When it comes to managing your business, understanding how the locals are behaving is vital. From the traffic patterns around your facility, to the demographics of those in the area, awareness can be very profitable for your business.
But how can you find this type of information?
One tool that has become very useful for small businesses can be accessed right on your Facebook Business page. This tool is known as “Local Insights.”
Facebook’s Local Insights gives you the ability to look deeper into the audience surrounding your business. Included in the data are the busiest times for traffic around your facility, the demographics of those who are near you, and how effectively you have been reaching them.
To get access to your Local Insights, you must first go to your business page on Facebook and click the “Insights” button at the top of the page.
When on your business page, look for the “Insights” tab at the top of the page.
While in the Insights section of your page, look to the left-hand column and click “Local.”
“Local” insights is on the left-hand column
You should now begin to see all of the information that Facebook has gathered regarding your surrounding area.
This information can be greatly beneficial to your business, but it is especially useful to stores, food venues, and other in-and-out types of businesses.
People Nearby:
This section breaks down the busiest times and days around your business. Knowing your region’s busiest time will give you an idea of when you should be more aggressive trying to get people in your door.
For example, this restaurant can see that the busiest time range around them is from 5PM – 8PM on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. This might inspire them to run a Facebook Advertisement that targets Facebook users close by.
This graph shows the busiest times of the day surrounding your business. This particular example shows a peak at 5PM.
There aren’t really too many surprises on this chart, as the weekend shows the highest traffic in the area.
Knowing the busiest times in an area can also help when planning internal decisions such as staffing. Though most businesses know when their busiest times are, knowing this information can offer another variable that can be used to properly predict traffic.
Demographics:
Like any marketing plan, knowing your target demographic is very useful. This portion of Local Insights breaks down the age, gender, and home location of those who are traveling near your business.
This chart represents both the age and gender of the audience around this business. It can be adjusted to individually show age, gender, or home location, as well.
This restaurant can see that a vast majority of those in their area are between the ages of 25-34 and mostly male (though the gender split is pretty even throughout).
If there was, say, a large spike in females in the area, this restaurant might consider making a “ladies night” dinner or drink special that would take advantage of the influx of women nearby and then run an advertisement targeting females in the optimal age group.
The same frame of thinking can be applied to various advertisements. Facebook Advertising and Google AdWords, for example, have unbelievable targeting options that would put this information to perfect use. Rather than paying to have your business’ message delivered to everybody and anybody, advertising on these platforms will allow you to reach the audience that is most likely to be in your area.
This information can also be used to create signage that more appropriately fits the audience that is most common around your business. This restaurant, for example, might consider creating signs that target young men, as they are the most common audience around their location.
Ad Performance:
Facebook ads are an amazingly popular and cost efficient way to reach a target audience, and this section of Local Insights lets you know how well your Facebook ads reached the audience that surrounds your business.
Knowing this information shows you if your ads were exposed to the people that have been near your business in the past week, month or quarter, helping you determine how well your ads generated brand awareness to those that are near you.
If your business relies on local travelers, this tool can be especially useful. Running ads that effectively target and reach people with close proximity can generate better results for getting potential customers in the door.
This particular business ran an ad in mid September that ran through the beginning of October, and the graph represents people that have seen any of the ads they’ve run in the at one point or another.
This tool can be especially useful for those that run ads on Facebook. Being able to accurately target the optimal audience for your business will make your ads far more efficient and cost-effective, while also generating brand awareness to the audience most likely to benefit from your services.
This particular information is a general overview of the local insights. You can find it on the top of the Local Insights section.
When it comes to marketing your business, more data is always better. Unfortunately, many business owners don’t have the time to go through all of these numbers and charts, or even run Facebook Advertisements, which may be holding them back. Businesses like this should consider contacting an ad agency like NEXT! Ad Agency to ensure that their marketing needs are being met. This will allow the business owner to focus on his/her service, while leaving the marketing to those who are better equipped to take on the many tasks.
I hope this article has given you a better idea of how to utilize Facebook Local Insights for your business. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comment section below!
