3 Tips for Reaching People in Remote Regions with Facebook

Advertising to people in remote regions with Facebook Ads seems like a simple task: just select the location where you want to show your ads in the audience selection and that's it.

Although this is really the first step for those who want to reach these people, it is far from being enough to generate results.

This is because, in addition to the challenge of reaching these people, who often live in regions without quality mobile internet (which ends up harming Facebook's own ability to use geolocation to identify where these people really are), there is still the challenge of the conversion.

That's right. Have you ever stopped to think that a person with poor internet (whether via mobile network or Wi-Fi) is unlikely to want to wait for that beautiful landing page full of effects you created to load?

Not to mention the difficulty of removing someone from Facebook and Instagram.

Unfortunately, reaching and driving results with your Facebook ads for people in remote regions may not be as simple as you thought.

The good news?

There are some ways that we have learned over a few years of experience and study that can help you in this mission.

1. Avoid taking the person off Facebook

This tip also applies to ads aimed at metropolitan regions, but it is much more important when reaching people in remote regions.

This is because if we assume that remote regions will have a more precarious internet and mobile phone infrastructure, we can conclude that people who access Facebook tend to have greater resistance to leaving the applications.

This resistance may be caused by fear of consuming mobile data and/or lack of patience to wait for a web page to load.

One way to get around this resistance is, therefore, to avoid removing the person from the social network application. This can be done using some models that Facebook itself offers us, such as “Registration Generation” or “Messages” ads.

Another way is to create chatbot strategies. They basically consist of creating a common post on your company page and configuring the chatbot to contact everyone who comments on it.

With some more modern chatbots you can even create personalized messages according to the person's comment.

2. Only advertise to people connected to the Wi-Fi network

If we consider that the quality of mobile internet in remote regions tends to be of lower quality than in the rest of Brazil (which is far from being one of the best in the world) it makes perfect sense to advertise only to people who are connected to Wi-Fi.

After all, if they are connected to the Wi-Fi network there will be no resistance to spending mobile data.

This option appears when you are selecting Placement when creating your ad through the Facebook Ads Manager. To display it, you must first select “Edit Positioning”.

3. Test different locations

A phenomenon that is difficult to explain, but that we have observed over the years when advertising to remote regions on Facebook, is the habit that some people have of putting a different location on their profile than the real one.

For example, a person who lives in the interior of Minas Gerais can say that they live in Belo Horizonte, and a person who lives in São José can say that they live in Florianópolis. In some cases, we saw Brazilians who clearly lived in Brazil claiming to live in other countries, such as Iceland and Turkey.

As mentioned, it's difficult to explain why, but depending on the size of your company, this audience can consume a good portion of your budget, significantly decreasing the performance of your Facebook ads.

Therefore, the tip is to test a more metropolitan location when you realize that the ads to reach people in remote regions are not working well – in fact, everything you read about tips on the internet, including on Portal Insights, our recommendation is that you test before drawing any conclusions.

There is no magic formula and you will only know if the tips will work for your business through experimentation in the context of your business.