Using location-based segmentation to target your audiences in Facebook and Instagram ads is nothing new. The many capabilities of this feature remains nevertheless an important reason why many businesses continue to increase their Facebook ad budget year after year. Here are 3 tricks we think might be new to you and might help you stay competitive on social media.
1st Trick: Targeting a Segment’s Postal Code
Instead of broad city-level targeting, Facebook allows you to get much more precise and even target specific postal codes. This has many implications, as there’s so much information that a postal code can provide on a population. Estimates of net worth and income brackets quickly come to mind, but a retailer can also choose to use postal codes to target neighborhoods based on their target segment’s age group. Some neighborhoods have larger youth demographics, others are growing with families moving-in and others are aging.
It can be interesting to take into account how a clientele living at a walking distance from your restaurant could potentially be interested in different offers than those that need to drive 10 minutes to reach you. And if you offer a delivery service, it would make sense to target areas where you deliver and areas that are possibly denser, have less traffic and are more profitable to work in.
In addition to allowing you to target for specific postal codes, Facebook also allows you to exclude specific areas. Are there areas hard to access or does specific zonage allow you to know that you won’t have any customers living there? Well then it makes perfect sense to avoid spending advertising dollars in that area.
2nd Trick: B2B Business? Targeting those 100 prospects is possible
Geo-targeting tends to really cut down the size of audiences. So much so that it’s possible to reduce an audience size to less than 50 Facebook users, sometimes even as few as 10. This means that if you are a B2B company targeting executives of a specific company, it’s completely possible to do so.
For example, after targeting the location of an individual’s office, you can target their employer, their income bracket, their age, their job title and an interest such as a university they’ve attended. One interesting feature that Facebook calls ‘Geographical Behavior’ also allows you to differentiate people living in a specific area, people traveling in the area, people that have only recently visited an area or all people in the area. If we are targeting a workplace, we would choose to target people that recently visited the area.
So with all these features in mind, you can imagine how key decision-makers can easily be targeted using very precise segmentation options, such as their office location, their age group and income bracket.
3rd Trick: Targeting Cost-Efficient Area Codes
Targeting less competitive locations and keeping our targeting broad can sometimes pay off. Although most people would target big cities and areas with a dense population of their target segment, doing so can often increase costs-per-clicks. Would you be able to target your audience in locations where there is less competition for certain keywords? Can you target suburban areas? Most people that live in the vicinity of metropolitan areas make trips into big cities on weekly basis, would be great to target and could very well become returning clients.
By dropping pins and targeting an area around a big city, while excluding the city itself, the cost-per-click of your advertising campaign will decrease if all other factors remain equal. You can use the same type of metric as mentioned in the above examples and analyze the results.
Geo-targeting is a great tool, with multiple advantageous usages. If you want to get ahead in the social media game it’s necessary to innovate your strategy. Nothing works for a very long time, in today’s fast-changing world of internet marketing, so an open attitude to new tactics is more than necessary!
