Ep 36: Exactly why local ads are different (and so much better) than online ads

🎓 Free Local Ads Workshop: www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/localads

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Local ads aren't just "online ads but smaller" — they work completely differently, and that difference is working in your favor. In this episode, Nicole breaks down the 4 specific reasons local business owners have a built-in advantage when it comes to Facebook and Meta ads that online businesses simply can't replicate. You'll walk away understanding why your budget goes further, why you don't have to test a million creatives, and why trust and personal connection are already working for you before someone even clicks your ad. If you've been on the fence about running ads, this episode will change how you see it.

Transcript

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Well welcome. Welcome to Hometown Advantage. If you are new here, my name's Nicole. This is your go-to podcast for keeping up with what's working in local marketing, particularly paid Facebook ads I local entrepreneurial thoughts, advice behind the scenes things of a scaling business owner. That's just kind of obsessed with Facebook ads, and if you are not new here, welcome back. I'm really excited for today's episode. I literally am recording on my laptop, and then I have my second screen to the side of me and Claude Cowork is scheduling out. 40 Facebook group posts for me right now as we speak. So if you don't know what Claude Cowork is, you're probably not as chronically online as I am, which is good, but it's an AI tool. It's comparable to chat GPT. It's just growing and improving its capabilities. And it's outputs, so like what It's sending back to you a lot faster than chat GPT is. So a lot of people are making the migration over and I have been for like the past several months playing with it. And there is a setting in Claude called Claude Cowork and they can literally take over your computer and do things for you. So of course there's lots of. Details when it comes to prompting it and making sure that it's gonna do the right thing. That's what I have been learning and playing with over the past couple months. But basically we're coming into a launch of Hometown Advantage, which means a big promos coming. I've got tons of content that needs to be, that needs to go out. And I am opening up my free Facebook group. So here's the plug for the Facebook group. Make sure you're in there and if you want free ads, advice for your specific business post, post something in there. I will go look at your Instagram page. I will go look at your Facebook page. I will look at your ads you have running. I will look at a particular piece of content you have that you're thinking about running for an ad. I will. Answer any questions of where you're stuck. Maybe you wanna run ads, but you have no idea where to start. Post in there to get my take on your business because I'm only doing this for the next two weeks or so. But it's called Launch Your Local Ads with Nicole Eldridge. That's the Facebook group. But anyways, I have lots of educational content coming to the group. I have ad stories, I have polls, so I can gather more information to make sure that I am creating content around where you are at. And Claude Cowork helped me write the content. Of course, it used a lot of my existing content and very specific prompts and instructions to not write trash content. cause I may be calling you out when I say this, but most people using AI to write content are putting out trash content. Okay? We can talk about that on a different episode. It strategized it, wrote the posts for me, and now I'm literally watching it in my Facebook group, one by one schedule out each post. It is so crazy. It has scheduled emails for me. It has, crawled my inbox and drafted responses to emails I need to be responding to. I check'em over, make tweaks, hit send, it, sends the emails back. It's, oh, this was my favorite thing that I did recently. I had it Scan Hometown Advantage, the curriculum. And then also scan the Hometown Advantage Slack channel and identify where any gaps are showing up in the curriculum that need to be added, and then make a plan for me to add those resources. So some of it was videos I needed to add. Some of it was just resources, like a troubleshooting guide, an ads manager, when all those silly errors come up. All these things. And organized it for me, added it to my asana, to my to-do lists. So each day I could just go in and get those things done. So much fun stuff and I have become very committed to learning this, and you should too, honestly. Because here's the deal with me and my team. I recently just hired two more team members, so there are now six of us, including me. They're all part-time, so they're not full-time yet. I would love for them to be full-time, but they are also smart and so skilled, which is what has been so helpful in me growing my business. But sometimes they do have to spend time on things that anyone could do, including a robot. And the fact of the matter is I'm never going to replace them with ai. I want to replace the tasks that they do so that they can uplevel the tasks they're doing instead of scheduling out content, building out ads and ads manager, they are. Doing deep dives into client's numbers, coming up with new strategies we can try next. Researching brand new types of ads we can try, and then making a plan to get them created instead of spending so much time on. The day to day tasks, right? So I actually just did a training with my team, teaching them how to do a messaging deep dive for each of our clients and use that messaging deep dive along with very specific in depth instructions on how to write a copy, how to strategize on ad angles and ideas, using knowledge from my brain and my experience. And we've been using that and the ads have been crushing that Claude is writing. So I'm actually going to share that training simply just as is with all my hometown advantage clients too, because I didn't wanna share it out with a hundred, almost 200 people until we knew that it worked and it was a good strategy. That's how we do things. My business and sometimes my clients' done for you. Clients' businesses act as the Guinea pig, which trust me, they love. They've got the ad spend to support it, and then we bring what's working to the program. Okay. That being said, this episode's not about eight Iron. Claude. This episode is actually about. Why local ads are different. So I talk about this a lot, but I realize I haven't actually broken it down and explained why they're different and why I'm so obsessed. So I actually have 1, 2, 3, 4 ways that make them so different and make them so much better than running ads for an online business. And I'm going to share them with you. A little backstory before we dive in, I really got my start in ads. Not running ads for local businesses, running ads for online businesses, coaches, course creators, e-commerce brands, spending thousands and thousands of dollars a month, but outsourcing their strategy and the implementation to the agency that I worked for. I worked for several agencies, but this was the one that I got my most of my initial experience in. And I loved it. I still do, like my own business is an online business. I have scaled it to multiple six figures. We're on track to do over 500 K this year. Really through paid ads. That is the driver of that. But on the side, I started taking my own clients from, people in my community. Like we'd be out and about. I would connect with someone. I'd say I do ads oh, can you help me run my ads? I'm like, sure, of course, I know exactly how to run ads. I haven't done them for local businesses before, but the concepts are similar, just different, if that makes sense. And once I started running them and seeing the potential, it was like my eyes were opened. I was like, oh my gosh. Local ads have such a ripple effect that online ads could never have. Okay, so let's jump into the specific reasons. Reason number one is your audience size. So this comes down to budget and how much you have to spend. The way Facebook ad budgeting and ad spend works is you pay to get on people's social media newsfeeds like the Facebook feed or your Instagram feed. And so when you have a target market that's. 10 million people like moms in the United States and Canada. It's probably more than that. You have to pay a lot to get on all those people's fees. And here's the thing, when you're an online business, the conversion rate, stick with me through these terms, I promise. It's simple. Which means you know, the amount of people that see your ad versus the actual amount of people that buy are going to be lower than a local business. So maybe it takes a thousand people for an online business to get one person to buy, and maybe it takes a hundred people for a local business. Those are just throwing easy random numbers out to you. Don't take them to heart. So the point of the story here is an online business has this huge audience and they have to get in front of a lot of those people to make sales, which means they have to spend a lot more to get in front of those people. A local business has a small audience and. They can usually have a higher conversion rate from that small audience. So it's two things. It's less people to get in front of and more of those people that will actually buy. So I want you to picture a circle, like you just drew a circle on a piece of paper and picture it has a thousand little dots in it. Picture 10 of those dots circled. Let's pretend that is, spending a hundred dollars, you might hit 10 of those little dots inside that circle. I've driven, I've drawn this out in my courses in some content, but I don't have a whiteboard with me, and most people aren't actually watching this, so I just need you to picture it. So you've got your circle, you've got a thousand little dots in there, and just a couple of them. Are circled, and that is the amount of people you can get in front of for a certain budget, say a hundred dollars. Now picture the same size circle, but just 10 dots. We circle those all 10 dots, and that's your a hundred dollars budget, meaning your a hundred dollars budget goes so much further amongst your audience when you have a small local audience versus a huge online audience. Okay, so that's the first one. Audience size and the amount you have to spend to reach the right amount of that audience. Much smaller for local businesses than online. Reason number two, local ads are so different with online business ads. You have to test dozens and dozens of angles, creatives, copy content, et cetera, to find your winners because again, you are shouting into a void sometimes, and you have a lot of other people. That are also shouting the same message. So you have to constantly be cr cranking out new content. That is not the case for local businesses. I have business owners running the same ad for over six months and still getting results from it. Now that is a bit of an outlier. Usually we don't go much longer than three months, but it depends like on so many different factors. Okay? So I always think about, this is so random, but two types of niches that I refuse to run ads for and I get a lot of inquiries for. And if you have one of these business niches, it's a new shade to you. It doesn't mean the ads don't work. My company just doesn't run ads for them. One is the jewelry brand, okay? There are thousands and thousands of jewelry brands out there. You would be shocked if you're not in this industry, and so many of them think that the answer to selling more jewelry is running ads. In theory, it seems right, but the fact of the matter is. There's so many jewelry brands selling jewelry that looks exactly the same as yours, that it's gonna cost so much money to get in front of the people who are buying jewelry because you're competing against so many other people and unless you have something extra going for you in your brand, you don't stand out. Versus when I've run ads for a tree removal company in Washington, a little town in Washington. People who are seeing those ads aren't seeing really any ads about tree removal companies anywhere else. Okay. We don't have to do much to stand out. We have to say, Hey, Washington, the city in it, need a tree removed. We've got you. Simple. Okay. The other one is a soap. Soap companies. Again, if you own a soap company, I love that for you, things can work really well, but you have to have very creative creatives, creative content, all different angles. You have to test a thousand things because there's so many soap companies out there. And this really leads me into the third point of what makes local ads different than online ads, and that's a, with online ads, there's just little to no personal connection. That conversion rate of people who see you versus people who actually buy will be either zero or very low, unless you have about a dozen other things in place that are exactly on point. First of all, for an online business, your offer has to be so juicy, so good that people think it's almost too good to be true. And not only does the offer have to be so good to get a first time customer, but the way you position and talk about the offer has to be so good. So to take you behind the curtain, this is something I have had to work on so much as. An advertising education company, a social media education company. There are so many options for you out there. If I want you to invest in me and not one of those other options, I have to offer you something that will be so good for you and that you know will be so good for you. So that's something I always have to work on too, because the definition of what's helpful and what's good changes pretty quickly. So you need this incredible offer. You need sales pages and web pages and checkout pages that are optimized to the nines that, make people wanna buy and make it easy to buy. Okay. So there's like website designers who specialize in. Just setting up a page in a way that it will convert much higher. Whether it's a checkout page for a bar of soap, or it's a checkout page for, a course$300 course or an$1,800 course. Okay. You also have to. Do what's called retarget the crap out of people so they don't forget about you. So I want you to think about your own ad buying behavior. If you've ever bought something from an ad. I've bought obviously a lot of things from ads. Actually, like I said, you probably aren't watching, but the sweater I'm wearing that I always get so many compliments on. I bought from an ad. I saw it in an ad. It is unique, it stands out, it's colorful, so already it had that going for it, but I probably saw an ad for it, honestly, I wanna say close to 10 times before I actually bought it. And that was not by mistake from this company. What is this company called? It's something Nest. Pretty sure it's Nest something. I can't remember. I. But the reason I actually bought it is because I kept seeing it. I wanted it from the first time I saw it, but human behavior and trust in all of these things aren't set up for you to just see something wanted by it. It's oh, I want that. Oh, it's.$38 or$48 or something. I don't know if I want it that bad. Keep scrolling. I see it again. Oh my gosh, I really want that. Let me look at some of their other clothes they have. See if I can spend enough to get free shipping. Look at some other clothes, add some things to my car. Actually, I don't know if this is worth it right now. I'm just gonna go back and keep scrolling, right? That is how people operate and how they are. And by the 10th time I saw the ad, I'm like, I'm buying the stamp thing and I bought it with a couple other things. Okay, so that is the company retargeting the crap out of me. They know that you are likely not going to buy the first time you click an ad, but if you click an ad, you're interested in it. So we are going to follow up with you like crazy until you buy. Another example I always think of is my grandma and some of the things she buys from ads. So obviously not everyone, but most older women. If your audience is older women, you're susceptible to two things. One nasty fam comments on Facebook sometimes, but two, honestly, more buyers.'cause they can, they're quicker to buy certain things if they speak to them. So my grandma bought this. Dog thing. I don't even know how to explain it. It's just like a real life looking dog that walks and barks and, I don't know. She bought it from a Facebook ad. I was so happy that she wasn't. That it wasn't a scam. It was real, thank goodness. But the video of it was so funny to her and it just spoke to her and she thought it was like the coolest, funniest thing ever. I don't, I. Of course if we don't know for sure if she saw a bunch of ads for it, I'm assuming she saw it once and bought it, but it wasn't like anything she had ever seen before and that's why she bought it. It was really something special for her. Okay, so if you're not willing as an online business to spend money to. Repeatedly target people or your product and offer doesn't stand out. You don't stand a chance with ads with local businesses, it's different. If you are a local dog groomer that's just down the street, it doesn't take a lot of. Retargeting and sales pages and email follow ups and all these things. Now, there are some things you need, but you don't have to have all of that optimized to the nines to get someone to see your ad and then call you or see your ad and then send you a message or see your ad and fill out the form saying, I would like to book an appointment for my dog. You have that personal connection baked in for you, that is something that online businesses have to work their tails off to make happen. That is something I have to work my tail off to make happen, is that I create personal connections with my audience and with my potential clients because I don't have that built in being local to them. Which leads me into the last point, which is just that trust is at an all time low, especially in online advertising. So online marketers have to be extremely strategic about breaking through that trust barrier. It's like with an online business or an online marketing program. How do you know that you're not being scammed? It can be really hard to tell, and I am not in. One way, shape, or another offended. When people tell me, I thought you were a scam. Or, my husband thinks you might be a scam. I'm literally not. I'm here. I'm just a girl. Just a girl. But I get it. I get it. I feel the, I have felt the same way about programs. I've been interested in investing in. People have bought products from ads that have been scams, all of these things. Most people at this point. In our culture have been scammed in one way or another, so their trust wall is strong. And so that's a huge job is breaking through that for online businesses and just like with the personal connection, it's the same for local businesses. You can build trust so much faster just by being visible to people. Also, people can quickly Google, you look up reviews, they can quickly go to your page, do a little scan of your content, and that builds trust very quickly.'cause they can just see, okay, you're a real hometown business right over on Main Street. These reasons are why I feel so strongly that more local business owners need to be capitalizing on paid ads. You have an advantage and you're just leaving it on the table. And honestly, if you're listening to this podcast or you're interested in paid ads, you are part of a small demographic because think about how many local businesses there are just in your town, let alone your state, let alone your country. There's millions. In a majority of local businesses are not jumping on paid ads, and by simply getting started, you are giving yourself such a leg up for your own self, your own company, but against the competition, honestly, just by getting visible. Just by knowing how to connect with your audience through ads, it can make such a difference. I didn't even talk about this and have this written down as one of my reasons, but the ripple effect of one new client to a local business can actually be huge because we all know that one new client can easily turn into two by your. Client referring someone else in their community to you. That's another thing that just doesn't work the same in online business world. Oh, and with online businesses, a lot of times if they stop running ads, their lead flow and sales flow is just completely cut off, done. Like they need that to grow. I know. I do. But with local businesses, it's not the same. You can turn ads on and off, turn your budget up, turn your budget down, and you can see a ripple effect for months and months to come because of all that visibility. Okay, so if you want to learn the best way to run local ads. You need to be at the Beyond Boosting Masterclass. It's happening on April 30th, 1:00 PM Eastern. Everyone who comes live is going to get my help. My ads aren't converting. Troubleshooting checklist where it will tell you exactly what to look for and what to change to make sure your ads do convert. I'm gonna show you the three campaign setup that I teach for all local business owners to use. I'm gonna show you how simple the setup can be, and the ad creation can be for local businesses because again, we don't have to be testing all these crazy different things. I'm gonna show you why your ads haven't worked in the past because I've seen the same mistakes made not only by business owners themselves, but by marketing agencies. And I'm gonna answer all your ad questions that you bring to me at the free training. I'll also be talking about Hometown Advantage, how the program works, what you get. And I'm going to be offering something I've never offered before,$500 off the price, plus everyone who joins in the week following the workshop will get two. Reels created personally for their business, their offer, their goals by my team that they can just plug and play right into their lead generation campaign. That is going to save you so much time from when you join the program to getting ads up because you're not gonna have to create reels to put into your ad campaign. All you're gonna have to do is build it and your reels will be done for you. I don't know if I'm ever gonna be able to offer this again because when I presented this offer to my team,'cause they're obviously gonna be helping me create reels for everyone, their eyes got a little bit big. So we're gonna see how it goes. But I want to make it easy for you to get your ads up, start generating leads, start booking new clients right away, especially as we're getting closer to summer. And you're gonna wanna have this load off. Okay, so there's a link in the show notes. The link to sign up is www.nicoleeldridgemedia.com/local ads. Make sure you're signed up. Make sure you're reading the emails that I'm sending out, giving you a little bit of homework up until the free training. Make sure you're following along on Instagram and Facebook. I've got all the links in all those places and make sure you send me a dm, preferably on Instagram, but Facebook works too if you have any questions about local ads or if this would work for you. If you're interested in the program, I want to hear from you and we will talk soon.