I am writing this article because I have picked up a new hobby in my boring life of staring at the computer. My new hobby while I am working (70+ hours a week) is find Facebook ads that are all wrong.
From the person they target to the area the people are from. I am in New Jersey and get Facebook roofing ads from California. Concrete company Facebook ads from Florida. Not to mention the ads on Instagram.
Wasted money, wasted time and maybe that business will give up, thinking Facebook ads don’t work.
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So, in this article, I am going to set the record straight, get you focused on how they work and the strategy behind good Facebook ads for contractors.
Before I begin, in my internet marketing career I’ve had great success and some bad failures in the last 8-10 years running ads on Facebook. Testing and patience are the making of true success.
Facebook ads are an effective way to attract leads.
But, Facebook is a crowded space where you need to pay to get your contracting business noticed. If you want to thrive and beat your competitors, you need to develop an excellent Facebook sales funnel strategy.
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that Facebook users generally aren’t actively looking to buy things when they’re on the platform. Facebook is not an ecommerce site or where people shop for a home service providers.
The first time they see your ad, you can’t expect them to start messaging you, calling you or interacting with your business page.
Think of it this way.
If you live in a city or town of say 50,000 people, how many of those people even know your business exists?
If you are a contractor, you have a hard time getting people to trust you, know about you and in some manner like you.
Know, like and trust is how business is done.
- You need to gradually make them (know you). This is the awareness stage.
- Then you work on getting them to (like you) in some manner. This phase happens in the consideration phase.
- And lastly, they need to (trust you), which is the final phase in making decision.
Before we get into the details, it’s essential to know how a sales funnel works.
Let’s take a closer look.
What Is a Sales Funnel?
A sales funnel describes the path a customer takes from awareness to purchasing a service. The top part of the sales funnel is all about making people aware of your products, services and business.
The top of the sales funnel is where you want to make people interested in what you have to offer.
The middle part of the sales funnel focuses on showing consumers how you are unique and why they should choose you over the competitors.
Free estimates are not going to do it. That was a 70’s marketing gimmick that has hurt more contractors then helped, but that is another topic.
A FREE estimate is not an offer.
RJ Cooper
The last part of the process is to convert people (leads) into customers. It’s all on you to lead people to the end of the sales funnel from the first stage.
A good sales funnel can nurture good prospects and prevent them from leaking out of the funnel.
If you want to grow your business, designing a good sales funnel is crucial. The bonus is you will always have prospects to sell to. This helps with the peaks and valleys many home service contractors face.
Steps to Building an Effective Facebook Sales Funnel
Now that you know how important a sales funnel is, let’s take a closer look at how a Facebook sales funnel works.
Facebook offers contractors an opportunity to reach out to a broad base of potential customers. Plus, the options to target your ads are numerous. But the sheer number of options also gives rise too much confusion.
How can you reach out to the right people and convert them into customers?
Let’s go through, step-by-step process in creating a Facebook sales funnel that will help you get more customers without draining your budget.
Whenever I write or make an offer, a website page or anything marketing wise for a client or myself, I ask these 6 questions. They have to be asked and answered before I can move forward. This is the most often overlooked part of marketing and a Facebook sales funnel is no different.
Who is it for, what am I offering them, where do I want to target them, why should they care, when should I advertise this offer and how can I go about getting the most out of every penny invested?
Every month I save sponsored ads from contractors that pop up in my news feed. Some months I have counted over a hundred. These ads are wasted.
For one, most of the time, they don’t service my area. I am in New Jersey, why am I seeing a roofing ad from Utah. Why am I seeing a tree service ad from a tree company that is 100 miles away in Pennsylvania that is not licensed in New Jersey?
I get offers in my feed from other marketing companies. It is stupid and a waste of their money. Could you imagine spending your advertising dollars as painting company, to show up in front of other painting companies?
Wasted money, wasted time. Which makes you think that Facebook ads don’t work.
The first task in a Facebook sales funnel is.
Who?
Who are you trying to do business with? This is where a buyer persona is important. In your mind who is your ideal customer? Who is most likely to do business with you? If you never serviced a mansion, don’t try to sell to mansion homeowners. Not yet anyway.
What?
What are you going to offer them? You can’t just say “Here is my company and what I do.” You have to make some kind of offer. Imagine, meeting them face to face. Hey mister or misses so and so. I am a roofer and I do roofing.
They will say, “So what!” That “so what”, is your chance to tell them what!
Where?
No, I am not talking about location geographically [although that is important in the strategy]. I am talking about where will you ads be placed. Newsfeed, Market Place, Messenger or any other number of Facebook assets. Instagram is one asset I see people marketing on. That is fine if your target is under 35-40 years old. What’s App is another asset to market in through your Facebook ads. The question is where is that “Who” at on Facebook.
Note: Facebook assets cover most age ranges and buyer personas.
Why?
What does your ad say to me, your target? What does that ad tell me why I should look, read, message or take an action? What do you have to say that is important to me? Why should I stop what I am doing and take notice? Because you know I need to see what Trump did today, what Bernie is up to and can’t forget about Aunt May. See what you are up against?
When?
Not only is seasonal ad timing important, but when should your ads appear to get the most bang for your buck? If your ads are a “call now” type, why run that ad when you are home in bed at 3 am. Or with messaging, we all know that Facebook starts a timer when someone messages you. If you are unable to respond, your response rate drops. Although a good message bot can help in this type of ad. Are you using a message bot? You need to think time of day or what days to run you ads.
How?
After you answer completely, the above 5 questions, you will have your answer to the 6th question “How”. The how in a Facebook sales funnel is, how do I get the most bang for my buck.
Create Different Types of Content for yout Facebook Funnel
Content is at the backbone of any digital marketing strategy. I can’t put a percentage on it, but I’d say 9 out of 10 contractors have little, to no content. And if they do have content it is for SEO sake, not ads or sales funnel buyer journey sake.
Ads are salesmen, not like website page (SEO). One is going out the find a customer, the other is for when a customer is trying to find you.
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The first step to building a productive Facebook sales funnel is to produce different kinds of content for different phases of the sales funnel.
Awareness, Consideration, Decision
Remember those three words. They are very important when building any type of sales funnel and Facebook is no different.
- Social Media posts
- Blog posts
- Slideshows
- Infographics,
- Ebooks,
- Landing pages
- Explainer videos
Are some examples of different kinds of content you can produce.
Here are three title examples for a Home Improvement or Remodeling contractors content through the 3 stages.
Awareness:
Pick Our Service to Upgrade Your Home!
Images of before and after. Maybe a video showing the project in elapsed time or slide show.
People love this type of content and will stop to look at the before and after pictures. Transformation videos are great for building awareness.
Consideration:
6 Things Not to do While Remodeling Your Home.
Images showing these things. A video of each thing and why.
A slideshow showing each of these 6 things would work great with subtitles and no sound on for a Facebook ad slide.
Decision:
4 Questions to Ask Your Bathroom Remodeling Contractor Before Investing in A Project.
Images showing why these questions are important. Video or slideshow, showing what happens when you don’t ask these questions.
People won’t spend much on prevention, but they will sell of everything they own for a cure. Don’t believe me? Look at the stop smoking campaigns versus the cure for cancer cost.
Of course, it takes a lot of time and resources to create new content. Even more to develop good content. If you have a limited budget or are short on time, you can repurpose your old content.
Multiple types of content will help you reach out to different segments of your target audience.
These three downloadable Ebooks pulled plenty of leads for my clients.
Some say it doesn’t matter which type of content you choose to produce as long as it is relevant to your product and services.
Wrong! Wrong! WRONG!
We all see junk content every day, and don’t take notice.
RJ Cooper
You produce content based on the phases of the sales funnel.
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
In that order. Too many start with the decision or consideration.
When you run an ad that has your image or logo, your service and a contact method to a cold audience, they don’t know you at all. You are asking too much from that ad. You are wanting them to be aware of you, consider doing business with you and make a decision all in a matter of a few newsfeed seconds.
See why your ads are failing?
You are putting the roof on, before the house is framed.
RJ Cooper
Promote Your Best Content
Before you get too far into your Facebook sales funnel strategy, you need to test the waters.
Test, test and test some more.
An excellent way to see what your audience likes is to promote your best content to people who are aware of you.
This means you need to promote your content primarily to your Facebook fans or upload you email list into your Facebook ads campaign of past customers or people you have given estimates to.
If you have installed the Facebook Pixel, you can also include those people who have previously visited your website but haven’t taken any action.
These are people who know about you, your products, and services already, so you don’t have to work too hard to create awareness.
Instead, you need to gauge how engaging they find your best content.
Look at how they react to your content and determine the content that gives you the most conversions. To do so, analyze your engagement and conversion rates.
Take note of the content that performs well. Once you find content that works, you can promote this content to reach out to a cold audience as well.
Chances are if your fans like it, cold leads are likely to react positive to it.
Create a Lookalike Audience for your Facebook Funnel
To broaden your Facebook sales funnel, you need to reach out to new people. The best way to make sure you’re reaching out to the right audience is to create a lookalike audience.
For those that don’t know, a lookalike audience refers to people who have similar interests to your existing customers. Alternatively, they could also be a group of people who have habits and behaviors similar to your core audience or customer base. Upload your customer email list to find people that match them.
It’s easier to convert this segment of consumers into leads you can market to, so you should aim to target them first.
Create a lookalike audience, you should go to the “Custom Audience” option in Facebook ads. Pick the options most appropriate for your Facebook sales funnel.
While choosing your audience, remember that it’s always better to keep the audience size smaller by filtering out locations and other variables. With a smaller group, you have a better chance of creating a lookalike audience that matches your core audience.
Remarketing with your Facebook Funnel
You can’t expect users to engage with your ad the first time they see it. It may take a few attempts to get your target audiences attention.
You may need to expose them to your offers several times before they become engaged and ultimately leads. That’s the best way to ensure you build a productive Facebook sales funnel.
Here are a few different ways in which you can set up your Facebook remarketing campaigns. It can be based on:
- Engagement
- Website visits
- Page visits
- Event interactions
- People who have interacted with your Instagram business profile
- Web page visits
Facebook’s tracking pixel tool is an excellent way to find visitors who have bounced out of your Facebook sales funnel. You can run targeted ads exclusively for them based on their behavior.
For instance, you can offer a coupon code or discount to move them to the next stage of the funnel.
In simple terms, a Facebook Pixel is like a tracking code. You can copy your Pixel code from Facebook and add it to your website. This will enable you to track the behavior of your traffic from your website to Facebook. It’s similar to Google Analytics.
It may seem overwhelming at first. But Facebook provides detailed instructions on how to install and test pixels. Once you create a pixel, it can take around 20 minutes for it to be active. There are many variables you can tweak to see which pixels give you the most leads.
Remarketing example here on our GMB page.
Conclusion
I hope Contractor Marketing Network, helps you with your Social Media Marketing.
Building an effective Facebook sales funnel requires strategy, a little technical know-how and familiarity with Facebook. It’s not tough, but it may take a while to understand how the basics, custom audiences and remarketing work to get you leads.
Even if you don’t get the expected results right away when you set up an ad, don’t give up, there is gold on Facebook. Keep tweaking the variables until you build a truly productive Facebook sales funnel.
Just like in the real world, when you do go work it comes back to you. Well producing good content with a strategy in place comes back to you as well.
Contractor Marketing Network 
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