The digital marketing landscape is more competitive than it ever was today. Ad spend continues to rise and consumers are bombarded with so many noises in the online world. A major key for brands and businesses to appeal to their target audiences is ad personalization. This can be done by filtering them through demographics like age, gender, and location, etc. One thing is for sure, local ads are gaining power right now. Last year, mobile searches for Google’s “near me” businesses increased by 250%. Thus, a digital marketing speaker Hong Kong suggests learning how to localize Facebook marketing. Being the king of social media, such a strategy can really boost awareness and conversions among brands.
A social media agency Hong Kong explains that the best way to localize marketing on Facebook is to use location pages. It has been around for a number of years helping consumers searching for directions of physical stores or shops with discounted offers near their location. Facebook location pages showed up to individual searches highlighting the closest businesses registered in their map. Facebook also features global pages. It is a page designed to help businesses with multiple global audiences and store locations in different countries. Within global pages are market pages. These are the same brand page showing on marketplaces of a particular location or region. Just like location pages, market pages show up on individual searches highlighting them as one of the closest businesses registered on their map. By understanding these concepts, we can now proceed to discuss how to localize Facebook marketing.
CREATE A BUYER PERSONA
The best strategy on how to localize Facebook marketing is to create a buyer persona. This is a fictional representation of your target audiences on Facebook. It starts with researching your current customers, your competitor’s customers, and potential clients of your industry or niche. You can also use existing data like the personal profiles of your existing followers on Facebook. The main goal of creating a buyer persona is to understand your target audiences better. It also allows brands to determine how large the market is and how much budget they will need for such a campaign. Group your information based on the following filters:
- Demographics such as age, education level, gender, geographic location, household income, languages, marital status, occupation, parental status, race, etc.
- Hobbies, interests, and behaviors. This is where you need to be creative and smart. You will need to dig into the users’ common activities and the pages or topics they engaged in and followed.
- Reason for buying. This answers why the user is interested in making a purchase. Is it for his or her own use or somebody else?
After getting all the information, you can now create a buyer persona that you think is people with the highest potential to buy your products and services. This is where Facebook global pages and location pages enter. If your brand wants to offer products and services in different parts of the world, you can apply for global pages and create market pages once approved. In the meantime, while waiting for approval, you can start creating Facebook local pages for each location. This also applies to those starting small. It allows you to reach a strong market of people within your location. All you need to do is register a store location on the said page. Once you are eyeing for growth or if your global page is approved, you can just switch your local page and turn it into a market page.
CREATE LOCAL FACEBOOK GROUPS
Out of the 2.85 billion monthly active users on Facebook, 1.8 billion are members of 10 million groups on the platform. These are vibrant communities where connections and engagement happen daily. Picking up the momentum of Facebook Groups can help brands and businesses localize marketing. They can create a Facebook Group based on geographical location and stir conversations relevant to the local community. Through hyper-local settings, brands and businesses can build and grow a community of followers that can eventually be converted as customers.
TAILOR POSTING FACEBOOK ADS ACCORDING TO TIME ZONES
Another way to localize Facebook marketing is to tailor posting ads according to time zones. In the absence of global and location pages, Creator Studio allows scheduling ads based on regional time zones. As such, Facebook ads can reach the right people at the right time. With the right content, you can increase click-through rates dramatically. A pro-tip in hyper-localizing the ad is to tag particular regions in your post. It will show up in regional searches to audiences within that region.
TEST ORGANIC FACEBOOK POSTS
Facebook Creator Studio also allows brands and businesses to do A/B testing on organic posts. This can be a good way to learn which post has gathered the most engagement. As such, it builds evidence in creating the most effective ads for a locality. You can start testing one post at a time and change them every 7 days. By carefully analyzing the effects of changes on an ad, you will better understand what content resonates with the community.