Facebook, with its staggering 189 million monthly active users in the United States alone, presents a goldmine for contractors seeking to connect with new potential customers. It's a marketing platform with immense potential for growth.
With nearly a million successful advertisers in the US alone, it's clear that Facebook construction ads can be a game-changer for your business. So, what's stopping you from finding new jobs and reaching new heights on Facebook?
For contractors, targeted advertising on Facebook gives you the power to reach local homeowners and businesses in need of construction services. And Facebook has made it so easy that anyone with an internet connection and a credit card can start advertising.
With this comprehensive guide, you'll be fully equipped to use Facebook advertising to grow your construction business. We’ll take you through everything from setting up your ad account to measuring your ad success, and everything in between.
Setting Up Your Construction Company’s Facebook Ad Account
Setting up a Meta Business Manager account, your first step to utilize Facebook advertising for contractors, is a straightforward process. You can easily create an account at business.facebook.com, giving you the confidence to start your journey on Facebook.
- Click on Create New Account, Log in with Facebook, or Log in with Instagram.
- Depending on your chosen option, you’ll need to log in to your Facebook or Instagram account or sign up for Facebook.
- Facebook will then walk you through the sign-up process and ask you to set up a business page with your business name, address, email address, phone number, and website. Submit
- Next, you’ll receive a confirmation email. To verify and activate your account, you just need to click on the link in the email.
And that’s it! You should now have your Business Manager account set up and be ready to run ads.
Defining Your Target Audience
The audience for your ad is the cornerstone of a successful Facebook ad for your construction company. It's crucial to define and target the right audience to ensure your ad reaches the people who are most likely to be interested in your services.
Let’s take an example. Let’s say you’re a contractor based in Iowa, and you set up an ad without thinking much of it. Before you know it, your ad is being blasted to tens of thousands of people who are desperately looking for someone to help them with their renovation. Great! Right…?
Well, what if you found out those tens of thousands of people were all spread across the East Coast from Miami to New York? Not so great anymore, right?
But if you set up your Facebook ad to only be shown to people within your service area, those dollars are now dollars well spent.
I80 is a construction company based out of Iowa that runs ads on Facebook. Notice that their ad never mentions anything about being in Iowa. That’s because they’ve set up the ad targeting (or audience) only to show the ad to people in their service area.
In your Meta Business Manager account under Saved Audiences, you can drill down your audience by town/city, or use a city or town with a radius. For example, if you’re based out of Miami, FL, and don’t want to drive more than 15 miles outside the city for a job, no problem. You can specify your audience to anyone within 15 miles of Miami, FL.
And if you have a website, you can set up an ad to target your previous website visitors using the “Facebook or Meta Pixel”. The Facebook Pixel is a piece of code you can insert into your website. It can keep track of visitors to your website and can be used to serve a targeted ad to them the next time they’re scrolling Facebook.
For example, if someone visits the roofing page of your website, you can then hit them with a “retargeting” ad on Facebook, a proven strategy for reaching potential customers who have already shown interest in your services.
The ad could showcase one of your recent roofing projects and offer a special discount if they’re ready to move forward with a new roof. Retargeting ads are effective because most people need to see a brand more than once before taking the next step in the buying process.
You can also use Facebook to create what’s called a "lookalike audience." A lookalike audience is when Facebook finds people who are similar to your past customers.
For example, if you have a list of people who hired you to do a kitchen remodel, Facebook can find other users with similar interests and behaviors or who are in a similar life stage. So, by targeting people who are similar to your past kitchen remodel customers, you can reach new people who are also likely to want to remodel their kitchen.
Crafting a Compelling Facebook Ad for Contractors
Once you’ve determined who you’ll target with your Facebook ads, the next step is to determine what kind of ad you’ll publish.
While there’s a science to creating an ad that will help you win new jobs, it can be boiled down pretty simply to three key factors: an attention-grabbing headline, visually appealing image(s) or video(s), and a clear and compelling call to action (CTA).
Attention-Grabbing Headline
The headline is the first thing a new potential customer will see, so it has to capture their attention immediately. Remember that these people aren’t on Facebook looking for a contractor, you’re interrupting them as they’re mindlessly scrolling through a sea of cat memes mixed in with life updates from family members.
Make sure you keep it short and straightforward. You can highlight one of your company’s key advantages or why they should take action now. Here are a few examples:
- Transform Your Backyard with *Company Name*
- Jaw-Dropping Kitchen Remodeling at Affordable Prices
- Get Your FREE Roof Repair Quote
Visually-Appealing Images or Videos
However, these headlines are only helpful with proper images or videos showing just how jaw-dropping your services are. It might seem obvious, but some of these people have never heard of your company and don’t know that you do fantastic work.
Using before-and-after photos of successfully completed projects can be a great way to show off your expertise. The more extreme the transformation, the better!
You can also use images of your team on the job site. These are especially effective if your team looks friendly (hint: smile!), because people like to work with friendly people at the end of the day.
Use a Clear and Compelling Call-to-Action (CTA)
A call-to-action is the phrase you use to get your audience to take the next step. You should be direct and clear about the action you want them to take, such as requesting an estimate, visiting your website, or planning a consultation. Examples of CTAs include:
- Get Your Free Quote Today
- Call Now for a Free Consultation
- Visit Our Website to See More Projects
Budgeting and Bidding Strategies for Contractors
Facebook offers a few different options when it comes to budgeting and bidding on ad placement. But for our purposes, you should mainly be using one of these two options;
CPA (Cost Per Action)
Bidding based on CPA means that Facebook will optimize your ad so that users complete a specific action from your ad. For Facebook contractor ads, this action usually involves requesting a quote or calling you. A CPA strategy can be great when you’re looking for new customers in the short term, especially if you don’t already have a modern website.
CPC (Cost Per Click)
With CPC-based bidding, Facebook optimizes your ad to send the most amount of people to your website, and you pay based on a “per-click” model. Using CPC can be a great idea if you already have a website or landing page set up that converts a high percentage of visitors into potential leads (i.e. you’re already receiving leads from your website).
As for how much you should budget for Facebook marketing as a contractor, it depends on how aggressive you want to be. Many contractors will start out spending $5 per day, and ramp up spending as they start to see results.
As for a maximum, unless you’re running a large construction company with multiple crews, you’ll likely not need to budget more than $50 per day on Facebook ads.
Measuring and Analyzing Your Ad Performance
As a wise man once said, measure twice and advertise on Facebook once. Or wait a second, that’s not how it went…
All jokes aside, tracking your ad performance is important if you want your Facebook ads to be effective and remain effective over time. While there are a number of figures that are important to pay attention to, watching your CPA (remember, cost-per-action) is debatably the most important.
https://instapage.com/blog/facebook-advertising-benchmarks/
Working out your budget per new customer will also help you analyze your ads and determine their performance. For example, if you figure out that your goal is to spend $400 per new remodel, and your CPA on your Facebook ad is $40, that means you need to convert 1 out of 10 leads to keep your customer acquisition cost (aka CAC), on target at $400.
If you consistently miss your advertising targets, you should implement some of our Facebook construction ad best practices, which we’ll outline in the next section.
Best Practices to Implement
Everyone will experience ads that aren’t performing at some point. It’s okay! Just take a second to breathe and try to implement these best practices.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is the process of publishing different versions of your ads with slight variations. This allows you to determine which variation works best and, thus, which phrase/image performs better.
For example, let’s say you ran an ad with the headline “Transform Your Backyard with Joe’s Remodeling” that is no longer performing well.
Well, you could try to duplicate the ad, but change the headline to “Stunning Backyard Landscaping at Affordable Prices”, and see if the performance improves.
If the ad performance improves, that means your audience is responding better to the new headline. This could change again, but as a marketer, your job is to continually test what your audience wants to see.
And remember the “Facebook/Meta Pixel” we talked about earlier? Well, this is also where that can come in handy. After it’s had enough time to gather data from your website, you can use the Facebook Pixel to deliver an ad to people who are already familiar with your company. Retargeting ads usually do better, with more results for less money.
Common Pitfalls to Avoid
There are also several potential pitfalls you could be overlooking, such as mobile optimization. There’s no getting around it - Many people use Facebook on their phones. So, if your ad or website is optimized for viewing on a computer, then you could be instantly sending these people off of your ad, hurting its performance.
Another one could be ignoring ad fatigue, which is when people see the same ad too many times and don’t engage with it. Sometimes, we need to take an ad behind the barn and… okay you know where I’m going.
But really, sometimes we need to retire an ad and start fresh. It’s important to not get too emotionally invested in using a specific ad, because if your target audience doesn’t resonate with it, you don’t want to dump more money into that ad than necessary.
Build Your Business With Handoff
Now, you should have your Business Manager account set up and the information to start running Facebook ads for your construction company. So what’s left but to get out there and do it? In the worst case, you spend an afternoon and a few hundred dollars and figure out that you need some help.
If you’d like to learn how to transform your business, take a look at how we’re helping remodelers and handymen manage their customers and workflow using Handoff.ai.
We know that it’s frustrating to waste half your day on estimates, invoicing, and customer management. That's where Handoff steps in. Learn how AI can be more than a buzzword and save you countless hours of your precious time every single day. Get started with a 7-day free trial today!
