How to Tailor Advertising with Geotargeting Facebook Ads

Learn about the options Facebook Geotargeting offers for your social media marketing. Discover how you can find custom audiences while maximizing your ad spend.

If you’ve ever used Facebook – or any social media – you’ve likely seen ads that seem to know exactly where you are, what you’re doing, or even what you’re in the market for. While disconcerting, the truth is that those ads are effective. Most of us have clicked on one before, perhaps even heading to a landing page or a retail store to follow through on our interest.

These hyper-specific advertisements are possible through geotargeting. And when it comes to geotargeting, Facebook is one of the best in the business for its accuracy and success for brands of all kinds. As a business owner or a marketer, learning how to use geotargeting on Facebook can help you design high-performing ads that take your brand far.

What Is Facebook Geotargeting?

Facebook geotargeting ads allow you to choose the geographic locations you want an advertisement to reach. In short, it’s an effective way to customize the audience of your ad campaigns, so they target a particular audience by location and other demographics.

Options Facebook Geotargeting Offers

The Facebook advertising process includes elements of geofencing, or geographical boundary selection, as well as other demographic and behavioral factors. The result is a full-fledged strategy that lets you choose your audience size in different locations – and the characteristics of that audience.

One of the great parts about the magnitude of data Facebook has is that you can advertise to people in a Facebook location for different periods. The feature allows you to choose between:

• People who live in a location
• People who were recently in a location
• People traveling in a location
• People living in or recently in a location

Rather than selecting a broad set of audiences in a certain mile radius at any given time, you can create a marketing strategy tuned to the Facebook users that will benefit you most.

In addition, Facebook also offers filters on the behavioral and demographic features of those audiences, from age to interests and beyond.

Why Should You Use Facebook Geotargeting?

As a business owner or marketing strategist, Facebook’s geotargeting tool likely aligns with other approaches you’ve integrated into your strategy. The intention of finding the right audience at the right time is the powerful foundation of most marketing practices, and Facebook’s advertising options are just another tool for expanding your ability to do that.

The benefits of Facebook geotargeting are similar to those of other location targeting tools or strategies, with one main difference. The omnipresence of Facebook makes it an intensely powerful tool. Your customers – at least a huge chunk of them – are likely on Facebook, and the brand has enough data to help you reach them.

Find Custom Audiences

The primary and most impressive benefit of Facebook’s targeting options is its support for your work in connecting to your target audience. If you know the specific audience you’d like to target, Facebook can help you get there. The first step is highlighting your product on their mobile devices with a high-quality ad.

Maximize Ad Spend

Geotargeted ads on Facebook aren’t free – but the benefits far outweigh the price if you use them effectively and in the right situations. Not only can this type of ad targeting ensure that you get the most out of any ad campaign, but they also decrease the need for external resources to accomplish the same task. Instead of paying a firm to complete geotargeting efforts for a certain campaign, you can try it out with this feature and see how much you can get out of it.

Get Customers In the Door

If your business has a storefront, Facebook Geotargeting Ads are a helpful tool for getting people in the door, and helping you stand out against competitors in a specific location. For example, meet patrons of a local coffee shop with a personalized advertisement related to your coffee brand, hyping the value of your pricing or experience.

Improve Time-Bound Sales Periods

Adding a geotargeting approach to your plans is the perfect tool for time-bound sales. In particular, Facebook’s option to include people recently in your geographical area is the best choice for a time-sensitive event, as they more likely fit your target audience’s location.

Create Loyalty

Again, your goals as a marketer and business owner are not just to get those potential customers in the door but to make sure they stay. Indicating to users that they are at the front of your efforts, displaying your emphasis on their value, and improving the customer experience with personalized digital marketing gives your users an added push down the sales funnel towards advocacy.

How to Use Facebook Geotargeting Effectively

Facebook geotargeting can benefit your business in so many ways, but that doesn’t mean it’s an effortless approach. Take these tips for better advertising, from our team of industry leaders in high-performing Facebook content:

1. Be Specific

Tuning your Facebook ad campaigns to the right level of specificity is the first step in ensuring their effectiveness. As you go through the ad process on the app, you’ll be faced with the questions listed above, designed to help you choose an audience that is narrow enough to be attentive and broad enough to meet all the eyes it needs. Taking into account the location and population (i.e., if you’re rural, you’ll need a broader geographic distance) will help you find that line.

2. Include Behavior & Demographic Targeting

Geotargeting incorporates more than just geolocation – and you should use the other tools you have access to. Adding behavioral data and demographics to target people within a geographic region can help you find a better-suited audience for your product or service rather than the general population of an area.

3. Use Campaign Reporting Metrics to Your Advantage

Facebook ad manager gives you key insights into the efficacy of your ad campaigns that you can and should use to your benefit. As you choose specific targeting options for a given campaign, you can use the post-campaign reporting features to see performance metrics for reach, engagement, and conversions, giving you more information to use in your next campaign.

4. Integrate Your Other Research

Your marketing efforts most likely include information about your target audience and target areas, including the specific geographical regions you want to touch. Whatever data you have outside of Facebook, use that in the app as well. Facebook also makes it easy with the option to bulk upload locations.

5. Optimize for Mobile

Because most of your viewers will be interacting with Facebook ads through their social media app, make sure everything is optimized for mobile. Nothing is more unappealing for users than an unattractive or otherwise faulty mobile ad, so make your ad spend count.

6. Concentrate on Quality

As with any marketing campaign, quality comes first. You’re taking the time to pinpoint a specific audience, so put the same effort into creating high-quality ads that speak to users personally, whatever that looks like for your brand.

First Media is Your High-Performing Facebook Content Partner

Location-specific advertising isn’t new, but the options Facebook offers give it new life that can be a great tool in your marketing arsenal.

At First Media, we’ve uncovered the value of quality content on Facebook – and how to create it. Our brands So Yummy and Blossom outperform all other industry brand publishers on Facebook with fewer posts.

Partner with First Media for access to high-performing digital experiences and human ingenuity that drives real-world action across Facebook and all of the digital world.