21 Facebook Local Marketing Tips for Local Event Marketing on Facebook

Need local marketing tips for local event marketing on Facebook? Learn how to brand yourself as a coach and promote your local in-person events on Facebook.

During the pandemic, it became harder for coaches who used to hold local in-person events and workshops and to promote their coaching workshops to a local audience and get more involved with their local community.

Becoming an expert in your niche locally isn’t very different from becoming known as an expert online.

The only difference is that you will need to connect personally with people in person and more often than when you’re conducting business with long-distance customers so that they can build trust in you.

If you want to get more involved with your local community online while you’re waiting for in-person events to start again, the best way to go about it is to create a Facebook marketing strategy.

21 Facebook Local Marketing Tips for Local Event Marketing on Facebook

Here are some Facebook social media marketing tips for local event marketing on Facebook. These local marketing tips for small businesses like coaches and consultants will help you brand yourself as a coach and promote your local workshops or events.

1. Fix your Facebook profile

The first step in your Facebook marketing plan should be to fix your Facebook profile. Before you join any Facebook groups, you want your profile to be open to the public.

This might be scary if you’ve only been using Facebook for personal use, but your local audience needs to know about you to trust you.

If you’re not comfortable using your personal Facebook profile for personal branding, you can always create an alternative Facebook profile only for your personal brand.

So open up the Facebook app and perfect your profile. And while you’re at it, ensure that you’re linking to your online profiles, groups, website, and blog.

2. Join several Facebook Groups

First, you’ll want to join a few groups where your target audience is active. For instance, if you’re a career coach, you can join career groups that students join for exam tips and career coaching tips.

If you’re a business coach or a marketing coach, you’ll want to join startup groups and entrepreneur groups full of business owners who need business and marketing advice.

Start with five to ten groups with the idea that you’re not going to fully participate yet. You’re just trying to find out what’s out there and get a feel for how Facebook Groups work.

If you plan to connect with a local audience, look for groups in your locality. For example, if you live in New Jersey, look for Facebook Groups that are active in your locality so you can connect with people who live nearby.

3. Introduce yourself to the groups

Take some time and effort to write up an interesting introductory note to introduce yourself to a new Facebook group according to the group guidelines.

In some groups, they don’t want you sharing links, while in other groups, they don’t mind. Since your profile is now open to the public, that means they can find you on Facebook if your introduction is interesting enough to them.

4. Monitor the Facebook groups

When you join a Facebook group, you want to monitor the activity. See who the moderators and owners of the group are and make note of whether you’re connected to people or not.

Don’t try to befriend everyone right away. If people befriend you, that’s good, but don’t be pushy by adding everyone as a friend. That could just come across as creepy.

5. Read & follow the group rules

Never skip reading the Facebook group rules. Sometimes that’s a pinned post, but other times it’s in the files.

Always look at all the files. Some groups let anyone add to the files, so that’s an important opportunity to note.

6. Don’t start selling immediately

In fact, unless invited, avoid selling in a group that’s not yours. Instead, be a presence in discussions that show your expertise. If you show them that you’re an expert in your field, people will come to you.

7. Be a useful resource to Facebook group members

When group members ask questions about something you know the answer to, jump in and help them out. The freer help you can generously offer members, the better.

You don’t have to do anything free that is going to take more than five minutes, but when you can help solve a problem easily for someone else, you will become known for your expertise.

8. Choose one Facebook group to hyper-focus on

Once you get to know the Facebook groups and their members, you’ll likely notice that at least one group is standing out as preferable and more useful.

Choose that one to get involved with more intimately and at a personal level. At this point, you can even unsubscribe to some of the other Facebook groups if you determine they’re not relevant.

9. Go to your first in-person event

Once in-person events become a thing again, choose the one group you want to get more involved in and go to your first in-person event.

When you go to in-person networking events, talk to everyone; don’t just try to talk to one person the entire time. Work the room when appropriate, making a point to introduce yourself to the leaders.

Wait until your third meeting to start offering to do things and volunteering so that no one gets afraid you’re going to take over.

10. Collaborate with local experts

Sometimes you can get more people to attend an event when you partner up with those who are also experts in your community.

Remember that there is no competition, only completion when you partner up with others who offer complementary products and services to yours.

If you can find someone who isn’t a direct competition, you could end up collaborating with them and sharing leads or referring customers to each other. So don’t lose the chance to make a new power acquaintance.

11. Start your own Facebook group

A really great thing to do is start your own local Facebook Group. As you join other groups and participate, people will be prompted to see your group via your profile and join.

Don’t promote your own Facebook group to other groups. That’s just poor social etiquette and it will be seen as spammy.

Organize a Facebook challenge and do Facebook Lives with a local angle to keep your group members engaged and keep your group buzzing and on point.

12. Start volunteering

Once you’ve become popular in your Facebook groups, you’ll notice that people will start inviting you to lunch, asking your advice, and even asking if you’re willing to volunteer.

Jump at the chance, because leaders who take initiative are the ones that are going to be seen as most trustworthy in the eyes of the group members.

13. Get involved with small business groups

Via your local Chamber of Commerce or another type of business-focused center, there is a huge need for volunteers who will concentrate on small businesses.

Most of these groups focus on bigger businesses rather than home businesses. So, they need you, and if you get involved, you will become well-known.

14. Find local events to attend and sponsor

Start attending small business events in your local area. Find some to sponsor too so that people get to know your business name and participate in public speaking activities.

Participating in local events is an excellent opportunity to introduce your local community to your business. Even if you can’t be there, the local community will begin to know and trust you more if your name is announced a lot.

If you’ve mostly done everything online or with long-distance people hosting, a training event in your local area can be just the thing to enable you to start getting known locally as an expert too.

While you’re busy preparing for your event, sharing information about your services and expertise when you socialize is an excellent way to get more locals to attend.

15. Speak at local & online events

In some cases, people who plan networking events also need speakers or people who will act as an emcee. You can get yourself on the list by joining your local speaker’s bureau or by directly contacting event organizers.

Send out a one-sheet to your local groups and organizations so that they know they can call on you to speak locally or online and on which topics you’re an expert.

If you have speaker pages or profiles online, include links to them showing your speaking creds and examples of speeches and workshops that you’ve given in the past.

While you’re getting to know people, start working on a signature talk so that you can give impromptu speeches, planned speeches, and maybe even eventually paid speeches in your local area.

Need public speaking tips to start speaking with confidence? Get free public speaking books and public speaking exercises from famous public speakers and public speaking coaches.

16. Host Facebook events

Facebook Events are a great way to promote local events because users can see what’s going on in their area based on certain categories and Facebook has an entire section for Events Near Me, as well as an option for online events.

Once you’re well-known, or even before you become famous in your community, start hosting your own online or in-person events on Facebook based on the targeted topic that you’ve chosen after getting to know people and seeing what’s needed in your community.

Your Facebook events can be free workshops, paid online workshops, live video events, webinars, or any form of online event that your audience seems to enjoy and engage in.

You’ll have developed the perfect topic once you get to the point of hosting your own online workshops and events. One of the topics you already cover online will likely work best for you.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Many of the same rules you use for attracting your audience online will work for attracting your local audience.

17. Fit your expertise with what’s needed

The best way to attract local business owners is to choose the right topic. As you attend events and get to know what is happening locally for small businesses, you can start to figure out what part of your expertise is needed most.

When you share your expertise freely by example, you’re going to be more likely to build good relationships with group members.

People like to be around those who are kind, helpful, and giving. Show your audience how much you care about them by being a resource to them in a way that is not threatening.

That will enable you to fit into the local milieu without butting up against a fierce competitor in a way that stifles your ability to help and become an expert with the local people.

You can set up online courses and target your local community with the lessons using a targeted Facebook advertisement to get the word out.

Another great way to teach what you know is to write and self-publish a “how-to” book through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). You can fit this into any niche. It’s also very easy to self-publish today.

Don’t worry – when they really want something, they’ll eventually come to you or even recommend you to others. At that time, be ready with your sales page or link to your online store if it makes sense.

In your advertising and marketing creative, you want to focus on the benefits the attendees will receive for attending your workshop or training event.

When you focus only on your target audience’s needs in all your marketing materials, it will be clear to them why they should come to your training event because they’ll know what they’re going to learn and why.

18. Develop awesome promotional materials

Create awesome promotional materials to target your local audience and run Facebook ads for them. If you don’t focus any of your marketing locally, you may not get very many locals.

Need help creating great marketing creative? Get a set of 20 editable and reusable designs that speak your brand’s voice, tailored specially for your business by PromoRepublic.

They will help you automate your social media presence hassle-free, manage content relevant to local audiences, schedule with AI, run local ads, and stay on top of the results with their intelligent products.

19. Take your marketing offline too

Don’t just stick to online marketing for local events. Include many types of advertising and marketing to get the word out, from local newspapers, local TV, local radio shows, and more. Use many types of channels to get the word out.

It’s also a good idea to allow people to phone you to sign up. Not everyone locally will be technologically savvy enough to sign up online, especially the older age group.

You can still allow for event registration via online methods or only allow online signups if you want to weed out people who are not used to online tech and may not be your target audience.

20. Follow up after a local event

After a local event, you need to follow up with anyone you spoke to for a few minutes. Do something nice that goes a little out of your way for the people that you really want to make an impression of.

Don’t immediately try to sell them something, but do follow up with any useful information that you promised them or connect them to someone you know would be great for them.

When one of your prospects sends a question about your event, signs up for your event, or engages with you on any level, you must make it a habit to follow up. If you meet them in person, get their contact information so you can arrange more meetings.

If they get on your WhatsApp or email list, ensure you have a follow-up series in place.

21. Automate your marketing processes

Set up automated marketing systems or hire a virtual assistant to help you put the systems in place to automate your marketing processes.

You can use the Fiverr Business Freelancer service to find a trained and qualified VA when you’ve decided that it’s time to bring a virtual assistant on board.

Local training events and coaching workshops are some of the best ways to break into the local small business community as a coach or expert.

If you want to become a coach, learn how to start an online coaching business with ICF-accredited coaching training and coach certification programs.

Want to raise awareness, branding, and word of mouth for your local coaching business? Read the articles below for more local marketing ideas for small businesses.

Social media tips & tools

• 21 Social Media Marketing Tips For Local Businesses
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• How To Create & Successfully Grow Facebook Groups For Business
• 35 Best Local Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Business Locally

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