Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
I had a look at your question about your Instagram Reels strategy in Chicago. It's a really common problem – trying to figure out what content works and how to reach a specific local audience can feel like shouting into the wind. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a strategic framework that might help you move away from the guesswork and towards a more data-driven approach. It's less about finding a magic content formula and more about building a system to discover what that formula is for your specific audience.
The core issue isn't just about Reels; it's about systematically understanding a local market. The good news is, you can use the power of paid ads, even with a tiny budget, to get the answers you're looking for much faster than just posting organically and hoping for the best.
TLDR;
- Stop thinking about your audience as "people in Chicago." You need to define your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by their specific, urgent problem or 'nightmare', not their location.
- Organic reach is unreliable for hyper-local targeting. Use Meta's paid ad platform to force your content in front of the *exact* people you want to reach within specific Chicago postcodes or neighbourhoods.
- Don't guess what content resonates. Build a simple "Content Testing Engine" using small ad budgets (£10-£20/day) to test different hooks, formats, and angles against each other and let the data tell you what works.
- Focus on metrics that actually matter, like Hook Rate (views past 3s) and Hold Rate (watch completion), not vanity metrics like likes. Use these to make decisions.
- This article includes a flowchart for a content testing process and an interactive Reel Resonance Score Calculator to help you objectively measure your content's performance.
Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic
Right, let's get this out of the way first because it's the foundation for everything else. "The local audience in Chicago" is not a target audience. It's just a location. It's so broad it's practically useless for creating content that actually connects with anyone. This is probably the number one reason you're struggling to find content that resonates.
Forget the sterile, demographic-based profiles. "Women aged 25-45 living in Lincoln Park" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to generic ads and content that speaks to no one. To stop burning time and money, you must define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening, or life-complicating nightmare.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. You need to become an expert in that problem.
- If you're a local accounting firm, your ICP's nightmare isn't 'needing bookkeeping'; it's the gut-wrenching fear of a surprise tax audit because their books are a mess.
- If you run a high-end restaurant in the West Loop, the nightmare isn't 'being hungry'; it's the social anxiety of planning a hugely important anniversary or client dinner and choosing a place that ends up being a disappointment.
- If you're a personal trainer, the nightmare isn't 'being unfit'; it's the crushing feeling of having tried every diet and workout under the sun and still feeling stuck, unhealthy, and out of options.
Once you've isolated that specific nightmare, then you can think about where these people are in Chicago. But more importantly, you can start creating content that speaks directly to that pain. Your Reels stop being "Come visit our business in Chicago" and start being "Tired of X soul-crushing problem? Here's how you solve it." This shift is everything. Before you even think about creating another Reel, you need to sit down and write out, in detail, the precise nightmare your business solves. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single second on content creation.
We'll need to look at building a Content Testing Engine...
Okay, so once you have a clear idea of the 'nightmare' you solve, the next step isn't to go all-in on one content idea. It's to build a system for testing multiple ideas quickly and cheaply to see what your nightmare-haunted ICP actually responds to. This is where you leverage the ad platform as a research tool, not just a promotional one.
The goal is to move from "I think this will work" to "The data shows this works." You do this by running small, controlled tests. You'll set up a simple campaign with a small daily budget (even £15-£20 a day is enough to get meaningful data) and pit different Reels against each other. Here’s a simple process you could follow:
1. Hypothesis
Based on your ICP's nightmare, form a clear hypothesis. E.g., "A Reel showing a quick 'how-to' solution will get a higher watch time than one showing a customer testimonial."
2. Create Variations
Create 2-3 short Reels based on your hypothesis. Keep everything the same except for the ONE variable you're testing (e.g., the hook, the format, the music).
3. Run Ad Test
Set up an ad campaign with a small daily budget. Target your specific Chicago audience. Put each Reel variation in its own ad set to see which performs best.
4. Analyse Metrics
After 3-5 days, analyse the right metrics (Hook Rate, Hold Rate, Shares). Ignore vanity metrics like Likes. Identify the clear winner.
5. Iterate or Scale
Turn off the losers. You can either put more budget behind the winning Reel (scale) or use the learnings to form a new hypothesis and start the process again (iterate).
The key here is to be disciplined. Only test one variable at a time. For example:
- The Hook Test: Create three versions of the same Reel, but change only the first 3 seconds. One starts with a question, one with a shocking statistic, and one with a quick, eye-catching visual.
- The Format Test: Take the same core message and create one Reel as a 'talking head' video, one with just text overlay on B-roll footage, and one following a popular trend/audio.
- The Angle Test: Frame your solution from different angles. One Reel is educational (how it works), one is emotional (the transformation it provides), and one is logical (the ROI/data behind it).
By running these tests, you're not just creating content; you're buying data. Within a week or two, you'll have a much clearer picture of what your specific slice of the Chicago market actually wants to see. This is infinitely more valuable than months of throwing organic content at the wall and hoping something sticks.
I'd say you need a Hyper-Local Targeting Framework
This brings us to the second part of your problem: how to effectively reach your audience within Chicago. Relying on the organic algorithm to show your content to the right people in the right area is a fool's errand. It's just not designed for that level of precision. This is where paid ads become completely essential.
Meta's Ads Manager gives you incredibly powerful tools to be surgically precise with your location targeting. You need to stop thinking "Chicago" and start thinking in terms of specific zones that are relevant to your business. Here are the main options you should be using:
- City Targeting: This is the broadest option. You can target the entire city of Chicago. This is a good starting point if your service is accessible to everyone in the city, but it's often too wide.
- Radius Targeting: This is far more powerful for most local businesses. You can drop a pin on your business address (or any address, like a competitor's or a relevant landmark) and target everyone within a specific radius, down to just 1 mile. This is perfect for businesses that rely on foot traffic or serve a specific local area.
- Postcode (ZIP Code) Targeting: This is my prefered method for getting really granular. You can create a list of the exact postcodes you want to target. This allows you to focus your budget on the most affluent, relevant, or dense neighbourhoods for your business, like River North (60654), Lincoln Park (60614), or Wicker Park (60622), and exclude areas that are less likely to produce customers.
Your strategy should be to layer this precise location targeting on top of the interest and behavioural targeting derived from your ICP nightmare work. For example, if you're that high-end restaurant in the West Loop, your targeting might look like this:
- Locations: Postcodes 60607, 60661, 60654, 60610 (covering West Loop, Fulton Market, River North, etc.)
- AND Interests: People interested in 'Fine Dining', 'Michelin Guide', specific high-end chefs or restaurant groups, 'Luxury Goods'.
- AND Behaviours: People classified as 'Engaged Shoppers' who have recently travelled or have an anniversary within the next 30 days.
Now, you're no longer just showing your content to "people in Chicago". You're showing your content about solving the 'important anniversary dinner' nightmare to people in affluent neighbourhoods near your restaurant who are actively interested in fine dining and have an anniversary coming up. The difference in relevance and response rate will be staggering.
You probably should focus on the Right Metrics
If you're going to spend money to buy data, you need to make sure you're looking at the right data. Most people get this wrong. They get obsessed with vanity metrics like views and likes. These are largely meaningless and tell you very little about whether your content is actually effective.
You need to focus on metrics that measure genuine audience resonance and intent. Here are the ones I'd pay close attention to when testing your Reels:
- Hook Rate: This is the percentage of people who watched at least the first 3 seconds of your video. In the ads manager, you can calculate this by dividing "3-Second Video Plays" by "Reel Plays" or "Impressions". A low hook rate (e.g., below 30%) tells you the first few seconds of your video are failing to grab attention. This is your first and most important battle.
- Hold Rate (or ThruPlay Rate): This measures how many people watched your entire video (or at least 15 seconds of it). This tells you how engaging your content is after the hook. A strong hook with a poor hold rate means you made a promise at the start that the rest of the video didn't deliver on.
- Shares & Saves: These are gold-standard engagement metrics. A "like" is a passive, lazy action. A "share" or a "save" means someone found your content so valuable they either wanted to send it to someone else or refer back to it later. This is a huge indicator that your content is genuinely hitting the mark.
- Outbound CTR (Click-Through Rate): If your Reel has a call to action to visit your website or profile, this metric is critical. It tells you what percentage of people who saw the video were compelled enough to take that next step.
Tracking these will give you a much more honest and actionable picture of your content's performance. You can use this data to build a scorecard for each Reel you test, which will make it much easier to spot the winners and understand why they won.
Interactive Reel Resonance Score Calculator
This is the main advice I have for you:
To pull this all together, here is a summary of the strategic framework I'd recommend. This is a move away from sporadic content creation and towards a systematic process of market discovery and optimisation.
| Phase | Actionable Step | Key Metric | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Foundation | Define your ICP not by demographics, but by their specific, urgent 'nightmare'. Write this down in detail. | N/A (Qualitative) | This provides the 'why' behind all your content. Content that solves a specific, painful problem will always outperform generic content. |
| 2. Hypothesis & Creation | Formulate a clear, testable hypothesis about what content will resonate (e.g., "Hook X will be better than Hook Y"). Create 2-3 short Reel variations to test this single variable. | N/A (Creative Output) | Isolating variables is the only way to get clean data and learn what elements are actually driving performance. |
| 3. Targeted Testing | Launch a paid ad campaign with a small daily budget (£15-£20/day). Use hyper-local targeting (postcodes/radius) layered with ICP interests. Run each Reel in a seperate ad set. | Cost Per ThruPlay, Hook Rate | This ensures your test is being seen by the right audience, giving you relevant feedback and avoiding wasted spend on an irrelevant audience. |
| 4. Analysis | Let the campaign run for 3-5 days. Analyse the performance based on Resonance Score (Hook Rate, Hold Rate, Shares, Saves). Ignore vanity metrics. | Resonance Score | Identifies the statistical winner based on metrics that actually correlate with audience interest and intent, not just passive views. |
| 5. Iterate or Scale | Pause the losing ad sets. Take the learnings from the winner to inform your next hypothesis (Iterate) or, if performance is strong, allocate more budget to the winning ad (Scale). | Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) if driving actions | This creates a continuous loop of improvement, ensuring your content strategy gets smarter over time and your ad budget is focused on what's proven to work. |
As you can probably see, this is a very different approach to just posting Reels and hoping for the best. It's more methodical, more analytical, and frankly, a lot more work. It requires a solid understanding of the ad platform, an ability to interpret data correctly, and the discipline to run clean tests. It's a process, and like any process, it can be managed and optimised.
Getting this right can be the difference between your business remaining invisible in a crowded market like Chicago and becoming a recognised local leader. If you feel that implementing a system like this is a bit daunting or you'd simply rather have an expert team manage the entire process for you—from defining the ICP and creative strategy to running the tests and analysing the data—then it might be worth considering some professional help.
We offer a completely free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a deeper look at your business and map out what a tailored growth strategy would look like for you. It's a good way to get some expert eyes on your specific situation.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
