How Local Businesses Can Increase Leads & Sales with Facebook Ads (While Cutting Your Marketing Budget)

My first job in the “real world” was as a tennis instructor. I had played professional tennis prior to that and I found myself needing to actually promote myself and find ways to get new clients to make my job viable. The constant need for leads to create group classes and individual lessons seemed like a constant battle.

As I found more success in marketing my own job, I was asked to market for the whole company and then later left to start my own online marketing company. So, do I believe in Facebook ads? Absolutely.

Facebook ads give local businesses looking for a more cost effective way to consistently attract qualified leads and customers to your business a platform to market on.

Facebook has over 1.2 billion DAILY ACTIVE USERS today, which means your ideal target audience is on Facebook. Unlike traditional forms of advertising like mailers, radio, newspaper, TV, etc… where you’re not even sure you’re reaching your exact target consumer…Facebook gives you the ability to put your ad in front of your exact target customers.

For example, you can put an offer like a 2-week Free Trial in front of:
Women, age 18-44, who live in Greensboro or specific zip codes who are interested in Yoga and shop at Lululemon. We can also exclude your current customers which means NEW leads are seeing your business.

And, you ONLY pay when you’re ideal audience sees your ad. Facebook ads are all about efficiency — no wasted money and you control exactly how much money you want to spend. As I mentioned above, because of all this, Facebook is the fastest and most cost effective way to grow a business.

So, you ask, how can I take advantage of this amazing system you talk so kindly about. Let’s start narrowing down the process.

Set Your Plan

The first thing with any marketing strategy is to make a plan. I think this is the most overlooked piece when people start creating ads. It’s not just about hopping into Ads Manager and creating your ads.

You need to know what the end game is to actually get to your goal. What are you trying to get people to do? Are they signing up for a membership or a class? Are you just trying to get leads to then follow up with them via phone?

Once you know EXACTLY the action you want someone to take, now you can start setting up your funnel and working backwards from your goal. Yes, I used the word funnel. I’m not using it to sound like a big shot marketing person, I just really love the imagery that it gives you. You are starting people in the largest part of the funnel and you are working them down to where you want them to go. Think about this for a second. You don’t just walk out your door and scream to someone that you have a sale. You find someone that may actually want to buy what you are selling and gear your efforts towards them.

A funnel allows you to warm up your audience. The top of the funnel may be a video about your product or service. Then you may guide people who view that video to a new ad that offers a free cheatsheet on a commonly asked question you get asked. A third ad may target those who go to your landing page with a special offer that gets the purchase.

Here’s an example funnel:

Who are you targeting?

This is where it may seem like a slam dunk. You know your target, you know your business. But I encourage to really look at this piece of the puzzle more closely. This is where you can really cut your costs and target the EXACT person who will buy from you.

Who is the person you are targeting? What are their interests? What problem are you solving for them?

Use my tennis coaching experience as an example: My target market is kids playing tennis. I was specializing in 8 and under tennis, so my target market was kids age 8 and under. But in reality, my target market was moms with kids 8 and under who had a connection to tennis themselves and want to get their kids in the game. I’m not marketing to all kids, I’m marketing to moms who play tennis and have young children.

When I speak to my target audience, I can specifically say “Do you want to get your child involved in the sport you love so much?…” Now I am targeting the exact person and speaking directly to their ambitions.

Conversion Tracking

What’s a campaign that you can’t track how well it’s doing? With the Facebook Pixel, they’ve made it super easy for you to track results and create audiences based on which pages people have visited on your site. In other words, you now know who visited the 8 and under page on your website and hasn’t sign up for lessons. Say what?! You can target that person specifically with Facebook Ads.

Landing Page

The landing page that people will land on after your ad is extremely important. It must be relevant to your ad (uses the same imagery and type of look and feel). And, when generating leads for your business, try to make it as easy as possible for someone to give you their email address. For example, show the opt-in box at top of the page.

Setting Up Your Ad

You’ve done your homework. You’ve added the Facebook Pixel to your website. You know what process you are going to take. Now it’s time to set up your ad.

First things first. You need to choose your objective. Now there are a plethora of options to choose from, but let’s go back to our plan. What action do you want the person take? For the first ad, maybe you are targeting people that don’t already know your business. Let’s call this COLD TRAFFIC.

So, you set up a video view campaign. You’re thinking, why would we do this? We want them to buy a lesson, not watch my video! Well, it’s cheaper to warm them up and build trust than to just walk aside the door and yell SALE at them. Facebook is a social platform. Think of it as a picnic and you are trying to add value to a person and not look like that annoying salesy person that keeps pushing their product on you at the picnic.

So, you choose the objective of the action you want them to take. If you want them to opt-in for a newsletter, a freebie or selling your product or service, choose the conversion objective. Let’s take the example of the mom who visited the 8 and under page on my website. I consider her WARM traffic. She is already further down my funnel, so my ads will be different to her. I may want to send her an ad directly to my sales page for my product, so I would choose conversion as my ad objective.

Now, you can set up your Ad Set. This is where the magic happens. In the ad set, you will:

Set your budget
Set your location targeting (you are a local business, so you want to make sure you set this to the area around your business)
Set your targeting. If you are using interest targeting, here is where you can find different demographics to match your target audience. You can also set your custom audiences here. In the example of the mom with the 8 and under child that went to my website, I can add that audience in this section.
Set your placement. It is recommended to choose Facebook’s automatic placement. Facebook will find the platform that works best for your ads whether that be Instagram, Facebook mobile, etc.

Create Your Ad

It’s time! Now you can make your ad come to life. Choose a video or image that depicts your brand and what you are trying to convey. When choosing your text, speak directly to your target audience and solutions to their problems. And ALWAYS abide by Facebook’s ad policies.