Stop wasting time and money targeting outside your service area

Are you a small business owner who values their time and money? Of course you are, so stop wasting it by trying to target customers outside of your service area. Both physically outside of your service area, but also demographically outside of your target market. But for this, we’re mainly going to focus on physically.

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I’ll start with a story, back a couple years ago I was working with a client. He was running his own facebook ads for his local business and when we were doing the onboarding he was so proud of how big his reach was, he was reaching like 400,000 people a week and that was his pride and joy. When we first started working with them we spent some time identifying his target demographic and who was actually giving him money, we set up all new targeted ads for him and he was honestly getting a lot of business right from the get go. About 6 weeks into working with him he called us in a panic, business was going great but his reach was down, his 400,000 people turned into like 7,000 and boy was he pissed that we “fucked up his business”. He was ready to fire us, cut all ties, and leave a negative review. I was able to talk him down off his ledge and then take some time to explain to him 

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(this is where you start paying attention). 

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He was wasting so much money because he set his targeting to be a 100 mile radius off of his location, running a business that you have to physically come into. In his 100 mile radius there were 5 other major cities with about 25 competitors, so yes his reach was massive and 400,000 people were seeing his ads. But his customers were primarily coming from within 10 miles of his location at the maximum. So all he was doing was advertising to his reach about how they should go to a business like his, but there were 20 closer competitors. Now I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time I wanted to go bowling and decided to drive 100 miles instead of just going to one that was a lot closer. 

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I have seen this a ton, and honestly I’ve used it as a way to find people who need help with their digital marketing. I spend a lot of time looking at pages for location based entertainment businesses. But then I will start getting ads for arcades for example that are across the country from me, because in their paid marketing they are targeting people in Canada who are interested in Arcades. Now there’s a client I reached out to help because they were in Vancouver and I am near Toronto, I don’t think I was going to drive 4,300km to go visit their arcade but I was getting their ads and they were wasting their money. Through proper targeting I was able to help them reduce their ad spend and increase their ROI.

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The moral of the story, when it comes to targeted ads look for quality not quantity. Target those who are actually in your service area that would reasonably drive to your business and stop wasting all this money targeting people who never will. When you’re running facebook, google, twitter, tiktok, whatever digital platform you’re on, you can always set a target area. Yeah it’s nice to reach for the stars, but think more like a sniper instead of a shotgun.

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There’s also the psychographic side of targeting. I find so many clients especially with businesses that do a lot of business with kids will target the youngest age demographic that their platform will allow. Now I don’t know about you, but in all of my time running my location based entertainment businesses I never once had an 8 year old call to book their own birthday party, it was always the parents. So in your marketing, don’t waste your money targeting kids, they don’t have any money to come out. You want to target the real decision makers who are the ones actually going to book something, drive their kids out, and pay for it. 

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There is the argument that I’ve heard “but the toy brands market to the kids on TV”, yes that is true. Their strategy is to market to the kids to the point that they annoy their parents enough or tell them that’s what they want for their birthday or Christmas, and it does definitely work for them. But TV advertising is a hell of a lot more expensive than the targeting that we’re talking about here, and they sell nationwide, not just in your specific service area like you do. If you have the budget to spend on TV advertising, reach out to me and I can guarantee I will find a better return on your ad budget.