Driving Local Customers In-Store With Facebook

While Facebook isn’t exactly riding a wave of PR goodwill, it’s still reporting significant growth in ad revenue — a signal that it’s still very much a worthy advertising channel with more than 3 million advertisers reportedly running ads across Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger. Location3 Sr. Director of Marketing Josh Allen recently shared with Franchising USA Magazine a few Facebook advertising tactics that franchises should (or shouldn’t) be using to increase revenue at the local level. Here’s an excerpt from the post:

Facebook Business Pages and the “Parent-Child” Hierarchy

In order to run any advertising on Facebook, you must have a business page/profile built and established on the platform. Setting up a Facebook Business Page literally takes minutes and is similar in nature to establishing your own personal profile; adding your business name, location information, profile photo, cover photo and more.

From there, you can also add custom calls-to-action that you want users to take, such as clicking over to your website or calling your business. Once the basic profile has been created, you can set about customizing your Business Page by including things like your menu, displaying your services or showcasing your products in a shopping section. Having noted this basic setup process, it’s important to mention here that a critical best practice for franchisors and franchisees alike is to establish what is often referred to as the “Parent-Child” hierarchy for Facebook Business Pages.

This hierarchy organizes all of the individual franchise location pages underneath a corporate/brand-owned master Business Page, and displays them in a “Locations” tab on the corporate page. This is incredibly important for a variety of reasons, one being that it makes local advertising more consistent and efficient, helping franchisees maximize their ROI for local Facebook campaigns.

It’s also worth noting that the Parent-Child setup still allows franchisees to manage their own individual profiles and engage customers directly, so you won’t be giving away your page access. If your franchise is not set up this way, it’s best to contact your franchisor corporate team to get the ball rolling on Parent-Child implementation.

For more tips, including local reach campaigns and why you shouldn’t be using “Boosted Posts”, read the full post here.