3-Tips To Using Facebook for Contractor Marketing.

Facebook for contractor marketing remains one of the very best channels for acquiring new clients. However, Facebook has been in the news a lot recently and most of it has not been good. Leading many small and mid-sized businesses to question the effectiveness of advertising on Facebook.

That said, Facebook remains the 1,000-pound gorilla in the room … at least for now and if you are considering advertising on Facebook or are looking to get better performance from your Facebook ads, here are 3 tips to help you.

Tip-1 Your Contractor Marketing Must Be Specific.

Facebook and Instagram (which FB owns) are entertainment channels. Just like your TV. People are on there phones scrolling through their feeds to be entertained. If you are going to advertise successfully you must be relevant and interesting.

What does that look like for home service providers? Here is an example I saw recently. Let’s check it out and talk about what they did right. They are not clients. They just appeared in my feed, and I grabbed the screenshot.

What I like:

• Visually appealing. Nice picture. Aspirational.
• The ad is not them. It’s about you.
• Pokes at a top-of-mind problem – renovating a bathroom
• Is specific – bathroom renovation.
• Nice engagement. 271 likes and 121 comments mean the ad is engaging the audience. They want to learn more and are asking for help right in the comments section.

What I think they could improve

• Simpler offer – free quote or consultation is good, but what if I am still in the information gathering stage.
• I would look at a call to action like: Check out our work and take the user to nice pictures of their work product.
• Then you can offer a free consultation there.
• Forms on Facebook don’t work very well (my opinion).

So, the basic formula for making Facebook or Instagram ads that convert is:

• Visually appealing.
• Problem or result focused.
• It’s about them and not you.
• Give them a reason to take the action you want them to take (see below).
• Get engagement.

Tip 2 – Your Contractor Marketing Must Have A Low-Risk Offer

What Facebook does better than just about any other advertising platform is get ads to the right audience. Their artificial intelligence algorithms are great. They know what ads to show you based on your observable behaviors. The good news is that will make an average ad perform better. The bad news is it won’t generate sales all by itself.

Having a low-risk offer is key to getting engagement and conversions (see the 3^rd tip below). What is a low-risk offer? One that offers more value than cost. The more value versus the perceived cost the better the conversion. So, when you have an ad like the one above and the offer is “click here for a free quote” that’s a high-risk offer. Up to know, what have you given me? A nice picture, true, but that’s about it. Now you want me to call you. Invite you into my home to provide a quote? Not so fast buddy!

A low-risk offer would be something that ads value to me but doesn’t cost much. For example:

• Access to a design guide for the cost of my email address.
• Access to a gallery of my previous projects for free?
• A coupon for 10% off the project in exchange for my email and phone number?

All these are interim steps.

With service-based businesses, the goal is not to make the sale.

If you are running an ecommerce site, your goal might be to make a sale. But when you are a service-based business, your goal is to make their acquaintance and engage with them. To show them who you are and why they should consider buying from you.

Tip 3 – It’s All About Your Tracking

What makes Facebook or Instagram ads different from a billboard on the side of the highway is that they can target only the users who might be interested in seeing your ad. Done right, that saves you money big-time. But to do this requires tracking.

Part 1 of tracking is outside of your control.

Since people log into Facebook or Instagram to use the platforms, Facebook can track what people engage with on their platform and learn what interests them. As we said before, what makes Facebook money is engagement. That’s one reason they have generated a lot of political heat recently. They’ve learned that hate and fear engage more than puppies and unicorns.

Politics aside, your ability to generate engaging content is important to you and to Facebook.

Part 2 of tracking is your responsibility.

At the risk of getting a little technical, you must help Facebook to learn who they should be showing your ads to. This is done in two ways.

1. The Facebook Pixel. You must have the Facebook pixel firing on your website. That way, when your users take the action, you want them to take – like schedule a free consultation – you let Facebook know and they can use that info in their algorithms to find more relevant users for you.
2. The Facebook API. Now this generally requires outside help but is worth it. As a result of Apple’s latest IOS update, the pixel can no longer figure out who the user is. That devise ID that was used to tie the user back to an account is blocked. And since about ½ of Facebook traffic in the US is on an Apple Device, that’s a big problem. But Facebook came up with a solution to this problem.

 

The Facebook API allows your system (website or landing page) to pass the users information directly to Facebook. This bypasses the pixel and sets up a direct link to Facebook.

The cost of setting this up is a few hours of programming and the return is huge. You now get all that valuable user information to Facebook so their targeting algorithms can work as expected.

We saw a big drop in the effectiveness of Facebook advertising last summer through the end of 2021. But now that we have the Facebook API working on all impacted websites, we are seeing the performance of our campaigns surpassing late 2020 (when Facebook ads were killing it).

Want great results from your Facebook advertising?

Facebook and Instagram remain one of the very best advertising options for small and mid-sized service businesses. We are here to help.

Schedule a Free Strategy Session with me and I’ll review your current Facebook Contractor Marketing campaigns, evaluate your website and landing pages, and make recommendations specific to your business so you can grow profitably.