How to Generate Plumbing Leads with Facebook Ads
If you aren’t using Facebook as a very prominent part of your plumbing marketing strategy, you’re leaving money on the table. In fact, we found that 30% of consumers reported patronizing a small business as a result of a Facebook ad.
Hopefully, if you have found this article it’s because you recognize the potential of Facebook ads for your plumbing company. If you are tired of posting for posting’s sake and are actually looking for ways to make it a viable channel for your growth, this article is for you.
In this article you are going to:
- Understand how to set up your Facebook ads account
- Learn the types of ads you can run and the impact they can have
- Gain insight into segmenting your audience to hone in on your potential customers
- Get some sense of the costs you can expect if you decide to advertise on Facebook
- Understand what impact Apple’s privacy changes are having on plumbing companies advertising on Facebook
- Be able to download our Best Facebook Ads for Plumbers Look Book, with pre-packaged, easily-customizable FB ads you can use for your account
So no matter what you’re hoping to accomplish with Facebook, whether you're a plumber looking to bring in more customers or an affiliate marketer trying to generate leads for your plumbing advertisers, we’re sure this article can help you!
What Role Will Facebook Play in Your Marketing Strategy?
The days when you could be a single phone book ad and then field calls are long gone. To truly succeed in today’s market, you must have a multi-faceted approach to getting new customers.
That means putting together a marketing plan that outlines the various channels you will utilize and what your goals are for each of those channels.
An important part of this marketing plan will be using both organic and paid social media content to engage with potential customers.
While organic social is any free content you create and/or share on your social page, paid social encompasses anything you pay to have shown to users, such as ads, promoted posts, influencer partnerships, and sponsorships.
It’s important that you clearly understand the difference between paid and organic social before going any further. And while we’re going to primarily focus on paid social in this blog, you won’t want to discount curating a quality organic social strategy.
Especially because 60% of businesses reported posting on Facebook at least once per week. You don’t want to get left behind!
While Facebook can be an excellent marketing channel for you, it shouldn’t be your only one. That means you need to understand what role Facebook is playing in your overall marketing strategy. Only then can you put together a campaign that makes sense for your plumbing business.
How do Facebook Ads Work?
While there are a variety of different ad types on Facebook, generally speaking, there are 3 ways potential customers can interact with your Facebook ads:
Basic Components of Facebook Ads
META Pixel
If you intend on ever using Facebook ads to try traffic to your own website (hint: you should), you’ll want to make sure that you install the Meta Pixel. This is a snippet of code that will need to be added to your site that will track conversions that occur from traffic sent to your site through your Facebook ads.
In other words, it will help Facebook know what ads/traffic actually converted into leads so that their algorithm can improve and they can try and drive more of those types of visitors to your site.
Ad Objectives
When setting up your campaign, you’ll find 3 different categories of objectives for Facebook ads. Each category has a number of specific objectives to choose from depending on your business goals.
Awareness. As the name suggests, this category is designed to bring awareness to your business. These ads are centered around informing your audience about your product and showcasing what’s unique about your business.
Consideration. This category goes further down the funnel and is designed to get people to actually engage with your business in a meaningful way. For plumbers, the two most common objectives within this group are Lead Generation and Traffic (which we will talk about later).
Conversion. Conversion is the most popular objective for Facebook ads for plumbers since its purpose is to increase sales. These ads send visitors to your site, where the Meta Pixel tracks when people convert into a lead, and reports that information back to Facebook to optimize around producing more of them.
Ad Formats
There are multiple types of ad formats you can deploy on Facebook, but they will take the form of either an image (or images) or a video.
Let’s talk about some best practices you should consider to make your plumbing Facebook ads stick out and convert.
Use bright colors that aren’t blue and white. If your color scheme matches Facebook’s, it will blend into users’ screens and get lost, so use colors that help your ad attract their attention.
Use a happy smiling customer. People love happy people. It’s just science, and it works. Show a happy customer, and folks can imagine themselves being in that happy person's shoes.
Make sure text takes up no more than 20% of the ad. Any more than that and Facebook doesn’t like it as their data shows it will perform worse.
Use humor. Inject some humor into your ads. Not only do people respond positively to it, but it also humanizes your business, reminding potential customers that they are ultimately doing business with real people.
Keeping these and other ROI-boosting factors in mind when developing your Facebook ads will set your plumbing business up for success from the beginning.
video ads
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re probably well aware of the way videos have taken over the social media universe in the last 5 years. This is largely due to TikTok, the short-form video platform that has over 1 billion active users.
Because the popularity of video is only continuing to grow, you’ll want to make video ads a major part of your Facebook advertising strategy. Although video ads do take a bit more time and money to build, they are likely to be your highest ROI-generating ads, so they’ll be well worth it.
Source: https://www.stansac.com/
Plus, with short videos, you can share them across multiple social media channels, such as Instagram, Twitter, and more!
Keep these tips in mind when brainstorming and creating video ads for Facebook:
- Keep your videos short and to the point. We recommend 3 minutes or less.
- Insert easy-to-read captions directly into the video.
- Insert your value proposition or “wow” factor in the first 10 seconds of the video.
- Avoid any flashing or blinking that could cause seizures.
By ensuring video advertising is a major part of your social media strategy, you are not only helping boost your engagement numbers and ROI, you are also helping ensure your ad strategy is relevant and evergreen.
Ad Budgets
Ad budgets do exactly what you think they do. It allows you to set a budget for the amount you want to spend. We suggest setting your ad budget on the campaign level, such that you allow Facebook to decide where that budget is most effectively spent.
Tip: Start your budget low so you don’t end up wasting a lot of money while you get things dialed in. You can always increase later as you start to see results.
Ad Audience targeting
Obviously, Facebook knows a ton about its users. That’s what makes their advertising platform so effective. It also means you can build an audience, the folks you want to see your ads, in many different ways.
Here are the most effective ways to utilize Facebook audience targeting for your plumbing business:
- Target your current and past customers. By targeting your current and past customers, you’re ensuring your content stays relevant to the specific needs of that audience based on detailed analysis and data. You can track data and target specific audiences by using the Facebook Audience Management tool.
- Target similar people as your current customers with lookalikes. By targeting a Lookalike Audience, you’ll be able to reach new people who will likely be interested in your business because the lists are created based on the data of your best customers. You can create a Lookalike Audience through Facebook’s Audiences page, it typically takes 6 to 24 hours to be fully created.
- Target specific service areas and include them in your creative. By targeting your audience based on location, you’re increasing the relevance of your ad and the potential to convert, especially for home service businesses that involve contractors visiting clients’ homes. It makes sense to target people close to your city, which you can do through Facebook’s Ads Manager.
- Retarget your website visitors and blog post readers with a special offer. Retargeting allows businesses to reach out to audiences who are familiar with them and have already visited their Facebook page, website, etc. It’s an excellent tool as you can automatically personalize your ads based on the information you’ve learned from them like a product of yours they viewed but didn’t end up buying. You can create a retargeting campaign through Facebook’s ad creation tool.
Examples of Good Facebook Ads for Plumbers
There are thousands of combinations of Facebook ads you can run, so let’s cut to the chase and discuss the types most likely to help your plumbing business grow!
Offer A Seasonal or Timely Deal on Conversion Ads
Everyone loves a good deal whether it’s on services they want or services they absolutely need. Seeing a special offer could be the deciding factor on why they choose your company over another one. Just make sure to drive them directly to a page that discusses that service/offering in detail.
Source: https://griffin-plumbing.com/
Highlight A Common Plumbing Problem on a Lead Generation Ad
Many homeowners have plumbing projects they’ve just delayed for whatever reason, and with Facebook, you can make it easy for them to decide to take action and deal with the problem. Offering a lead generation ad where they can easily submit their information to book an appointment can allow for just that.
Source: https://www.cowtownplumbers.com/
Showcase A Customer Testimonial on Engagement ads
If your Facebook company only has a few likes, it will be hard to gain credibility in the eyes of potential customers. Through engagement ads, you can have some strong testimonials promoted across Facebook with the goal of getting people to like your page. As a bonus, when they do, you then have a chance of them seeing your future posts.
Source: https://www.monkeywrenchplumbers.com/
How much do Facebook Ads for Plumbers Cost?
Like with any digital marketing platform, costs are dynamic and vary depending upon many different factors. With that said, a ballpark estimate of costs to run Facebook ads for your plumbing business can be somewhere just north of $1 per click to your website, while impressions-based ads can cost around $7 per 100 impressions.
in conclusion
Now that we’ve climbed in and out of the Facebook ad world, you should be ready to start your journey to create more compelling, effective ads that convert and generate plumbing leads.
Having a nice design is one thing, but molding together all the tactics of strategically chosen objectives, formats, and the target audience is what will ensure your ultimate success in growing your business!
