A local service business, such as a kitchen remodeling company needs to attract a local audience for its services. It’s no secret that logging onto Facebook is already part of most people’s everyday lives. With that in mind, it provides local service businesses the unique opportunity to find their own unique audience from a large selection of potential clients and engage them with relevant content that those customers will find enticing which will generate new sales and leads.
There are many ways that this can be accomplished, through both digital marketing and traditional advertising. Ultimately as a business owner, you must figure out how to generate interest in your business. Many home service providers like plumbers and cabinet refacing companies simply rely on word of mouth and personal referrals, or a sign on their truck. Those leads are always welcome, but Google and Facebook are where most of your calls and leads should be coming from because it’s much more scalable as your business develops. The Internet platform that allows a small local business to compete with larger companies with bigger budgets is Facebook. That is because through all the personal data Facebook captures, makes it easy to set up Facebook business ads to laser target who your message will reach and how frequently.
How to Promote Your Business on Facebook
Through use of Facebook business ads, boosting posts, engaging with your target market and even targeting potential customers who have already visited your website, watched a video or been on your Facebook business page, there are a host of ways you can use the platform for lead generation. With Facebook affording business-oriented features such as targeted marketing your kitchen remodeling company has more opportunities within your local market than ever before.
“Every small business should be on social media, especially Facebook. From its powerful advertisement options to Facebook groups, Facebook has many tools small businesses can and should use.” - Saige Driver, writer for Business News Dailey
Frequent posts about business, industry and your local area
Before putting down any funds on your ad spend, it is critical that your businesses branding is properly set up and you have content on company’s Facebook page. The best way to do this is by engaging your current audience with frequent posts about your industry and relevant events in your local area. This will make your company seem like more involved in the community and less promotional. You should then sprinkle in a post about your business, a sale, before and after photos, and things of that nature one out of every 3 – 5 posts.
Boosting posts to a custom audience or lookalike
Often, a business will have a blog set up on their WordPress site. For example, if you were a kitchen remodeler, you may want to write a post about whether someone should reface or replace their kitchen cabinets. Once you have this article written, you post a link to it on your Facebook page, and then “boost the post”, which is to say, you can choose to have your post shown to people who are not following your page, but fall into the criteria of your target market. For example, you could choose to have anyone who identifies as a homeowner and that lives or works within 20 miles of your service area and is between the ages of 30 – 65.
If you don’t at least boost your post, it is unlikely that even 10% (probably much less) of your audience will see your content, let alone engage with it and share to their Facebook friends.
Retargeting website viewers
Did you know that most businesses get their leads from re-targeting? Re-targeting is advertising to people a second time after they showed interest in your ad after seeing it the first time. For marketers, this is the secret weapon for catching valuable leads. A top marketer will be able to set up a re-targeting campaign for your remodeling business to help you get more leads and close more sales. Retargeting are display ads which target users who have interacted with your Facebook content or website in certain ways you have preset. Once that happens a cookie is set in their browser and you can use this data to “retarget” them for your Facebook business ads.
Facebook Lead Gen Ads to a custom audience
Even if you do not have your website or landing pages optimized for conversions yet, you can run an ad that will allow a user to fill out a lead generation form on Facebook, which will then be emailed to your sales team to follow up with the interested prospect.
The key to creating a successful lead gen ad is to properly set up your custom audience. Facebook target marketing affords a local business with the ability to reach potential homeowners and property managers who log on to Facebook every day through laser-targeting people with specific interests and behaviors as well as through demographic data such as a user’s age, where they live and work, their gender and so much more.
Use Lookalike Audiences to target commercial clients
If business owners are a target market, you could buy a detailed list from infousa.com or SICcode.com of businesses in your state, and then upload that to Facebook, and create a look alike audience. A Facebook lookalike audience is a group of Facebook users who share common traits or demographic markers with your existing customers who have previously interacted with, or purchased from, your business. With this strategy, you can also create a look a like audience to people who have visited your website in the last 180 days, or even have watched 50% of a video you have posted on Facebook. It is a great way to meld retargeting audiences with other user that have similar online behaviors.
