Owning a home inspection businesses requires your attention in a great number of ways. From ensuring that inspections are being completed successfully to managing your staff, you most likely are being pulled in many directions at once. Therefore, you presumably make it a priority to complete tasks as completely, yet efficiently as possible.
One of those important tasks is finding a steady stream of customers for your business. In all likelihood, you have some sort of marketing plan, where you leverage word-of-mouth and advertisements to find new customers. You may have tried newspaper or television ads with varying degrees of success. That said, you may or may not be leveraging the power of social media ads. Social media ads (particularly Facebook ads) can be a powerful tool in your marketing toolkit. This is for a variety of reasons, but most notably because of their precise targeting capabilities.
While you may not see yourself as a “technical” person, you absolutely can leverage the power of Facebook ads to grow your business. By doing this, you will be able to find a steady stream of warm leads that you can (ideally) turn into future sales. Even though this guidance below is not a complete guide to leveraging Facebook ads, it will get you started should you want to explore this great opportunity.
Facebook Ad Basics
If you aren’t yet familiar with Facebook ads, it is helpful to start by reviewing some of Facebook’s documentation, which is thorough and easy to understand. You can find it here.
Before you can run a Facebook ad to target potential customers, you need to create a page for your business. This is easy to do and you likely already have a page for your home inspection business. If you don’t have this, however, you can visit this page, choose the page type, input all applicable information, and click “Get Started.”
Whether you just created a page or have had your page for some time, you will want to determine the objective of your advertising campaign. This is a critical step. If you want more people to be aware of your business, for example, you can select Facebook ads that allow you to reach people near the physical location of your business or to reach as many people as possible. If you are searching for new, potential customers, Facebook can help as well. You can create ads that can encourage Facebook users to visit your business website, ads that collect information from people (like email addresses for a company newsletter) and ads that promote events that you may be holding. By using Facebook ads, you can even drive traffic toward a particular service you offer by releasing coupons, offers, or special deals.
By purchasing Facebook ads, you also get the benefit of running your ad both on Facebook and Instagram. Having this added benefit can increase the reach of your ads. Even though Instagram users tend to be younger than Facebook users, you never know where your next customer will come from.
Targeting
As you can see, you can leverage Facebook ads in a number of ways. But we still haven’t gotten to the main benefit of Facebook ads. Yes, other websites offer similar ad formats that you and your business can leverage. However, Facebook ads are extremely powerful due to their targeting capabilities. Whether you agree with its practices or not, Facebook collects an immense amount of data on its users, ranging from their birthday and location to their interests. As an advertiser, you have access to this immense wealth of data, allowing you to precisely identify warm leads that you can aggressively pursue.
So how do you do this? Facebook provides a brief introduction here. In effect, you select a core audience that can be as broad or as well-defined as you want. Facebook offers five broad categories for your audience: location, demographics, behavior, connections, and interest. You will ultimately have to play around with these factors in order to define one that fits your specific needs. You can also import customer data that you already have (including CRM data) to connect with contacts and friends of those contacts on Facebook.
The real magic happens, however, when you leverage Facebook’s lookalike audiences. Lookalike audiences help you connect with potential customers who are similar to those you have already targeted through Facebook ads. Using lookalike audiences can increase the chances that you will find people who will not only respond to your ads, but who could become a future customer. While you need to advertise on Facebook for some time to take advantage of lookalike audiences, the benefits are substantial.
Design
Considering the type of ads and audiences that you can target, you will also need to account for the design and copy of your Facebook ads. Facebook provides some important recommendations here.
First, it helps to use less text than more text. When a user is scrolling through their Facebook or Instagram feed, you cannot expect that they will slowly and carefully read through your ad. The copy needs to be short so that Facebook users can immediately understand the message and click on your ad. Next, it helps to include high-resolution pictures or video. Pay attention to the size and quality guidelines that are promulgated by Facebook. If you ignore these guidelines, your photo or video will be misaligned or will look awkward. Finally, it helps to show happy customers. Showing off your service with humans in your ad makes the ad feel like it is a familiar part of a user’s social fabric. In other words, it builds a subtle connection that increases the odds the user will ultimately click on your ad.
While these are just some quick suggestions, you will want to experiment with the design and copy of your Facebook ads. It helps to not only look at examples of Facebook ads in your feed, but to also look at Facebook ads that your competitors may be running. Doing this hard work before you run your first couple of ads will lead to higher engagement, more promising leads, and, most importantly, avoiding wasted money.
The Power of Facebook Ads
Clearly, you want to leverage the power of Facebook ads in your home inspection business. Facebook ads or boosted posts can help get your business (or your content) in front of an audience of warm leads. While there may be some additional upfront costs of your time and organization’s capital, you will—in all likelihood—be satisfied with the results. Whether you work on Facebook ads yourself or delegate the heavy work to a staff member, we encourage you to experiment and see what works for you.
If you’d like to learn more about how Facebook ads can help you and your business, don’t hesitate to reach out. At Inspector Media, we help home inspection business owners leverage Facebook in order to find new customers and grow their businesses. In fact, when you sign up for Inspector Media, you will receive one free boosted post per month promoting your home inspection business’s website. To learn more about us and this offer, feel free to visit our website. We can’t wait to hear from you!