One of the best ways to raise brand awareness and get clients for your service-based business is through Facebook ads.
Through a well-designed Facebook campaign, you can position your brand in front of the right audience and generate leads for your business.
In this post, you’ll learn 7 effective Facebook advertising tips to improve your Facebook campaigns' performance.
Facebook Ads Tips for Professional Service Providers
- Optimize Your Facebook Business Page
- Refine Your Target Market
- Create Custom Audiences
- Define Your Facebook Ads Goals
- Setup Facebook Conversion Tracking
- Develop Theme Based Ads
- Scale Your Facebook Campaigns
1. Optimize Your Facebook Business Page
Before starting a Facebook paid campaign, the first step is to optimize your Facebook Business Page. If you don’t already have a page for your business, go to busines.facebook.com and register for a new account. It’s free, and it only takes a few minutes to complete.
The next step is to make sure that the information on your business page accurately represents your brand and services.
This is important because users who see your ads and are unaware of your brand are likely first to check your Facebook page to learn more about you.
Using the Reliablesoft Facebook business page as an example, these are the elements to optimize:
About Section - Explain to users, in a couple of sentences, who you are and what you do.
Header Image - Use the profile image to show users what your page is about. Use the same colors and background in all your social media channels for better branding.
Social Media Handle - For business purposes, having a social media handle that is as close to your brand name as possible is important for maintaining your brand image.
It’s also easier for your audience to search and find your business page using your name if it aligns with their expectations.
Contact Information - Make sure your contact information is up-to-date, and your business is verified with Facebook. The verification process is simple but crucial to establish trust with users.
Call to Action - Add a relevant call to action to redirect users to your most important landing page. Facebook allows you to use different CTA on your cover photo, choose the one more representative of your offerings.
Keep your page content fresh - This is an easy tip many business owners neglect.
Make sure you update your business page with a couple of new weekly posts. You don’t want your page to look like a deserted island.
2. Refine Your Target Market
The next tip for you is extremely important. You need to define your target market to increase your chances of running successful Facebook campaigns.
Facebook has billions of users, and you need to find the right audience that might be interested in your offerings.
To define your target market, you can follow these tips:
Analyze the profile of your existing customers - Look at your existing customer base and identify patterns and common characteristics.
Things like their age, location, gender, industry, job role, estimated income, and lifestyle are attributes you can use in creating your customer personas.
Analyze the profile of your website visitors - Another valuable source of information is your website and social media analytics.
Use Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to find out the demographic profile of your users.
Sketch the profile of your ideal customer - Ask yourself these questions:
- Who can benefit the most from your service?
- What problems do your services solve?
- What are the steps your potential customers take before making a buying decision?
Combining the above answers with information gathered from analyzing your customers and website visitors will help you accurately define your ideal customer profile.
As explained in the next tip, you can then use this data to create your custom audiences on Facebook.
3. Create Custom Audiences
Custom audiences are a feature of Facebook Advertising that lets you segment Facebook users into groups and target them with different campaigns and ads.
You can take the results of your target market analysis and create different Facebook audiences.
For example, you can create one audience to target people that are not yet aware of your brand. This audience will include users with the same characteristics as your ideal customer.
You can set up another audience for people who visited your website but did not convert and another audience to include your most valuable customers.
The way this works is simple. Facebook will identify the common qualities of the people in your defined audiences (for example, demographic characteristics or interests). Then, it will create an audience of people who are similar to (or "look like") them.
For each of these audiences, you can show them different ads. For example, you can use retargeting ads to entice people that already visited your website but did not convert to revisit your landing pages. Or you can create up-selling related ads which target your existing customers.
4. Define Your Facebook Ads Goals
The next step is to define your marketing goals. In other words, what business objectives do you want to achieve with Facebook Ads, and which KPIs to monitor?
If you begin running campaigns without a coherent plan, you are not likely to find success.
To ensure that you are getting the most of your ad spend, you’ll need to define your marketing goals and determine how to measure progress to evaluate the results.
A few examples of goals and KPIs for service-based business include:
Brand Awareness
Business goal: Introduce your brand to more people.
KPIs to monitor: Campaign Reach, brand mentions, ad impressions, ad shares, likes
Lead Generation
Business goal: Get qualified leads with your Facebook ads
KPIs to monitor: Email subscriptions, contact form completions, phone calls
Customer Acquisition
Business goal: Acquire new customers
KPIs to monitor: Sales by campaign type, conversion rate, cost per conversion
The above metrics can be measured in detail by customizing your Ad performance report on Facebook.
5. Setup Facebook Conversion Tracking
A common mistake made by small business owners is not to have conversion tracking enabled.
Conversion tracking is a feature of Facebook that lets you connect your website with Facebook. When conversion tracking is enabled, Facebook can identify users that visited your website because of an ad they saw on Facebook.
Without conversion tracking, it’s impossible to evaluate the performance of your campaigns or optimize your conversion rate. This dramatically decreases your chances of running profitable campaigns.
Enabling conversion tracking is a technical task, and you might need the help of a developer, but it’s an important action you need to complete before starting any Facebook campaigns.
You can learn more about conversion tracking here.
6. Create Theme Based Ads
One challenging aspect when running Facebook Ads is to find out which messaging performs better.
A great way to achieve this is to create theme-based ads.
Theme-based ads are different types (images/videos) based on the same or similar messaging. Creating ads based on a single theme at a time makes it easier to find out which combination of media works best for your target audience.
When you test several themes over time, you can keep the ones that perform better and eliminate the low-performing themes.
Don’t forget that for best results; you should create targeted ads for each of your custom audiences.
This means you’ll have different messaging in the brand awareness ads compared to your retargeting ads while maintaining your brand’s voice and tone.
It may take a lot of testing to find out what ads to show your users, but it’s very important since effective ads will generate better results at a lower cost.
7. Scale Your Facebook Campaigns
One important metric for all kinds of service-based businesses is customer acquisition cost.
In other words, how much do you need to pay to acquire a new customer? Knowing this number will allow you to scale up your Facebook campaigns and safely spend more of your budget.
Let me give you an example to understand how this works. Let’s say that after running Facebook campaigns for a few months, you found that it costs you $100 on average to get a qualified lead from Facebook.
If this number is within your acceptable levels, then you can use the cost-cap feature of Facebook to scale up your campaigns. Setting up a cost cap allows you to maximize your budget without worrying that your cost will go above your preferred levels.
Facebook will try to get you conversions within or below your cost cap.
Here are a few tips to know about cost-cap:
You need to have conversion tracking enabled and a value defined for conversions. This value is the monetary benefit for your business when you get a new lead from Facebook.
Your campaigns need to generate enough conversions to implement a cost cap successfully. In other words, enabling this feature on new campaigns is not recommended.
Run your campaigns without a cost cap, and once you have enough data on how much a conversion costs, you can enable it.
Facebook will make a recommendation as to what cost-cap value to use. If this number is above your acceptable levels, don’t enable this feature and instead use one of the other bidding strategies available (Highest value, lower cost, or bid cap).
Conclusion
Marketing on Facebook is essential for service-based businesses. With the right strategy, you can find and target the right audience with different kinds of campaigns and ads.
The first step is establishing your business presence on Facebook and optimizing your business page. The next step is to define your target audience and what you want to achieve with Facebook Ads.
Once this is ready, you can perform technical tasks like enabling conversion tracking and creating custom audiences.
Next, you can start testing different ads to find out what works best for your audience and gradually scale up your Facebook campaigns.
The bottom line is that Facebook is a great digital channel for professional service providers and the medium to reach new audiences to present your brand and offerings.
