and then that campaign runs for you for months sometimes. So that's something that I'm gonna talk more about in the local strategy session, is how we're going to plan and systematize our ad campaigns so that one, we get the best results, but two, it doesn't take. Six to 10 business days to get everything together. And then the last thing that's really working with ads right now is manually controlling ad spend by turning off low performing ads. So if you're not already doing this, listen up. When you sign a budget and Ads manager, you can set say, a$10 a day budget and have as many ads running inside of that one budget as you want. This makes it so that your budget is spread out between all of the ads. And the idea is that meta is pushing spend to ads that are working the best. Now, that's not actually always the case, so you need to go in and check how much each ad spent, and how much is the cost per result of each ad. If you have five ads running and one is showing a$6. Cost per lead and one is showing a$32 cost per lead. We want to turn off that one that's showing a$32 cost per lead because it's not converting and it's getting a lot of your budget. Now the trick is to compare the ad spend to the cost per lead. So if there is an ad that isn't getting any leads, a lot of times it's'cause it hasn't gotten any spend yet. So you wanna keep that on to give Facebook the option to push spend to that ad. But the main thing is we want to turn off ads that are getting a lot of ad spend but aren't converting. This will push the rest of your budget to the ads that are converting better. Okay, so that's all my technical ads talk. I wanna get a little deeper now, and I want to share the qualities. Then I notice in my most successful clients, because it's not just about creating winning ads, that's probably about half of it, to be honest. It's 50%. The other 50% is about your mindset and your expectations for your ads. Because if you come in with the mindset that you shouldn't have to spend any time on this and you shouldn't have to spend any money, and it should just start working immediately, and if you do it one time, it should work. And if it doesn't, then you give up. Ads aren't gonna work for you because if you come into that mindset for anything that you're trying to do, it's not going to work, right? That's unfortunately not life, and it's especially not business. Okay, so that leads me into my first quality that I notice in every single one of my clients that are getting an incredible return on their ad spend is they're in this journey for the long haul. They're not looking for the next shiny thing that will work for them. They're looking for a strategy and a system that they can use long term and that they can keep working at and keep improving. Okay, so they're not just getting their ads up and being like, cool, I'm done. I did it. I went through this four month program, and now I'm an ads queen, right? They're in this for the long haul. So when my four month program ends, there's an opportunity for you to resign into the program. It's called The Hometown Encore. And basically it's half the price of the program, but you still get access to my support to the unlimited campaign reviews that we'll do for you to the group coaching calls to the Slack channel. And a lot of my most successful clients sign into that because they know ads are what works. They just have to keep working at it. They have to be consistent. The thing about consistency with ads though is that it's coming back to it once a week or once every other week, and making sure that you're staying on top of things versus. What people see consistency as with other social media strategies is posting every day, right? I prefer the consistency of, checking in once a week or, or once every couple weeks. Quality number two, they understand their clients and customers inside and out. They know what their clients want versus what they need. That's a big one. That goes back to the clear offer. Like your clients want clear skin, but what they think they need is Botox or something like that, and they can speak to that in their marketing because the unfortunate thing is we have to speak to what they want and then we can follow up with what they need. Inside my program, I have an activity called the What to Say Workbook, and this basically breaks your messaging down into, I think it's six or seven phrases or sentences that basically we're gonna use over and over again in all of your ads, all of your posts. But part of it is really understanding what your clients and customers are going through, what they need, what they want, what's important to them, all of the things. Third, quality, they understand that marketing is people first. They understand the importance of getting photos, taking videos. Building up a bank of content that we can use for their ads. That means they're not afraid to get on video themself. They're not afraid to have people take pictures of them. They're not afraid to ask their clients, Hey, do you mind if I videotape this so I can use it in my marketing? They're not afraid to ask their clients for reviews. They know that if they want to grow their business and they want to help more people, they need that human aspect in every step of their marketing. And just to be so blunt at this point, if you are not willing to do that, then I would say choose a different platform or choose a different way to try and market and grow your business. You might need to go to a lot more local in-person things and spread the word that way. You might need to come up with an affiliate program for current clients. Maybe you're gonna go like the flyer and mailer route. I'm not really sure. I'm not an expert in all of those other strategies, but if you're not willing to show up on camera in some way, shape, or form, photo video B-roll talking. I honestly don't even really want to help you with your ads because they're not gonna perform as well, and then it's gonna be frustrating for both of us, right? So a lot of times that's a mindset thing. It's a remembering to take content to reach out to people. It's being brave and asking for people to be a part of it. I use this kind of message in a lot of my forms and where I collect feedback from people I say, Hey, do you mind if we use your name and your story in our marketing because it helps me grow my business. People want to help you. Okay, quality number four, they are prepared to buy back their time. If you haven't read the book, buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel. I highly recommend it. One of my favorite business books of at least of this year, if not ever. Because it opened my eyes to how much opportunity I have to live my absolute best life if I stop hanging on so tight to every cent in the name of saving money, right? My goal for my business is twofold. I want financial freedom for my family, but I also want time freedom. For my family. Okay, so the people who are really succeeding inside my programs are people who want to grow their business so that they can hire more, they can free up time, or sometimes it's people who work for other business owners and they wanna negotiate salaries or raise their rates because the results they're getting, their clients or their company. Are so much better now'cause they're learning about real localized strategies that are actually gonna work for them. So basically the people who are so successful inside my program are people who just want to grow. Simple as that. The last. Quality is that they follow data and not just feelings. Now, note, I'm not saying they follow data and not their feelings, because I do think your feelings and your intuition can be a very important piece to follow when you're tapped in, but to me, the data comes first. I have a really hard time with people who. Show up to calls or send me messages and say I ran ads and they didn't work, so I asked, oh, what do you mean they didn't work? I don't know. I didn't book anyone new. Okay. So was it because no one was clicking? Was it because people were clicking but they. Got to the offer page and just decided they didn't want to. What was your cost per lead? How many of your leads became sales? And they say, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Then that just means they're going off of a feeling that their ads didn't work because they came in probably with the wrong expectation and they're not following the data. Now, if you're someone that's listening to this and thinking I don't understand. Data. I don't understand ad data. I totally get that. And the great thing about local ads is there's only three or four numbers that we pay attention to, but they tell such a complete story that it will give you very specific information on what to do next with your ads. That's something I teach inside my program. Okay, so we're gonna be talking all about how you can bring all of these things to life in your own business at my upcoming free live local ad strategy session. It's on January 7th, and if you are listening to this after that, did I say January 7th? Yes, it's January 7th. Don't worry, I'm going to be hosting sessions like this throughout the year, so if you don't see anything in recent episodes or on my Instagram or through the emails that I send, reach out and ask me when the next one's gonna be, because you're definitely going to want to be at one of these to get the most clarity that you've ever gotten in your marketing. We are gonna go through my frameworks and step-by-step processes on how you get that clear offer, how you choose which type of ad to run, how you choose what to say in your ads, and how to creatively show it through the visual part of your ads. We're gonna talk about tracking and optimizing your ads based on what's working and what's not. All of those fun things. I'm also gonna be talking more about Hometown Advantage. My program, it's a four month mentorship program where you get my full local ads course, lifetime access to the course. So you never lose access to the material or any updates that I make in it. But the really juicy part is that you get four months of support and mentorship from me. So that looks like our Slack channel where you can ask questions at any time. And get an answer within 24 hours. During the business week, me and my team are sending loom videos, voice notes, campaign ideas. Captions to include with your ads, all of the things in there. And then we also do weekly group coaching calls where you can come on, get time with me, face to face, to talk through what you're struggling with, what's working, what's not, where to go next, all of those fun things. And then this is new, but you actually get unlimited ad campaign reviews and add data audits while you're in the mentorship space of the program as well. So anytime you wanna run a new campaign, you submit your copy and your creative to us. We tell you what to tweak. We tell you what we think will work well. We tell you. More insight on what to expect, and then every time you have seven days worth of data on your ads, you can submit for an ad data audit where we will help you break down the data and think this is what we should test next based on this data. On that workshop, I'll actually be announcing that I'm running a promo for the program,$500 off, and you'll also get four months free access to my local content club where I give 10 post prompts a month. This is a group favorite. Because I lay out exactly what you should post this month. I give you fill in the blank captions, I give you examples, I give you templates, all of that fun stuff. So that will be a limited time bonus as well. More so than that, if you join the day of the strategy session, which is again January 7th those first three days from the strategy session, I will set up your entire ad account for you. If you already have an ad account set up, I'll do an audit of the last three ad campaigns you've ran or the three ad campaigns that you want me to look at, and I'll record a video talking through where I see. We can optimize your results. Okay, that's my fast action bonus this round, so make sure you're signed up. Link is in the show notes, or you can go to my Instagram comment strategy on any of the posts. It's actually www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local ads. www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local ads come live. If you want the reels ads templates that are crushing it for my clients right now, I'm going to give those to anyone who's on the call live, and don't hesitate to send me a direct message or an email. Letting me know what questions, comments, concerns, what have you that you have. Thank you so much and I will see you on the next one.