20 Oct Nextdoor Advertising: Connecting With the Community

Have you been looking for a new way to reach potential buyers, outside of traditional marketing tactics and social networks? With nearly 1 in 3 U.S. households utilizing Nextdoor, “the neighborhood network” advertising services might be an ideal investment for your brand. Here’s what you need to know.

About Nextdoor

Nextdoor works to connect neighbors, businesses, and public services together within their communities. Users primarily utilize the network to report on news and events in their respective neighborhoods and to source local service providers.

While Nextdoor isn’t your traditional social network, the platform still provides a way for businesses, both local and national, to promote upcoming events, local deals, reach new customers, increase brand awareness, and more. Additionally in 2017, three years after launching, advertising capabilities were added to the platform and provided businesses a new way to reach local customers.

Who’s Using Nextdoor?

We always advise brands to evaluate the existing audience of every network before investing their ad dollars. So as such, we gathered data from our partner, GWI, to see what Nextdoor’s audience makeup looks like.

Note: Within the graphics below, the solid red bars represent audience reach, while the solid orange circles represent propensity or likelihood compared to all users.

Age: The majority of Nextdoor users are on the older side, dominated by Boomers and Gen X. You can find a few Millennials in the mix, but if you’re after Gen Z, look elsewhere.

Gender: More females are using the network than men, but not by much. It’s fair to say that you can target both easily here.

Education: Interestingly, there’s a higher propensity for audiences on Nextdoor to have a college education.

Location (U.S.): Finally, looking at where users are geographically, the South East may have a large share of network users, but those audiences in the South West and West show a stronger propensity. If you’re looking to target audiences in the North East, there’s not as strong of a userbase in this area.

Nextdoor Advertising Solutions for Local Businesses and National Brands

One of the benefits of Nextdoor is that they offer advertising opportunities for businesses of all sizes. That said, there are some limitations depending on if you’re a local business or a larger regional/national brand as well as the level of investment you’re willing to make.

Nextdoor Ad Options for Local Businesses

When we say small/local businesses, we’re primarily talking about those businesses with a single location who are looking to target audiences within about 30 miles of the location. These services tend to be valuable for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, home builders, & home contractors since 74% of Nextdoor members are homebuyers. Even if your business doesn’t fit into those categories, getting started as a local business is relatively easy. Your company will need to create a free Business Page to enable advertising opportunities and will need official business documents to verify your Business Page in order to post messages to the nearby neighborhood newsfeed.

From an “organic posting” standpoint, businesses can publish business posts to the newsfeed. Advertising options are a bit more limited for small businesses but include local deals, events, and neighborhood sponsorships, to name a few. 

Nextdoor Ad Options for Regional and National Brands

The larger your businesses, the more advertising opportunities are available on Nextdoor… for a price. The network does offer a self-serve advertising option through the Neighborhood Ads Center (NAC), that you can consider their equivalent to Facebook Business Manager, or your can sign-up for Managed/Enterprise services where a Nextdoor representative manages your ads (which is only available at a certain spend level).

The main difference between these products (besides price) are the ad units available. If you’re utilizing the NAC to run ads independently, you’re limited to running single-image display ads that can only be placed in the newsfeed, in the marketplace (called Finds), or on the right-hand rail. Managed/Enterprise services offer a variety of native ad units (see specs for each ad unit here, as well as company-recommended best practices for copy and graphics):

• Display Ads: Target customers in related context in the newsfeed
• Video Ads: Capture scrollers’ attention with helpful content
• Email Digest Ads: Reach members in their inboxes with neighborhood recap messages
• Finds Ads: Drive consideration and conversion of your products and services in Nextdoor’s local marketplace
• Lead Gen Ads: Drive awareness while gathering leads for your initiative
• Carousel Ads: Showcase multiple products or services available to build awareness and increase consideration
• Click to Call Ads: Allow members to call your business directly from Nextdoor’s in-app newsfeed

For regional and national brands, here are some standard questions you may have before getting started with your Nextdoor advertising strategy… and of course the answers to each.

• Is there a recommended spend? At least a +$100/Daily Spend over a 30-day flight.
• How is billing set up? They primarily bill on credit cards and have autopay.
• What objectives are available? They offer CPMs, CPCs, and Conversion options.
• What benchmark rates should we plan for? CPMs are $10.01 & CPCs are $5.01.
• Do brands need to have an organic presence (similar to a Facebook page) to run ads? No, not at all.
• Is there a NextDoor pixel that can be used for retargeting? Yes, a simple pixel is available but it does not allow for retargeting. However, a newer version of the pixel is expected to be released in Q4 that should have this capability.
• Are there any other targeting options such as third-party targeting (interest, behaviors, etc.)? No, 3rd party targeting is only available in the Managed/Enterprise product.
• Does the company provide a representative to assist with advertising questions, or is there a certain level of spend that enables that type of support? Nextdoor’s fully managed service is $25k/mo min where you will have a dedicated Client Partner & Account Manager.

Ready to get started with Nextdoor advertising? It’s a great way to mix up your media buying investment and reach new audiences in the community. If you need any assistance developing a strategy or executing your own ads, contact us.

Get more information about social media advertising, as well as news and trends in the social industry delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up for our e-newsletter, Social You Should Know, below.

Subscribe to Social You Should Know