One of the most resonant elements of social media - if not the most resonant - is that it gives everyone a voice. The core idea of social is that everyone can participate, everyone can be connected, everyone can contribute and make their voice heard as a part of virtually any conversation in the world, at any time. As such, the empowerment factor of social is significant. But empowerment also fuels another aspect - expectation. Now that everyone has a platform from which to speak, they're growing to expect people - and brands - to be listening. And thus, from a marketing perspective, the emphasis is shifting more and more to response and conversation, to locating and acknowledging those who are asking questions and looking for answers. This shift is hugely important - no longer is it solely people searching the web to find businesses relevant to their queries. It's now just as important that businesses be listening in and finding them.
This is why Facebook is in such a strong position - Facebook has more user data than anyone else. While Google has search history, Facebook has personal details, identifying traits, personal interactions. Facebook data is possibly the most valuable marketing resource ever created, and only now are we starting to work out how we can use this influx of information, how to locate relevant insights in order to better reach our target audiences and maximize response.
Increasingly, the key elements are personalization and localization, using the insights available to reach the audience most relevant to you at the exact right time.
In line with this, Facebook has just released two new updates that will help local businesses better hone their message and connect with their most receptive and relevant target audiences. Here's how they work.
Multi-Location Support
Last year, Facebook launched 'Local Awareness Ads', an option which enables businesses to focus their marketing messages onto people in the vicinity of their business. Based on your listed address, Local Awareness Ads target people living in or visiting the surrounding area using their residential details or location data as registered by their mobile device (if enabled).
Now, Facebook's looking to extend the functionality of Local Awareness Ads, making them more targeted, and more specifically relevant, to each individual segment of your brand audience.
The first update relates to businesses with more than one physical location. Thus far, it's been difficult for multi-branch operators to maximize their use of Local Awareness Ads because the structure hasn't supported regional-specific focus in varying locations through one manager. Now, Facebook's updated the offering to enable owners of multi-location stores to use information from each of their Pages (via the 'Locations' feature) to add dynamic ad copy, links and call-to-action buttons to their ads, making each ad localized for its corresponding store.
From Facebook's announcement:
"For example, if a cafe with multiple locations in the San Francisco Bay Area decides to run local awareness ads, they could choose to automatically populate the city name in their ad copy, depending on where the people seeing the ad are. So, people in Menlo Park would see "Join us for lunch in Menlo Park," while people in San Francisco would see "Join us for lunch in San Francisco." Call-to-action buttons are also dynamic, so when someone clicks on the "Call Now" or "Get Directions" button, they're connected to the store currently closest to them. This helps advertisers spend more efficiently, since they're only connecting with people likely to visit the store and the information they share is hyper-local and relevant."
This is a great addition - as noted, the more personalized and individually relevant you can make your ads, the more you're working with the rising expectations of consumers and delivering more focused, relevant content to each segment of your audience. While it may seem minor, adding in a generic address into your ads - similar to how you get 'personalized' e-mail marketing messages with a 'Hey [insert name]' opening - studies show that such tactics work, and can lead to increased click-through rates and conversion.
As part of this update, Facebook's also looking to simplify the ad targeting process, making them store-specific:
"Because each store Page has an address associated with it, advertisers can now simply select the stores they want to run ads for and choose a targeting radius around each of those stores. And, ad reports are now available for each location, giving businesses greater insight into ad performance than ever before. Location-specific ad reports help advertisers find out which locations are performing best, empowering them to advertise more efficiently by focusing their ad budgets on the best performing stores and ads."
Again, this is great info to have - the ad targeting options are not really anything new, but the additional ad insights reports for each location will be of significant benefit, helping focus both ad spend and region-specific messaging.
Local Insights
The second addition announced today relates to localized demographics and information about the people who are within the immediate vicinity of your store. Using data from people with location services enabled on their mobile device/s, Facebook can now give store owners more specific info on the people nearby their businesses physical location at any given time.
From the announcement:
"Businesses can discover the neighborhood's busiest days of the week and times of day, so they know when people are most likely to visit their store. And they can see aggregate demographics of the people nearby, including age, gender, tourist and local residents. So, if their business serves tourists or people of a certain age group, they know when they have the best opportunity to connect with those people."
Of course, that's only going to be as relevant as the amount of people who have location services switched on, right? And how many people enable location services? As it turns out, most people do have location services switched on and set to 'while using the app', as it makes it easier to use maps and other functionality within your device. The extent to which people have been sharing their information data was highlighted earlier this year when a student created an app called 'Marauders Map', which showed people's location history based on their Messenger activity. Facebook has since updated their location settings for Messenger, but other offerings like Place Tips are built on the back location services being enabled, which suggests there must be enough data coming through to make it a viable option.
Another interesting element of the new local insights data is an indicator of how many of those people in the immediate vicinity have actually seen your Facebook ads.
That's pretty amazing insight - this information can help advertisers better target and focus their campaigns to ensure they're reaching the right people. And as noted by Facebook:
"Over time, this new metric can also help advertisers draw a connection between reaching a larger percentage of people nearby and accomplishing the business outcomes they care about."
Both additions provide new possibilities for brands looking to maximize their reach to people around their businesses.
The updates to Local Awareness Ads are available globally through the API and will soon be made available in Power Editor, while Local Insights are rolling out to Pages in the US starting today and over the coming weeks.