

Are you an owner of a local business? Do you want to reach out to your existing and prospect customers around your area and let them know about your products and services? If your answer is yes to both questions, then you need to be on Facebook.

If you’re not on Facebook yet, you may be missing a lot of opportunities in connecting with customers and marketing your business. With over 2 billion active users monthly, Facebook gives you a platform where you can engage in marketing activities to build awareness about your company and bring it to the next level.

Here are the top 6 useful marketing tips for your local business that you can do on this social media website:

1.) Make A Complete Business Page Profile:

Firstly, you need to create a Facebook page for your business.

But you may wonder, why do you still need to have a Facebook page when you already have your own profile? There are many advantages that you can get from a business page including the use of unique content creation tools, opportunity to run paid promotional advertisements, and the ability to mine data from analytics report on user activities.

By having a page, you will not only get to separate your personal profile from your business but also the chance to make your online presence stand out from the competition, understand your customers better, and create marketing activities that are tailored towards their specific preferences and needs.

Once you have created a business page, here are several must-haves that you need to do to get the most out of it:

Complete your business profile. Take the time to complete all the details about your business including name, contact information, nature or category of your business, hours and days that you are open, link to your business website, a brief history of your company, and profiles of the members of your team.

Upload a profile picture. Your profile picture is going to the most prominent feature of your page. Make sure that you choose an image that represents best your brand and captures visitors attention.

Create a call to action. A call to action is a button that allows you to capture your customers. You can let them send you a message, contact your office, or bring them to a landing page of your website to make a purchase or schedule an appointment.

2.) Post Engaging Contents:

The next thing on the list is to create buzz by filing your page with contents that you think are relevant to your target market.

If you are a small business selling bicycles and accessories or offering service repairs and maintenance, you can post about your products and services but not always. Aim for engagement – likes, comments, and shares – and just about your offerings to ensure that you have a solid following.

You can follow the 70-20-10 rule: 70% of your posts are original and valuable contents, 20% are from other posts and external articles that your visitors might find interesting, and 10% for promotions.

You can also do all sorts of marketing gimmicks including the use of a relevant hashtag, live videos and Q&A’s, and polls.

3.) Run A Promotional Ad:

You can boost the popularity of your posts, grow your page users, improve your website traffic, and increase your sales by running a promotional ad.

Facebook ads are a way for your business to reach out to the larger community in your local area. For instance, you may want to target students, employees, or athletes for your bicycle business so that they will know about your page, get to know more about your company, and later on, hopefully, drop by in your physical store to buy.

4.) Be Responsive:

Be available to respond to messages, comments, or inquiries. If you can’t do it, you may hire a social media manager. Many local businesses now are outsourcing virtually to lower labor costs. There are many freelancing job sites such as Upwork and Freelancer where you can look for and hire people full-time or part-time who can take charge of your Facebook page on a daily basis.

5.) Partner With Influencers:

If you have accomplished cycling athletes, bloggers, vloggers, or famous internet personality with sizable fans in your area, you may also establish a partnership with them. You can invite them to talk about your products and services in their posts so that you can reach out to their fans and expand your market.

6.) Offer Freebies And Discounts:

You can also offer freebies and discounts for your loyal page followers. For example, you may run promotions such as doing a raffle to pick winners from the people who will like, post a comment, or share a particular post that you want to boost. Not only do you create awareness about your product or service, you will also establish awareness about your business and start building a relationship with your customers.