It’s not possible for you to know everything about social media. Here are the essentials to understand about what your Facebook ad campaigns can do for you and your franchisees.

As a marketing manager for a franchise, ensuring you are utilising Facebook’s extensive advertising tool set to it’s full potential can be quite a task. To save you the time and effort, we’ve listed the top four items to consider when developing a top-down Facebook ads strategy for your franchise:

1. Personalise your advertising

While it may be easier to carry a general brand message across all your Facebook ads, running your ads at a franchisee level (or empowering the franchisees themselves to run the ads) means your customers are presented with a more personable and ultimately trustworthy ad. Rather than the same generic creative and copy being used across all locations, this can be customised to fit in with the location and intricacies of each particular franchisee.

Consider this example of an ad targeted to people within 1km of Camberwell, Victoria. Instead of “Looking for a great Italian restaurant? Visit Roma Italia today!” it can be personalised to “Looking for a great Italian restaurant in Camberwell? Visit Roma Italia today! Located at 112 John St, Camberwell”.

Immediately the ad stands out as relevant as the customer lives in/was in Camberwell recently. It also eases the purchasing decision process. The potential customer knows where they are located from the individualised copy, instead of having to leave Facebook, visit the website and find the closest location themselves.

Imagery can also be tailored to showcase the location itself, customers or staff. Rather than using the same pictures across all franchisee sites, there is value in authentic content that establishes a more meaningful and trustworthy dialogue with local customers.

2. Gauge local demand

Facebook’s granular targeting capabilities allow for relevant locations to be easily targeted as well as excluded. By running multiple campaigns simultaneously for your franchisees, with only the geo-targeting different, you will be able to see what locations have high demand vs those that do not. From here you can make business decisions accordingly.

3. The power of the pixel

A major mistake made by many businesses who advertise on Facebook is not utilising Facebook’s Pixel. This is a piece of code which, when installed on a website, basically acts as a sponge, soaking up the Facebook ID of users that visit the website.

From here, advertisers can re-market to these website visitors via Facebook, already knowing that this audience has shown interest in the product or service you offer.

In addition to this, the Pixel has the ability to track conversions that take place on the website such as a purchases, registrations or key page views.

4. Use effective ad units

Facebook’s primary advertising unit is a click to website ad, which directs people from their Facebook newsfeed to a website. Although this ad unit is commonly used and is great for driving web traffic, there are a number of other options that can help drive business, particularly for local franchisees.

These include:

Local awareness ads: While Facebook optimise click to website ads to drive the highest number of visitors to your website, local awareness ads serve to get the highest number of local eyes on your ad. Interacting with this ad allows you to directly call the business (only on mobile devices) or view a map of the business location, highly valuable actions to a local business.

Offer claim ads: Are you running a special promotion? Facebook’s new and improved offer claim ad unit allows offers to be claimed by just a click on the ad. Available for both in-store and online deals, claiming an offer will save to the user’s Facebook ID, so they will be frequently reminded by Facebook and encouraged to redeem it.

People who claim instore offers receive a QR code to show at their point of purchase whereas online offers send a unique code to the user for redemption at checkout.

Leads generation ads: Rather than directly driving a Lead Generation ads, once clicked on generate a pre-filled form within the Facebook platform, with fields such as name, email address and phone number already being filled in due to Facebook’s knowledge of the user. This provides a seamless process for the user to submit their details, without having to be directed off Facebook to a website.

As well as name, email address and phone number, you can create custom fields specific to your requirements. Once a lead is submitted it will be stored in the publishing tools of your page, only available for page admins to download. It can also be easily integrated with a number of popular CRM programs.

While Facebook has the tools to drive results for businesses for it to be effective it needs to be a component of a marketing strategy and not just a standalone effort. When complemented with other channels, such as search engine marketing and above the line, Facebook assists with driving the user down the purchasing funnel, from awareness to consideration to, if possible, conversion.