5 Basic Facebook Ads to Grow Your Local Service Business
Facebook ads are a great way to promote your local service business cost-effectively. The best part is that you can target a specific audience and create ads for them, which makes it easy to promote your business to people who are in your target audience.
But first, how to setup basic Facebook ads
- Go to your business page and click on Ad Center on the left side
- Select the big button that says advertise, then choose Create New Ad from the options
- Fill out the information to build your ad
- You should shoot for $5-15 leads from Facebook for service businesses
5 Basic Facebook Ad Strategies
1. Target a specific location with Facebook ads
Facebook ads are powerful, but not all of the targeting options are obvious. For example, did you know that you can target people based on the area where they live? If your business is local and you’d like to drive business from other areas in town, this feature is great because it allows you to specify how far away from your location someone lives or works.
Create a simple ad targeting a city and say something like this:
“Washington DC Residents get $35 off service!”
You can also target more affluent areas of a service area with ads to attract specific customers.
2. Offer a special to a specific location audience
You can also offer a special to a specific audience. This is one of the easiest ways to use Facebook Ads for a local service business, as it takes advantage of the fact that you have an audience that’s already interested in your product or service.
For example, if you’re a carpet cleaning business that offers February and March specials and you want to drum up more business, it might be worth offering the February and March deals specifically on Facebook ads.
You can do this by running ads to a specific audience with a specific time sensitive call to action like:
“Schedule before March 28th and get $35 Off any cleaning throughout the year!”
3. Target by interests and demographics
Another way to target specific audiences with offers is through interests and demographics (age/gender). Let’s say that there are two groups of people who really love what you’re selling: stay-at-home moms over 40 and 20-30 year old singles. If these two things apply to me but not my brother-in-law (who doesn’t need any help from us), then we would want him excluded from seeing our ads.
This kind of targeting allows us to make sure only those who will be interested see our ads so we don’t waste money by showing them all over town without gaining any new customers from doing so!
4. Run Facebook ads for hiring
When you’re running Facebook ads for your business, it’s important to remember that you can use them to reach beyond the usual demographics. For example, if you want to hire new employees and need specific skillsets or experience, Facebook has a special ad category just for this purpose.
Here is an example ad we run for clients:
We recommend sharing pay and a brief description of the position. The call to action should be to a simple “careers form” where people can apply for the job.
5. Upload a customer list and target past customers
You can also upload emails to Facebook and allow them to match emails with customer accounts on Facebook to show them ads. The benefit of this is that you can focus on people who already know and trust you, so they’re more likely to convert into returning customers.
This takes a little more skill, but to get started, go to the Audiences section in your Facebook Ads Manager (or click here) and select “Import Custom Audience from File” from the drop-down menu under People.
You can also create a custom audience based on people who have visited your website or engaged with your content by using lookalike audiences. This will allow you to reach new potential customers who are similar to those who have already purchased from you in the past.
Bonus: invite people who like your post to like your page for organic reach
When people like your ad, you can then invite them to like your page. This is a great way to get new fans for organic reach without paying for ads!
Professional Facebook Ads for Local Service Businesses
If you are considering running Facebook ads for your local service business, we would be happy to help strategize with you to help get maximum results. Set up a free 30-minute strategy session with us to discuss your business and goals.