Getting customers for your cleaning business may seem at first like a difficult task. You may not know where to begin looking for clients or how to capitalize using resources you already have. Advertising is always a viable option for obtaining clients, but many options require exorbitant fees or require the use of hard-to-navigate software. As an alternative to the typical advertising methods, using Facebook ads to acquire more clients for your cleaning business is a relatively straightforward process that can fit into your specific budget. Facebook has over two billion users, meaning the opportunity to display your cleaning business in front of large groups specified by your selections. By following a few steps, you can maximize the likelihood of your ad being clicked on by users, thereby increasing the number of clients gained for your cleaning business. First, you will want to specify an objective for your ad and select your target audience. Following the selection of an objective and audience, you will need to decide where your ad will run. In the next step, setting your budget will be required. These steps encompass the foundation of using Facebook ads to gain more clients for your cleaning business. After the budget has been determined, you will begin to get to the meat of the process. Once the foundation has been laid, you will need to decide on the formatting and design of your layout. Once you have perfected the design elements for your ad, you will need to place your order and continuously measure and manage your ad.
Selecting an Objective and Audience
When creating an advertisement using Facebook, many key points will assist you in creating a successful ad. Simply creating advertisements is not enough; you want to ensure that your promotions are unique and persuade users to click the ad to explore more about your company. The foundation for a well-performing ad is to specify an objective. When considering the intent of your ad, determine what specific outcome you are seeking to achieve with your ad. For this article, we will focus on gaining more clients for your cleaning business, but you can use these steps for a wide variety of objectives in future instances. When you begin creating your Facebook ad, you will have the option to select your objective.
The best selection for an objective of gaining more clients for your cleaning business is lead generation. When you select lead generation, interested users can click to learn more about your business. This is an excellent starting point when beginning to use Facebook ads for the first time. Most importantly, choosing an objective of lead generation will encourage those who visit your site to spend time within your website learning more valuable information regarding your business’s services. Selecting the correct objective for your intended goal is crucial to increase the number of clients for your cleaning business.
Once you have zeroed in on the correct objective, you want to move forward with selecting your audience. As a cleaning business, you may not have a specific niche of individuals you are trying to reach, or you may have already created a business plan that includes the category of individuals that best represent your prospective audience. With Facebook Ads, you have the option of targeting three distinct types of audiences–Core Audiences, Custom Audiences, and Lookalike Audiences.
Core Audiences allow you to define your preferred audience based on conditions such as interests, age, and geography. When you choose the Core Audiences option, you are presented with the opportunity to set rules to specify where your ads are delivered. If Core Audiences is selected, you must be accurate in your specified criteria. For example, if your cleaning business is local, you would not want your advertisements to be shown in a different state, as there will likely be very few individuals who click on your ad, and those who do will quickly find that the services you provide are not for their particular locality. In addition to location, you can edit the demographics you would like to reach with your advertisement. If you have chosen a specific niche for your cleaning business’s services, choosing specific demographics may be beneficial when setting up your ad. Of most significant importance within the Core Audiences option is the Connections option. Connections allow you to include or exclude people already connected to your business’s Facebook Page or event. This is important, especially when first beginning, because it will enable you to exclude individuals who have already connected to your Facebook Page. This can help to ensure that you are reaching new audiences with your ads. If you find that you are unsure if you should include specific demographics or interests when selecting Core Audiences, Facebook provides “Audience Insights,” which allows you to explore the demographics, behaviors, and interests of those connected to your business’s Facebook Page, and of people on Facebook.
Alternatively, you may choose the Custom Audiences option, which allows you to connect directly with those users who have previously shown interest in your business. However, if you are just beginning on your Facebook ad journey, choosing Custom Audiences may not be the best starting plan. Since Custom Audiences connects you to those who have already exhibited an interest in your business, you will be limiting the scope of your ads and will be unable to reach new audiences.
Finally, you have the option to choose Lookalike Audiences. If you select this option, you will need to have access to a previously created audience, or you can choose to base your Lookalike Audience on individuals who have liked your business’s page. If this is your first time generating a Facebook ad, you will not have any audiences to choose from and thus will be unable to create a Lookalike Audience. Choosing Lookalike Audiences could hinder your chances of gaining new clients for your cleaning business in similar ways to choosing Custom Audiences. For example, if those who have previously liked your business page belong to a specific demographic, you could effectively exclude interested individuals simply based on a demographic.
Selecting Where to Run Your Ad
Once you have an appropriate audience selected, the next step entails choosing where to run your advertisement. One of the plus sides to choosing where to run your ad is that Facebook allows you to select various platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and even Messenger. In the future, if you decide, you may choose to run ads on more than just Facebook. When selecting where your advertisement will be placed, Facebook has assigned the moniker “Placements” to define the places in which your ad can be run. Facebook offers two options regarding Placements. You may choose Automatic Placements to allow Facebook to select the optimal combination to maximize your budget. Alternatively, you may pick “Choose Ad Placements,” which will enable you to make your own selections.
If you choose to select your own Placements, many different options are available across Facebook’s platforms. First, you may want to insert your ad directly within a user’s Facebook News Feed. When a user is scrolling through their feed, they will see your advertisement in between posts made by their friends, business pages they have liked, or groups they have joined. This can be a successful advertising method because it allows you to present your ad directly in front of potential clients. Gaining more clients for your cleaning business will require placing your business in the forefront, where potential clients have the opportunity to click your ad and interact with your business. Inserting ads directly into a user’s news feed is an excellent way to begin using Facebook ads to get more clients for your business. Many people spend the majority of their time perusing their feed, so this will get your cleaning business a great deal of exposure.
In addition to placing ads within a user’s feed, there is also the option to place your ads within Facebook Marketplace. Choosing to display your ads within Facebook Marketplace can be assistive for many reasons. Of most significant importance is that it can assist in driving potential clients who were already searching for a particular product. Therefore, displaying ads within Facebook Marketplace can be a successful strategy if combined with placing ads within users’ feeds.
Determining an Appropriate Budget
Advertising using Facebook can assist in gaining more clients for your cleaning business if implemented appropriately. Of significant importance is the determination of the business’s budget with regard to advertising. Advertising can quickly become a high-dollar expenditure. Therefore, it is essential to remember that anything spent on advertisement should be in an effort to recoup the costs associated with the advertising. For example, if your business invests $200 in an ad for a month, but the ad only results in a single one-room cleaning job valued at less than $100, then the cost of the advertising exceeds the earning associated with the ads, thus resulting in an overall financial loss.
When selecting a budget, Facebook offers the option to set a daily spend goal or an amount spent for a particular campaign. When selecting a daily spend goal, you will be determining how much to spend on your ad campaign per day. Setting up a budget for your Facebook ad also includes selecting a bid strategy to apply during ad auctions.
Ad auctions are Facebook’s method for determining the most appropriate ad to show to an individual at a specific time. Based on how much you set your budget for, it will determine how many times you will win the auctions determining whether your ad will be shown to potential clients. The cost of ads vary based on demographics and demand within that particular category, so it is necessary to, at the very least, review the suggestions provided by Facebook regarding structuring the budget for ads to gain more clients for your cleaning business.
Formatting and Designing Your Ad
Selecting an objective, clarifying the target audience, selecting ad location, and implementing a budget are the initial steps that will provide the foundation for your ad. Be sure to dedicate ample time to the foundational steps prior to jumping into the formatting and design of your ad. Facebook offers a variety of formats to assist in creating an ad that will stand out to users.
Facebook ads are capable of including video, images, and words, or a combination thereof. Six design features are available to select from to present your business’s Facebook ad to users. Photo and video ads all your business to create engaging imagery to capture potential client’s interest. Photo ads are an excellent option to drive traffic to a site. Creating a photo ad is simple and can be accomplished in minutes. When creating photo ads, be sure to choose a singular focal point and maintain a consistent and aesthetically pleasing theme. Most importantly, be sure that the images used in the ad are high-resolution images.
With video ads, much of the recommendations remain the same as those indicated for photo ads. Video ads can be inserted within videos users are already watching, within a user’s news feed, or as an individualized Facebook Story. In addition, video ads offer multiple variations within the category to reach more clients for your cleaning business. One option is to use the slideshow feature, which will use images and texts to rotate through a series of images. In addition to the slideshow feature, Facebook also offers the opportunity to select Carousel, which will incorporate two or more videos in conjunction with photographs.
There are many examples of how the Carousel option can be used to advertise your cleaning business. One possibility is that you may choose to include before and after photos of successful cleaning jobs combined with short clips of the cleaning process shown at double speed. Carousel ads allow the insertion of creativity that will increase the odds that users will click on your ad. While photo and video ads can provide vivid imagery for users, a combination of both can elicit an even greater response from users as the movement captures the user’s attention as they are scrolling through Facebook. Creating a memorable Carousel will motivate users to click through to your website.
Another great design that can be selected for your ad is the Collection option. By selecting Collection as the ad design, your business will have the capability of displaying services directly for users to view. If a user taps a specific service, they can be taken to your website to learn more about the service provided. This is a somewhat out-of-the-box method of thinking for advertising using Facebook ads to gain more clients for your cleaning business. Typically Collection ads are used by companies attempting to sell specific products. It is vital to understand that when properly applied, this can translate to promote particular services. For example, you may have one preview that is specific for a single-room cleaning and another that encompasses a whole-house clean, etcetera.
Placing Your Ad and Monitoring Performance
Once you have completed the design process and placed your order for your ad, you may think you have reached the end of the process. This is not so. Placing an ad is great, but if you do not continuously monitor the progress and performance of the ad, you run the risk of making unnecessary financial sacrifices. For example, if you have created an ad campaign and are paying for the ad insertions but receiving minimal clicks, monitoring the performance will allow you to see the poor success of the ad and make changes as needed. If you place the ad campaign and forget about it, you will likely return to find that you have not acquired many new clients for your cleaning business.
Facebook describes the management of your ad campaigns as a Facebook measurement. If a business or individual runs ads on Facebook, they are granted access to this free tool. Facebook measurement can be accessed via the web or through the mobile app. Within Facebook measurements, you will have the capability to review breakdowns of anonymized data to understand your audiences’ demographics.
When reviewing the performance of your ad campaign, you will want to understand the definition of attribution. Attribution is defined as the process by which credit is assigned to marketing touchpoints of the client’s journey, leading to a conversion or other desired action by the client. In laymen’s terms, it is a method to determine which ads have generated the most significant results. Using this information, you can update your ad campaign and reduce unnecessary financing of ad campaigns that are not producing new clients for your cleaning business.
Another method Facebook provides for measuring the success of your ad campaign is known as A/B testing. With this option, you can compare two different ad strategies so that future campaigns are optimized. With A/B testing, you make hypothetical changes, so they will not be saved to your current ad campaign. Their purpose is intended to illustrate which strategy will provide the best performance for your ad campaign. Facebook also has an added feature that allows estimating the cost per result to give you a better idea of a reasonable budget for your ad campaign. For example, gaining new clients for your cleaning business will sometimes require adjustment to the ad campaigns you have created. However, you may not want to make changes if you feel unsure how those changes will affect potential user engagement. The use of A/B testing will allow you to make changes to individual variables to better predict which changes to implement within your current ad campaign.
It is crucial to continuously monitor the progress of your ad campaign over time. By continuously monitoring the progress, you will always be aware of any changes in typical user engagement that may warrant alterations in your ad campaign design or other elements. Maintaining an ad campaign that is fresh and up to date is also of essential importance. When possible, create new ad campaigns monthly to ensure the quality and relevance of the information presented. There may be instances in which new ad campaigns are required more frequently. In these cases, resist the urge to reuse ad campaign material from past Facebook ad campaigns.
Overall, gaining more clients for your cleaning business can be accomplished in many ways. One method that has recently gained traction is running Facebook ads to promote your product or services. If the intent is to gain more clients for your cleaning business, Facebook ads can provide the platform necessary to reach individuals within your specific niche. Beginning by selecting your objective and target audience, you begin to lay the foundation for your Facebook ad. Here, it is imperative that appropriate selections are made, as these will hugely determine who is exposed to your Facebook ad. Selecting where to run your ad follows the solidifying of the ad objective and targeted audience. Facebook offers many possibilities for where an ad can be run. Of most noticeable impact are likely to be within a user’s news feed and within Facebook Marketplace. Next, and likely of most significant importance to the business owner, is the creation of a budget. Facebook allows ad purchasers to specify budget amounts that can span an ad campaign. Though users can choose their budget, it is wise to view analytics to understand the typical range for ads since Facebook uses auctions to determine when an ad is displayed. Once the foundation is laid, you will be able to design and format your ad as desired. Creativity can be unleashed during the design and formatting process so that users will feel compelled to click on your business’s ad and find out more about your services. The more creative your format and design, the more likely it is that users will click on your ad. Once your ad has been completed and ordered, remember to continuously monitor the results and implement changes as needed. Following these steps will ensure you will gain more clients for your cleaning business.