We recently blogged about why you need a location-specific digital strategy and using social media ads to find nearby prospects ties directly into that plan. Social media ads use geotargeting to deliver content to prospective renters based on their geographic location. Rather than spearheading a national ad campaign, social media advertising is an efficient, effective form of advertising that meets your prospect where they spend their time online.

Use Social Media to Target Specific Areas

Geotargeted social media ads are a must-have for your digital marketing strategy. Marketers looking to connect with a specific audience based on their location can use social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to promote content and reach their ideal, location-based audience. It does this by geotargeting their IP address and recorded address, as well as segment by county, city, state, and zip code. Once you’ve targeted by location, you can get even more specific to target by psychographics like their favorite interests and activities.

Geotargeting helps you understand how people within your targeted area actually respond to your promoted content. Creating multiple audiences and testing your social ads can help you discover the best area to target your self storage services. You may consider targeting a wider breadth of neighborhoods and cities in one audience and a more localized section of the city in another audience. Comparing the conversion rates of both allows you to focus your budget on the highest performing audience.

You want to advertise to relevant users and geotargeting allows you to do that on the social networks where your prospects spend most of their time. Combining geotargeting with other types of user data helps you focus on the exact persona that would rent your self storage units.

Create Local Audiences

Social networks such as Facebook allow marketers to create local audiences that can be used and edited as necessary. Choose to advertise to potential renters through targeting and then narrow down your reach to get as granular as you’d like. Select the entire city of Portland or market specifically to people located in the Richmond neighborhood that your self storage facility serves.

Marketers also have the option to target specific audiences on a per post basis without spending a dime on social media advertising. On Facebook, go into Edit Settings and select Post Targeting and Privacy. From here, you can segment your content to appeal to specific audiences within your fanbase. By viewing Page Insights, found within the Admin Panel, you can see page likes, visits, people your posts have reached, and more. By clicking on the People tab, you can see the fans you have in specific areas and then target your posts to reach a certain audience.

Find Nearby Prospects

Using geotargeted social media ads helps marketers find the right customer base and provide content for these desired audiences. In an effort to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time, geotargeting helps you find the most qualified people in your local area. While a broad campaign may make sense at first, you’ll want to target as specifically as possible to find nearby prospects ready to rent self storage units from your facility — and get the most bang for your social media advertising buck.

Want to know more about geo-targeting and finding nearby prospects with social media ads? Contact G5 to schedule your free strategy session today.