Facebook Ads For Service Businesses - 7 Keys To Success!

0:00Hi guys, it's Ben Heath from Lead Guru and in this video I'm going to talk about Facebook ads for service businesses and specifically I'm going to give you seven keys to success. Seven things that you want to be doing or not doing, seven techniques that you want to use um if you are advertising for a service based business or perhaps you you run a service based business yourself and you're running Facebook ad

0:19campaigns um to try and generate leads. Got some stuff in here that I think you're going to find very very useful. Before we get into that, I want to very quickly ask you to smash that like button, click that thumbs up button. That would help me out and be much appreciated. and of course subscribe to my YouTube channel if you are new and haven't done so already. Okay, so seven key success. I've uh I've you know we've worked with many many different service business over you know last five or six years and um I think a lot of people assume that Facebook advertising is much more geared up for e-commerce businesses

0:48you know companies that sell t-shirts and little bits and bobs and things like that. Honestly, the businesses that I consistently see have the absolute best results uh with Facebook advertising in terms of the return on ad spend are service-based businesses. And that's because you're not usually competing nationally or internationally. So, your competition is far smaller when you're advertising service business because you're usually advertising locally. There's only so many other people offering the same thing in your local area and depending on your industry, probably not a huge amount of them actually advertising on uh on Facebook and Instagram. But also, your average customer value is probably much higher. You know, if your average

1:25customer value is $30 when you're selling a t-shirt, if you're a service based business, it could be, you know, could be down at that level, but could be anything up to tens of thousands of dollars with a lot of service providers sitting somewhere in between. And that that really high average customer value means that your potential return on ad spend if you've got a campaign that consistently generate quality leads can be phenomenal. You can really grow a very successful business, a very successful service business by um by doing so. So, as I said, lots of experience in this place. These seven things are are very much uh tried and

1:54tested and been thought about and proven. So, so you've got some uh some stuff you can really rely on and trust in this video. So, I've got some notes alongside me as you probably see me glancing down to help me uh make sure I get this right. So, the first one the first thing I really want to emphasize is you don't want to over complicate your Facebook advertising. If you're a service-based business, there's lots of online trainings, tutorials, courses on Facebook advertising that have these very complex, you know, six, sevenst step sales funnels. Now, I would argue they're often not necessary, but they're more necessary for certain types of

2:27businesses. If you're a service-based business, you often want to keep it much more simple than that. You don't want this elaborate, you know, people do this, then they do this, then they do this, then they do this, because you're probably going to be advertising locally. your audiences are going to be fairly small. And in order for those sevenst step sales funnels to work, you need tons of people going in the top stage because you're going to get drop off at each one of those. Okay? So, I think it's it's very important to keep it simple. A free consultation, a free quote, something along those lines for a

2:58lot of service providers is going to be an offer that can really do the trick. So, first thing, don't over complicate it. If you've got a salesunnel that's more than let's say three steps, I think you're going wrong. Okay? So, that's the very first point. The second point is is sort of the it's added on to that first point and I'll explain. Don't advertise your service directly. So whilst I think you want a really simple salesfunnel structure when you're advertising a service business, you can't often just go direct for sale. So in general, my rule of thumb is if you're offering something that costs more than $100, you

3:31can't ask people to directly purchase it. There are always going to be exceptions, but in general, you need something to happen between them seeing an ad and them becoming a customer. Some step in between that builds a relationship that takes people further down the salesunnel before someone's willing to hand over that amount of money. Um, so if you're advertising a service that costs less than $100, then absolutely go with a direct here's our service, come buy this. But if you're advertising something more, particularly if it's in the, you know, high hundreds, thousands of maybe tens of thousands of dollars, um, I think you need something in between. Now, that something in

4:04between could be something on Facebook, something online or offline. So, for example, you could be using a lead magnet strategy whereby, you know, let's say you're um a kitchen fitter. You know, you build new kitchens and fit kitchens for uh for people. That's what your service based business is. and you have a lead magnets that's the ultimate guide to kitchen countertops. Okay, something's people are thinking about a new kitchen. They want to know should they have a you know granite or you know um whatever all the various different options that you can have for a for a kitchen kitchen countertop. You can provide a free guide on that and then

4:36you can retarget those people to perhaps book a free call. So that would be like an online um option of an intermediary step between the ad and someone becoming a customer would be that lead magnet. But you can also do it offline and I've already given an example. Things like a free consultation, a free quote. Um why don't we come around and do a free strategy session to work this out for you? You know, if you're a business, why don't we do a free audit, you know, if you're offering accountancy service or bookkeeping services or you're a financial adviser or something, perhaps you could do an audit of what they

5:02currently already have, work out where they're going wrong, make some recommendations, and that's how they become a customer. So you don't need multiple steps on Facebook. The lead magnet is two steps because you got the initial campaign, then you're retargeting. You can have the two steps being one ad campaign effectively of a free consultation that people then um have the free consultation and that's that next step before they then go on to work with you. But you can't get away with directly advertising it. So you can see you're already getting a sweet spot here. You either got um you know you haven't got a fivestep salesunnel and

5:32you also don't have a one-step salesunnel. A two or a three-step sales one is usually be perfect for most service based businesses which hopefully I was pointing in the right direction cuz getting that right in terms of structure is absolutely key. Oh, by the way, I should quickly mention that I have created a free webinar and there'll be a link to this in the video

5:47description, completely free to watch. Um, that shows you all about different salesunnel structures, two-step, three-step sales funnels. And a lot of that is, and in that webinar, I talk a lot about if you're a service business, you want to use this. If you offering a service across this, you want to use this type of salesunnel. So, strongly recommend you check that out. 60 70 minutes long. Be well worth your time to watch it. Link is in the video description below. So, make sure you go ahead and and check that out if you want to know more about exactly the sales funnel you should be using for your

6:10servicebased business. Okay, so those are the two things about salesfunnel structure. Now, I want to get into some stuff around the ads because I think this is also really important with a service-based business. I think it's incredibly important to demonstrate your work in the ad itself. So, what does that look like? If you're portfolio based, it's quite straightforward. Include images of, you know, using the example before of a kitchen fitter, you know, use fantastic images of that. Um, if you're anything, you know, if you're a photographer, anything sort of where you can demonstrate images of your work, if you make stuff for people, um, then then do

6:44so. If you don't, you're not portfolio based as service provider and that doesn't really fit, there are still ways you can demonstrate your work. Perhaps with a client testimonial, okay, either in text or video format. You know, if you're a, you know, a physiootherapist, for example, perhaps that's how you can demonstrate your work. could be some one of your previous customers saying how much you know you helped them achieve their objectives that shows your work to your potential prospects. If you're a financial adviser of some sort perhaps you can show how much you know talk about a particular you know it could be anonymized of course but talk about a

7:18particular client how much tax you saved them or you know how you set them up with a proper pension scheme or something along those lines. Find a way to show your work. Okay is the first point I want to make on on the Facebook ad creative. The second one is that I think with a service business, getting someone from your company to be like to be effectively the face of it and

7:35represent the brand is really important. Whenever we work with local businesses, and I say we as just everyone, not my company specifically, you want to feel like you're connecting with a person. You want to feel like that person is who I'm going to be working with. I'm going be working with their company. They're in charge of what's going on. They've got an eye on things. nothing's going to go wrong because they've they've got it they've got it taken care of for me. So, obviously, even if you know, if you're a company of any size in a service based business, it's might necessarily be you um actually delivering the service if

8:07it's your business, but still getting your face into the ads, getting your presence there. So, this could be including you in part of a static image. It could be obviously face to camera video ads. There's a number of different ways you can do this, but and it doesn't have to be on every ad, but I think in some of your advertising, you want that to help build that relationship with your local um market. And I think that we've seen that really help. If you try and be a bit anonymous as a local business and just hide behind a a logo and a and a brand name doesn't seem to

8:35work as well because they want that connection. When you're hiring service providers, you want to make the thing that everyone's worried about is are they going to do a good job. I know that, you know, we're a service business as a Facebook ads agency. The thing everyone's worried about is, oh, we worked an agency before, it didn't work so well. are they going to do a good job? So, a lot of our marketing is

8:52demonstrating that we can do a good job. Okay. And part of that is having a face of the company getting in front of in front of things. So, the second point I'll make I'll talk about the uh the Facebook ad creative. The first um I can't remember what I said here now. Just checking. Um yeah, the first is demonstrate your work. The second is to establish a personal connection and put the face of the company in the ads wherever possible. Another point um on ad creative before we move on to to other stuff that I want to accidentally click that that I want to make is that

9:22because with a service business you're usually advertising on a local basis and even if you're not you need to protect your brand. So whereas a lot of Facebook advertisers, particularly those that advertise e-commerce products that are national or international, they're not putting ads out there that really sort of protect their brand and stay on point with their brand and represent who they want to be. They'll use a lot of salesy tactics and and fake scarcity and things along those lines because they're

9:49they're kind of hiding behind volume. You know, they're thinking, "Oh, our target market is 20 million people. or does it matter if you know 10,000 of those see ads that are you know not how we want to represent ourselves that the the downside is limited. I don't think that's the case for service businesses. People want to know they're going to work with uh businesses that have integrity that do what they say that follow through that do a good work that are conscientious have a high attention to detail. And you're probably going to be advertising to the same people in your local area if you advertise locally

10:20as service business again and again and again. So just make sure that you don't do anything that misrepresents your brand. Protect your brand. It's very very important over the long run. Um you don't want to do sort of damage with your potential customer base by coming across as sleazy or or or mistrustful or anything like that. Okay. So key to success number six is to not advertise to really really small audiences. So that's why I'm in an example Facebook ad account here. I've got an example campaign example ad set up is I want to demonstrate this. So I live in a county in

10:52um England called Glostershare. Okay. Now when I select the whole of the county, let's assume that that was my target audience, which actually be quite big. Often service business is going to be quite a bit smaller than that. You can see my potential reach on this right hand side is 420,000. I cannot now go in and add really narrow interests into here. So, for example, let's say I was advertising my own business, Facebook advertising agency, and I wanted to reach admins of business pages, people who have business pages on Facebook. That's basically my target market for the most part. So, if I pop in business page admins here,

11:25um, and I select that from the top as a behavior, you can see my audience goes all the way down to 5 a half thousand people. That's not a big enough audience at all. Okay? I cannot advertise to an audience that's that small and that specific. And by the way, that's with age and gender being wide open. Okay, so what does that mean? That basically means when you add in your location targeting criteria, cuz service business are usually advertising locally, take a look at your potential reach. If that number is anything less than 250,000, I would most likely go with open targeting, no interestbased targeting options. If it's larger than that, let's

12:01say 420,000, I still may want to leave this open because I might decide, for example, that our clients are very unlikely to be under the age of uh let's say 13. If I add that in, we can see that jumps all the way down to 300,000. So that might be a good audience to start advertising to, just the whole of the county. Okay. Um, there are scenarios in which you may want to add in some detailed targeting options, but it's going to have to be very, very broad targeting options that encompass a

12:27wide percentage of the population. Because if we're starting with 420,000, we can't knock that down to 20,000. It's got to be at least 100,000, uh, preferably 250,000. Now, the caveat being if we were just advertising in a local area where there's only 20 30,000 people, well, fine. Don't not advertise or don't make your area artificially large. stick with that audience, but don't constrain your audience, make it too small where it's not necessary. And I feel like here it would not be necessary. Facebook's smart enough to work out who within your audience is likely to be interested. Give them that runway. Don't put that audience down really small unless you have to because

13:04that's all the people that are in your area, which does sometimes happen. Okay, so that's um that's something that's really really important. Audience size. If I go up here to to this look custom audience section, you might be thinking about advertising to lookike audiences. something I speak a lot of and include a link in the video description to a tutorial all about creating um lookalike audiences and if you want to run lookalike audiences to a local audience which you can do just make sure use a 10% look alike otherwise that the resulting audience is going to be too small you want to make the lookalike as

13:34large as possible because then obviously you're narrowing down at the uh the geographic level um and small audiences and Facebook ads are just a big no no where possible avoid it Okay, so that's tip number six. Then number seven is you, this is going to vary business to business, but a lot of service

13:54businesses have fairly long lead times. So if we go back to our example earlier of a kitchen fitter, they might have a lead time of average of 3 to 6 months. I'm sure they speak to some clients, some prospects that become clients 2 or 3 years later. Some will move more quickly than that because obviously getting a new kitchen put in your house is a big decision. That's a big decision. It may be that it's got to line up with other refurbishment work that you're having going on. It's not something you could just jump on and go,

14:22"Yep, sure. Let's decide that tomorrow." If your lead time is 3 months, 6 months, um even if it's just a month, you need to give your Facebook ad campaigns a lot longer to assess performance than you would if you were advertising an e-commerce product where you can basically get real-time data. Yes, you can base decisions around your cost per lead and lead volume. So if you're not generating leads, you don't need to keep going for obvious reasons. But if you are unsure about how your campaigns are performing and you're not just going off lead data, you're actually going off, okay, what have we generated in terms of

14:51sales and stuff like that from this this this Facebook ad campaign we're running, you may have to give it some time. We've worked with service providers before where we're we're sort of um producing reports off month one, month two, and the results just they're not looking great. We're generating leads, but they're not really converting. But then by month four, month five, the results look fantastic. And the truth is that some of those leads were going to convert. They just hadn't yet. So they come through and it completely changes the numbers. And that's um you know that's something that to be to be very much factored in. Don't become

15:22disheartened. Don't assess things too early otherwise you could be missing out on a great opportunity which is Facebook advertising for for a lot of businesses. Okay. So those are the the seven keys to success. I'm going to very quickly run back through them. So the first is don't over complicate your salesunnel. You don't want to be using five sixstep salesunnel for service businesses. It's not what you want to do. Number two is don't directly advertise your products either. So you can't have a one-step funnel. You're going to want two or three-step funnel. Something along those lines is absolutely perfect. Number three is that you want to demonstrate

15:50your work where possible in your ad creative portfolio, client testimonials, things like that. Number four is that you want to get the face of the business in the ad creative as well. Whether that's in images, face to camera, video ads. Make sure that your prospects feel like they can connect with an actual human being, not a faceless brand. Five is protect your brand. Okay? Don't do anything that's overly salesy that would lead prospects to mistrust you or feel

16:15like you're not a reputable company. You're going to be advertising the same people. Very important you protect that brand and only put an creative forward that you'll be happy with everyone seeing. Number six is to not advertise to really small audiences. Don't go with detailed targeting options that bring your audience size down to 20 30,000 if you don't have to. Okay? In an ideal

16:33world, audiences would be above 250,000. It's not always possible when you are advertising locally, which much a lot of service businesses are. Um, and that's fine if it's not, but if it is, then don't go below that number. And then finally, number seven is to assess campaign performance over a longer time period. What that means for you will depend on your lead time and your

16:51business. It may be as much as 6 months. Okay? So, just keep that in mind. May even be more than that, but it may be as much as 6 months. So, keep that in mind. Okay? Hope that's been useful. Before I go, a couple things I want to mention. The first is our Facebook advertising services. So, if you're running Facebook ad campaigns yourself, perhaps you're not getting the results you want or perhaps you feel like you get better results. We can almost certainly help improve your results and help take your Facebook advertising and potentially your business as a result to another level. So, we create, manage, optimize

17:18Facebook ad campaigns for our clients. We have, you know, we're running hundreds of client hundreds of campaigns at any one time. Um, clients in every industry imagine. We've almost certainly advertised something that's very similar to the product or service that you offer. If you'd be interested in finding out more about about our service, there's a link in the video description below. You can click on that and book a a call with uh me or one of my team members, um just a 30-minute chat where we can find out more about your

17:41business, how we might be able to help. You can find out more about our service and we can see if we we would like to uh to work together. We do have a 3K per month minimum budget. So, if you're not at that level, we won't be able to uh to work with you and please don't don't book a call if that's the case. But, if you do meet that criteria, we'd love to speak with you and uh please go ahead and and book that call. Other thing I want to quickly mention is my Facebook ads mastermind group. So we've just gone past 56,000 members in there. An amazing

18:05community, one of the biggest in the world um of Facebook advertisers, one of the biggest online communities of Facebook advertisers. And um you know, I do free live trainings in there regularly. There's hundreds of questions being asked and answered all the time by the members. It really is a fantastic community full of people just like you just want to get better results with Facebook ads and helping each other achieve that. So if that sounds you want

18:25to be part of, go ahead and and join. Again, there'll be a link in the video description. If this video was useful, please give it a thumbs up. Give it a like. That would help me out. Please comment below to let me know. Comment below if you've got any questions. And of course, subscribe to my YouTube channel if you are new and haven't done so already. I release Facebook advertising related content about twice per week. And um yeah, I think it'd be very valuable if you do. Okay, thanks a lot guys. Best of luck with everything

18:50and I'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.