Solved: Scaling Facebook Ads in Canterbury (Simple Steps)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your situation with scaling Facebook ads in Canterbury. It's a really common problem people run into when they focus on a tight geographic area, and to be honest, the way most people think about "scaling" locally is actually the very thing holding them back. The real solution isn't about finding a magic button to reach more people in Canterbury; it's about fundamentally rethinking who you're trying to reach and why you're limiting yourself to a single postcode.

Let's get into it.

The Canterbury Conundrum: Why You Can't Scale in a Goldfish Bowl

Right, let's get the biggest myth out of the way first. You can't truly 'scale' ad spend in a tiny geographic area like Canterbury without things going wrong, fast. It's like trying to make a goldfish bigger by keeping it in the same small bowl. It just doesn't work. The problem isn't the fish; it's the environment.

When you try and force more and more budget into a limited audience pool, a few things happen, and none of them are good for your wallet.

1. Audience Saturation: Canterbury and its immediate surroundings have a finite number of people on Facebook and Instagram. Once you've shown your ads to most of the relevant people a few times, you've hit a ceiling. There's literally no one left to 'reach' who hasn't already seen your ad.

2. Ad Fatigue: This is the big one. When the same people see the same ads from you day in, day out, they get sick of them. They start ignoring them, or worse, they hide them and report them as spam. This tells Facebook's algorithm that your ads are annoying, and your performance plummets. Your Click-Through Rate (CTR) goes down, and your costs go up.

3. Skyrocketing Costs (CPMs): Facebook's auction works on supply and demand. When you tell the algorithm "I MUST spend £100 a day, but ONLY on these 50,000 people in Canterbury," the algorithm has to work much harder to find slots for your ads. It has to outbid other advertisers more aggressively for that limited attention. Your Cost Per 1,000 Impressions (CPM) goes through the roof. You're paying more money to show your ads to the same, tired audience.

Think of it like this. Pushing more budget into a small geo doesn't create new customers; it just increases the cost of shouting at the ones who have already decided not to listen. This is the path to burning cash, not scaling a business.

Your Ideal Customer is a Nightmare, Not a Postcode

So if scaling geographically is a dead end, what's the alternative? You stop thinking about where your customers are and start thinking about who they are, defined by their problems.

I see this mistake all the time. People create an "ideal customer profile" that looks like this: "Female, 35-55, lives in Canterbury, interested in home decor." It's sterile, it's generic, and it tells you nothing useful. It leads to ads that are just as bland.

A truly powerful customer profile is built on pain. On an urgent, expensive, frustrating nightmare that your product or service solves. Your customer isn't a demographic; they're in a specific 'problem state'.

Let's make this practical.

• If you're a local accountant, your customer's nightmare isn't 'needing accounting services'. It's 'the sudden terror of a brown envelope from HMRC and the fear of a massive, unexpected tax bill.'
• If you run a high-end restaurant, their nightmare isn't 'being hungry'. It's 'the social anxiety of a looming anniversary and having absolutely no idea where to book that will impress their partner.'
• If you're a B2B service, your customer isn't a 'Marketing Manager'. It's a marketing manager who's terrified of presenting next month's lead numbers to their boss because their current agency is delivering nothing.

Once you define your customer by this 'nightmare', your entire approach changes. You're no longer just targeting "people in Canterbury". You're targeting "people in Kent who are members of small business owner groups on Facebook and have also shown an interest in Xero or QuickBooks." You're targeting "people within 20 miles of Canterbury who are in a relationship, have an anniversary in the next 30 days, and have engaged with 'foodie' pages."

This is the work. Do this first. Isolate the pain, the specific frustration. Then you can build an ad campaign that speaks directly to it. This is how you find your ideal customers, whether they live next door or fifty miles away. They are united by their problem, not their proximity to the cathedral.

You're Paying Facebook to Find Non-Customers. Here's How to Stop.

Here's another piece of brutally honest advice that might sting a little. If you've ever run a campaign with the objective set to 'Reach' or 'Brand Awareness' because you wanted to "reach a wider audience", you were actively paying Facebook to find the worst possible people for your business.

It sounds mad, doesn't it? But think about what you're telling the algorithm. You're saying, "Hey Facebook, here's my money. Please go find me the largest number of eyeballs for the cheapest possible price within Canterbury."

And the algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly that. It goes and finds all the people in your target area who are cheap to show ads to. And why are they cheap? Because they never click on anything. They never engage. And they absolutely never, ever buy anything. They're not in demand by other advertisers, so their attention is on sale. You are literally optimising for people who are programmed to ignore ads.

This is a complete waste of money for any business that needs to make a sale or get a lead. The best kind of 'brand awareness' is a happy customer. That only happens through conversion.

You MUST switch your campaign objective to one that aligns with your business goal. That means 'Sales' if you're e-commerce, or 'Leads' if you're a service business. When you do this, you change the instruction you give to Facebook. Now you're saying, "Hey Facebook, here's my money. I don't care how many people you show this to, just go and find me the specific people within my targeting who are most likely to actually fill out my form or buy my product."

The algorithm is incredible at this. It has trillions of data points on user behaviour. It knows who the window shoppers are and it knows who the buyers are. By choosing a conversion objective, you unleash its power to find you customers, not just passive viewers.

I'd say you need to look at advanced targeting, beyond the Canterbury walls

Okay, so we've established that we need to think beyond a simple geographic pin drop. The goal now is to build audiences that find your ideal customer—the one with the 'nightmare'—wherever they are. This is how you genuinely scale.

Here’s a practical, tiered approach I'd use. Think of it as a set of campaigns you run simultaniously, each with a different job.

Tier 1: The Local Stronghold (Your "BoFu" - Bottom of Funnel)

This is where you still use Canterbury, but you do it smartly. This campaign is for your hottest audiences—the people most likely to convert right now. Don't put broad interests in here.

• -> Audience 1: Website Retargeting (Last 30-90 Days). Anyone who has visited your website but not converted. They know who you are. This is your lowest hanging fruit.
• -> Audience 2: Engagement Retargeting (Last 90 Days). Anyone who has liked, commented, shared, or watched a good chunk of your videos. They're warm leads.
• -> Audience 3: Customer List / Past Purchasers. Upload your customer email list. You can use this to upsell them, or exclude them from seeing ads for things they've already bought.

The budget here should be small but consistent. Its job is to capture people who are already close to buying.

Tier 2: The Regional Expansion (Your "ToFu" - Top of Funnel)

This is your growth engine. This is where you find new people. Instead of just "Canterbury", you expand your geography and get very specific with your interest targeting.

• -> Geography: Start expanding outwards. Don't just jump to the whole of the UK. Create a radius, say 25 miles around Canterbury. This pulls in places like Whitstable, Herne Bay, Ashford, Faversham, maybe even Dover. You're still 'local-ish' but you've just multiplied your potential audience size.
• -> Interest Layering: This is where you combine interests to zero in on your 'nightmare' profile. Don't just target 'small business owners'. Target people who are interested in 'small business' AND are admins of a Facebook Business Page AND are also interested in 'Mailchimp' or 'Shopify'. You're building a much more qualified prospect.

Tier 3: The True Scale Engine (Lookalike Audiences)

This is the holy grail of scaling on Facebook. A Lookalike audience is when you give Facebook a list of your best customers (your 'source audience'), and it uses its machine learning to go and find millions of other people across the country who share similar characteristics, behaviours, and interests. It's the most powerfull tool you have.

• -> Source Audience: You need a good source. The best is a list of your highest value previous customers. If you don't have that, use a list of all your purchasers. If not that, use people who have initiated checkout, or even just all your website visitors. The closer the source audience is to a real customer, the better the Lookalike will be.
• -> Geography: This is key. You don't target your Lookalike to just Canterbury. That defeats the whole purpose. You create a 1% Lookalike audience (the 1% of the population most similar to your source) and you target it to the entire of Kent, or the Southeast, or even the whole UK.

This is how you break out of the Canterbury goldfish bowl. You use the data from your small pond of local customers to find thousands of identical fish in the entire ocean.

I remember one campaign we worked on for a subscription box company. They had a solid local customer base but couldn't grow further. By creating Lookalike audiences from their best customers and targeting them nationwide on Meta, we helped them achieve a 1000% return on their ad spend. This is the power of using high-quality local data to find new customers at scale.

You'll need an offer that works as your scaling engine

Let's be blunt. You can have the best targeting in the world, but if your offer is weak, you will fail. I see so many businesses trying to scale ads that lead to a homepage with 20 different buttons, or a vague "Contact Us" form. It's lazy, and it doesn't work.

The single most common failure point in all advertising is the offer. A great offer makes people feel stupid for saying no. It solves a specific problem and reduces the risk for the customer to take the first step.

The classic "Request a Demo" or "Learn More" is terrible. It's high-friction and low-value. It screams "I'm about to get sold to". Your offer's only job is to provide a moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect think, "Ah, I get it. I need this."

What does a great offer look like for a local business?

• For a service business (e.g., plumber, consultant, trainer): Don't sell the service, sell the result or a valuable 'taster'. Instead of "Get a Quote", try "Get a Free 15-Minute Leaky Tap Diagnosis via Video Call" or "Download Our Free Guide: 5 Common Financial Mistakes Kent-Based Businesses Make". You're giving value first.
• For a retail/eCommerce business: Make the first purchase a no-brainer. "15% Off Your First Order" is okay, but it's boring. How about "Try Our Best-Selling [Product] for 30 Days - Full Refund If You're Not Thrilled"? You're reversing the risk.
• For a restaurant/cafe: Drive footfall with an irresistable first-time offer. "Get a Free Coffee With Any Pastry on Your First Visit" or "Two-for-One Main Courses, Tuesday-Thursday". The goal is to get them through the door so your great product can win them over for life.

A stronger offer has a direct, mathematical impact on your ability to scale. If you can improve your landing page conversion rate from 2% to 4% by making your offer better, you have literally halved your cost per lead. That means you can now afford to bid more aggressively, enter new audiences, and scale your spend profitably. A better offer is more important than a bigger budget.

For instance, one client, a medical job matching platform, was struggling with a £100 cost to acquire a new user. By refining their offer and targeting on Meta and Google Ads, we brought that cost down to just £7. A powerful offer doesn't just attract customers; it makes acquiring them dramatically more efficient, which is the key to profitable scaling.

You probably should calculate your limits, so you know when to stop pushing

This brings me to the final, and possibly most important piece of the puzzle. The question you should be asking isn't "How can I scale my ads?" but "How much can I profitably afford to spend to acquire a new customer?"

If you don't know this number, you are flying blind. You're making decisions based on guesswork and fear ("ooh, that £50 per lead feels expensive!") instead of data.

The metric that gives you this answer is your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you expect to make from an average customer over the entire time they do business with you. Once you know your LTV, you know your spending limit.

Here's how to calculate a simple version of it:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold).
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (If you have one-off sales, you can use 'average number of purchases per year' instead).

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's say you run a subscription box that costs £30/month. Your gross margin is 60%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month.

LTV = (£30 * 0.60) / 0.05 = £18 / 0.05 = £360.

Each customer is worth £360 in profit to you. A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. So, in this case, you can afford to spend up to £120 to acquire a new customer and still have a very healthy, scalable business.

Suddenly that £50 lead doesn't seem so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth.

This is the main advice I have for you:

So, to bring this all together, here's a practical action plan. This isn't about just flicking a switch; it's about building a proper, tiered advertising machine that can actually grow without breaking.

The final peice of the puzzle is your creative. You need to test different ad formats and messages for each tier. Your retargeting ads should be different from your prospecting ads. For retargeting, you might use testimonials or address common objections. For prospecting, you need to grab attention fast and speak directly to that 'nightmare' we talked about earlier.

This all probably sounds like a lot more work than just boosting a post to people in Canterbury, and it is. But this is the difference between amateur advertising and professional, scalable marketing. It requires strategy, proper structure, and a deep understanding of who you're actually trying to sell to.

Running campaigns like this, managing the budgets between tiers, testing creatives, and interpreting the data to make the right decisions is a full-time job. It's where deep expertise can make a monumental difference, turning a campaign that's breaking even into one that's driving serious growth for the business.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this kind of strategic thinking specifically to your business, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at your current setup and give you some more tailored advice.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh