Facebook Advertising: Why Choose a Local Company First?

It seems almost daily our online marketing team gets the following question – “should we advertise on Facebook?”. With the recent IPO and massive amounts of press about Facebook recently it seems like we are getting asked the same question twice as much. Of course that is followed up by “do you do this” and “does it work” and “how expensive/hard is it to do”.

We use Facebook ads internally and as a part of almost all of our online ad campaigns. The ability to publish ads directly to certain demographics helps save time and money (ex: display to a certain sex ‘male/female’ or a certain age group). Facebook has the best targeting for this type of advertising and “yes” it does work.

The two fundamental differences between paid search and Facebook ads is this – IS WHAT YOU ARE PROMOTING BEING PUSHED OR PULLED? In other words, if you are wanting to push “happy hour” for your bar, not too many people are searching for “happy hour” on Google. But as they are checking their Facebook account and they see the ad for happy hour – they are more willing to click on it.
The opposite is true for “local plumber”. Those types of terms are used quite frequently as you’re standing in 2 inches of water in your kitchen and not as utilized when on Facebook.

At the end of the day, you want to find a local company that handles dozens of Facebook campaigns and stays up to date with all the changes. I highly recommend local because things change and you need to have the ability to get someone on the phone or face to face to make agile changes. The key to any online marketing campaign being successful or not is the variant test and review data (wins & losses) regularly.