While many social media platforms can target local consumers through ad settings, there’s only one that is built 100% around local communities and perfectly suited to drive local service businesses leads. That’s NextDoor. We offer NextDoor ad management services including zip code sponsoring, sponsored posts, promoted posts, and local deal promotions in Katy, Fulshear, and Houston, Texas. Contact us to schedule a free consultation for ad management.
What is NextDoor and How Can it Help My Local Business?
NextDoor is a neighborhood-based social media platform founded in 2010 and committed to everything hyperlocal. It’s growing in popularity across the nation and world.
Today, it has over 10 million daily active users and 40 million monthly active users, divided among 260,000 local neighborhoods.
NextDoor has even brought city neighbors, who often don’t know each other, together online. In this space, neighbors discuss everything from lost pets to road construction to home security to the best local services. In fact, around 25% of conversations on this platform are specifically asking advice from neighbors about where to buy something locally.
Does this sound like a place your local business should be visible? NextDoor Advertising Services are the way to begin to reach people in the neighborhoods where your customers are and get your neighbors talking about your business.
Get Super-Local and Grow
Many local businesses struggle to find their place. They may be competing with businesses in a larger geographic area plus online vendors in some cases. Because of it, it’s hard to get a foothold and grow. You may have to significantly outspend your competition to fight for market share if you don’t have an established organic presence from quality SEO campaign management.
NextDoor solves this.
It’s a place where you increase engagement, sales, and word of mouth in a small area to grow your business. Next Door Ad Management can target specific zip codes, neighborhoods, and communities with ads, incentives, and promotions to quickly generate not only direct response to advertising but also digital yet 100% local “word-of-mouth” referrals.
This doesn’t happen on any other platform.
How to Grow a Business Using NextDoor Advertising Services
1. Understand Why People Like Nextdoor
74% of users are homeowners, so they’re very invested in their local community. People spend social media time on this platform to:
- Connect with neighbors
- Stay informed about local issues (crime, missing pets, road work, etc.)
- Find out about local events
- Organize local events
- Sell/Buy stuff (yard sales, single item sales)
- Get personal recommendations about local businesses
- Alert neighbors of suspicious neighborhood activity (porch pirates, etc.)
67% of its users have recommended a local service business to a neighbor. In cities especially, this “neighbor” is usually someone they don’t know and would never have met except through this platform. NextDoor is bringing neighborly word of mouth to the forefront but in stylish, modern way.
Local services businesses leverage NextDoor to network in their local communities, driving more leads and growing their reputation from neighbors’ recommendations.
2. Understand How Nextdoor is Set Up for Users
It’s divided into hubs. Each user only sees posts from their neighborhood or adjacent ones, depending on their settings. New users must prove they live in a neighborhood to sign up. This increases the integrity of the communities and reduces spam activity.
It’s currently in 11 countries, including the US.
All of this means that local targetting is already done for you, so you don’t have to worry about people in another zip code or state clicking your ads and running up your ad costs.
3. Explore Your Options
You can use NextDoor tools to:
- Interact with the community – Organize a local event. Engage socially as a person. Like other social media platforms, you can engage in these activities for free if you’re in that community as long as you don’t seem to be promoting your business directly.
- Run Local Deal ads – Make sure your neighbors know about your business, where you are, and that you’re one of them.
- Share special offers – Send exclusive offers to your neighbors.
- Gauge your local reputation – You can track your mentions, and read what people are saying about their experiences with your business or you as a neighbor. If you’re not delivering good customer service, NextDoor can turn against you. But the positive is that you can use this platform to gauge and improve your reputation as well.
NextDoor Advertising Services help you explore these options and apply effective strategies to get the most out of this platform.
4. Set Up a Personal Account
Like most social media, you’ll be more effective if you are part of a community. You can see how the locals are using it to develop the best ad strategies. You also need a personal account before you set up a business one.
Download the app on Google Play or App Store for a smartphone or tablet. You can also view NextDoor on your home/work computer through www.nextdoor.com. Fill out your information and verify that you live in your neighborhood.
5. Set Up Your Business Account
Search for your business name at https://nextdoor.com/create-business?is=weblocal to see if a listing already exists for your business or business location. If one does, claim it. If not, type www.nextdoor.com/create-business into your browser window and enter the details for your business.
You can choose to use your personal NextDoor account to claim or create your listing but we recommend using a different one so other people in your business can log into it. This way you won’t have to share your personal profile access as well.
Search for your business name. It may be there. If so, claim it.
Otherwise, you’ll need to enter information. Choose the best category, keeping in mind your neighbors will use this to search for local businesses.
From here, you’ll need to fill out your page completely to represent your business in the best way possible.
6. Learn How to Manage Your Reputation
We’ll get to NextDoor advertising soon. First, it’s essential to consider your presence. Your business does not appear in local neighborhood searches until you have three recommendations in their neighborhood.
To get these recommendations rolling, try these strategies:
- Display in-store and on customer communication that you’re on Nextdoor. Ask for recommendations.
- From your business profile, select “Reputation” on the left side. This takes you to a dashboard where you can see your reputation. You’ll find a business link here. Share this on your business Facebook, customer emails, etc.
7. Start Replying to Neighbors
Nextdoor makes it easy for your neighbors to tag your business once it’s visible in search. So be on the lookout for people talking about your business in posts. You can send thank you’s and comment through your business page. You can also send private messages if you need to resolve an issue without the whole community seeing it.
When you do this, they may remove a negative post once resolved, so this is worth your time.
You may also get direct messages. You can set get alerts through your email, on your phone, or both. Treat this like your business email or social media messages.
Check it regularly. Respond timely. Follow up.
8. Set Up Some Nextdoor Ads (Local Deals)
Now, we’re ready to start NextDoor Ad Management. Ads are called Local Deals.
From your business account, you’ll set up the following:
- An image (1156 x 600 pixels) – Very important
- Catchy title. 120 characters max.
- Deal details
- A timeframe (7-30 days)
- Link to a landing page on your website. Ideally, this is a page dedicated to this deal, not just your homepage
- Your audience – You’re not limited to your local neighborhood. Deals default to two miles around your business. You can increase this to 10 miles. As you get more recommendations, NextDoor will let you expand this radius.
Be sure to preview it, so you know how it looks on larger devices and smaller ones.
9. Set Your Ad Budget – What Do Local Deals Cost?
Local deals are not pay-per-click or based upon 1000 impressions. Instead, the flat fee is based on two factors.
First, the size of the communities you’re targeting. That’s one more reason you may want to start small.
Second, how many days you run the deal.
The ad itself may cost as little as $3 for a very small neighborhood. The average ad is a $75 flat fee. You really can’t beat that price for this kind of targeted advertising.
If you need to cancel the ad because of a mistake, too many responses, etc., you can. But refunds are not automatic. You must contact Next Door to discuss why you canceled the ad. They will generally refund a prorated amount. However, canceling ads is bad for the community experience, so your refund request may be rejected if this becomes a trend.
It’s best to plan and execute Deals with this in mind.
10. Next Door Ad Management
It’s one thing to set up Next Door and start running ads. It’s quite another to manage those ads to achieve the highest ROI. This is what NextDoor Advertising Services do. They understand how to get the most out of Next Door features.
With this in mind, let’s look at the Next Door metrics you need to track to manage your ads.
- The number of recommendations – This is where you get the most benefit. The more of these you have, the more visible you are without paid advertising.
- Neighborhoods – How many neighborhoods see your business? The more recommendations you have in other neighborhoods, the more neighborhoods you’ll be visible in up to a 50-mile radius. So you have a lot of room to grow.
- Neighbors – How many individual people can see your page in search?
- Organic neighborhood reach – From that reputation tab, see how many people are organically finding your business.
- Overall neighborhood sentiment
- Local Deal views
- Local Deal clicks
- Local Deal saves
The Power of Local Communities
NextDoor uses social media to strengthen the power of local communities, even among neighbors who would otherwise not know each other. These communities want to support local businesses.
Tapping into this community is a cost-effective and efficient way for a business to reach its most likely customers and grow.
Schedule a Consultation for NextDoor Ad Management
Contact us online to request an appointment or call (346) 218-8472 now to speak to a member of our team about hyperlocal marketing opportunities.