Nobody drives 160 kilometres to go bowling.
That sentence is the whole argument, and it is worth more than any targeting guide, because the most common way local venues waste money is paying a platform to show ads to people who were never going to come.
Reach is the number that feels best and means least
A few years ago I onboarded a client who ran his own Facebook ads. The thing he was proudest of was his reach. Four hundred thousand people a week.
We spent the first session working out who was actually giving him money, rebuilt the targeting around that, and business picked up almost immediately.
Six weeks later he called me furious. Business was good, but his reach had fallen from 400,000 to about 7,000 and he was ready to fire us and leave a bad review. I talked him down and explained what had been happening, and this is the part worth paying attention to.
He had set his radius to 160 kilometres. Inside that circle were five other decent-sized cities containing roughly 25 competitors. So yes, 400,000 people saw his ads. Most of them lived closer to somebody else's venue than to his. He was paying, weekly, to remind hundreds of thousands of people that businesses like his exist, and then handing them to whichever one was nearest.
His actual customers came from within about 16 kilometres.
I find clients by receiving their wasted ads
This is not a hypothetical failure mode. I get served ads for arcades on the other side of the country because they targeted "people in Canada interested in arcades."
One of them was in Vancouver. I am near Toronto. I was not going to drive 4,300 kilometres to play their games, and they paid for every impression I saw. I reached out, they became a client, and cutting the radius alone reduced spend and raised return at the same time.
If your ads are reaching me, something is wrong.
Target like a sniper, not a shotgun
Every platform lets you set a service area. Facebook, Google, TikTok, all of them.
Set it to the distance somebody would genuinely drive for an evening out in your town. In most Canadian cities that is fifteen to thirty minutes, and in a rural area it is further because people are used to driving. You know your own market better than a default radius does.
Reaching fewer people on purpose is not scaling down. It is spending the same money on people who might actually show up.
Not everyone is your demographic, and pretending otherwise is expensive
The geography is half of it. The other half is who, and it is the argument I have most often with new clients.
They believe everyone will love the business, so they target everyone: 18 to 65 plus, both genders, the whole radius. You will get customers from every demographic. That is not the point. The point is that you are spreading a small budget evenly across people who are much less likely to convert, and the money spent on them is money not spent on the ones who would.
Build a customer persona from the people already paying you, not the people who theoretically could. Anyone could give you money. Focus on who actually does.
When I owned my arcade, my strongest demographic was women aged 25 to 35. That is not who anyone pictures when they picture an arcade, and it took looking at the data to see it. They were booking for their partners, and above all they were booking their kids' birthday parties.
Which brings up the mistake I see constantly in venues that do children's parties: targeting the youngest age bracket the platform allows. In all my years running venues, an eight-year-old never once called to book their own birthday party. The parent did. Advertise to the person with the credit card and the car.
The Lamborghini rule
Lamborghini has said they do not run television commercials because their audience is not sitting around watching television.
They are not trying to reach everyone. They know most people cannot buy the product, so spending money in front of those people is not brand-building, it is waste. A local venue with a four-figure monthly budget can afford that logic even less than a supercar company can.
The useful side effect: it makes you hard to sell to
Once you know who your customer is, the constant stream of local ad offers gets easy to answer.
Somebody will want you on the back of a kids' football jersey, on a kiosk at the hotel, on the wall at the drive-through, in the program at the community event. If you are an 18-plus axe throwing range, the football team is a no and you know it in three seconds. If you are an arcade that lives on children's birthday parties, it may be the best money you spend this year.
The targeting work is the same work either way. It just happens in a meeting instead of an ads manager.
There is one counterargument I get: toy brands advertise to children on television and it works. It does, because they can afford to buy pressure on parents at national scale, and because they sell in every store in the country rather than in one building in one city. If you have television money, I would rather put it somewhere it can be measured.