3 Sure-fire Reasons Why Multi-unit Brands Need Facebook Advertising

The takeaway: Facebook advertising campaigns offer multi-location brands plenty of opportunities to reach the right local customers. If you’re not currently advertising on Facebook, read this post to find out what you’re missing.

According to the company’s internal data, Facebook has more than 2.3 billion monthly active users. I think we can all agree, that’s a lot of people. But if you’re a multi-location brand marketer who is decidedly underwhelmed by that figure, then this article is for you.

Multi-location businesses like restaurants, retail stores and healthcare brands don’t need massive audiences. Your marketing efforts (and dollars) are best spent on campaigns geared toward hyper-targeted audiences – i.e., consumers who are both interested in your products and near one of your locations.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook advertising campaigns aren’t right for multi-location brands. As globally popular as Facebook is, it’s still very effective at reaching specific audiences and driving conversions at the local level – when it’s done right. To prove this point, here are three reasons why advertising on Facebook is an excellent choice for multi-location brands.

No. 1: Facebook advertising offers sophisticated location targeting

Facebook advertising campaigns make it easy for multi-location brands to target local audiences for hundreds or thousands of different markets. With Facebook’s location targeting, you can hone in on users by country, state, city, ZIP code and more. You can also upload locations to target in bulk, which is especially handy for multi-location brands.

On top of that location targeting, you can also target different types of local consumers based on their behavior (e.g., whether they live in your designated areas or are just visiting). Here are the settings available in Facebook advertising campaigns to target different users based on their location.

No. 2: Facebook advertising drives local leads

It’s not just the targeting options that make Facebook advertising campaigns a valuable tool for multi-location brands. Facebook offers several ad types and objectives designed to reach nearby consumers and drive local leads.

Here’s an example of an ad type you can use to drive local leads for your multi-location brand:

Facebook Offer Ads

Facebook Offer Ads help multi-location brands and local businesses drive both online and offline sales by promoting special offers to target audiences. Consumers can claim these promotions with a click of a button and redeem the offer in a variety of ways:

• Bookmark the offer on Facebook
• Receive an email copy of the offer
• Get notified when they’re near one of your locations or when the offer is about to expire

Here’s an example of this ad type at work for a multi-location brand we work with. Recently, we implemented Facebook offer ads for GoWireless – a Verizon Wireless authorized retailer with more than 700 stores across the United States.

The results were impressive. During the two-month campaign, the campaign led to more than 45,000 offers claimed and reduced cost per in-store sale (CPIS) figures by 65 percent compared to standard Facebook link ads.

Related Case Study – How Mindstream Used Facebook Offer Ads to Boost In-store Sales for GoWireless

No. 3: A decline in organic reach is driving brands to Facebook advertising

In 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major update to the platform’s mandate.

“The first changes you’ll see will be in News Feed, where you can expect to see more from your friends, family and groups,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook Post. “As we roll this out, you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands and media.”

Translation: More posts from friends and families (because who doesn’t want to know more about your uncle’s thoughts on politics, right?) and less content from businesses and publishers.

We wrote about this update to Facebook’s News Feed at the time and the trend continues. This drop in organic reach means brands and publishers need to go beyond organic social posts to reach Facebook users – i.e., paying to promote content (almost makes you wonder if there was an ulterior motive behind Facebook’s decision).

While ad spending on the platform has plateaued, brands are still dishing out plenty of dollars to reach Facebook users. Which means that even if you’re not currently advertising on Facebook, chances are your competitors are.

Facebook advertising revenue in the United States

So, if you don’t have any Facebook advertising campaigns running, you have some catching up to do. If you’re interested in bridging that gap, contact Mindstream Media Group and we can help you put together a Facebook advertising strategy that will drive local leads for your brand.

If you’re already advertising on Facebook, we can also help you improve your existing campaigns. Contact us today to find out more, or check out our next post on how to audit your Facebook ad campaigns.