Paid Social Ad Management for Contractors

If you struggle with a lack of awareness with your audience, minimal search volume in your category, or highly competitive search marketing your business can benefit greatly from moving into paid social advertising. It’s essential to take your marketing to where your audience is, and right now they’re all looking at their Instagram Feeds.

You can achieve any objective from awareness to leads to sales using channels like Facebook or Instagram to advertise in, and it can be done efficiently.

Although they are managed in the same advertising platform, Facebook Ads Manager, they have pretty unique characteristics.

How about audiences? 

Who Uses Social Media – Pew Research

Facebook is considered to have an older audience, which is true, but this is a little bit deceptive. Most people between 18-29 (88%) use Facebook, they just have a tendency to use it less – and they also use Instagram (59%). Whereas 79% and 61% of 30-49 year olds & 50-54 year olds use Facebook – but only 31% & 13% use Instagram. You’re getting good audience penetration using just Facebook, but if you want to capture and hold the attention of a larger audience under 29 you need to be in both platforms.

How about ad types? 

Facebook allows us to use lead ads and has multiple placements in the news feed and right-column, ads are 1200×628. You can use static or video ads, as well as carousel (series of slides), canvas (expandable mobile experience), or collections (an ad with multiple products showcased below it).

In Instagram we can place ads in feed, static or video, ads are 1080×1080 – and we can use Instagram Stories ads shot 9:16. There are no lead ads, but we can still drive traffic to your site to create leads and sales.

It can be, but it’s often less expensive for driving site visits than AdWords (where competition can drive very high CPC’s); the issue becomes comparing the conversion rate of the lower cost paid social traffic to the higher cost (but more intent-driven) search engine advertising. LinkedIn is considered to be the most expensive social media platform, whereas channels like Reddit have a $1 CPM (every one-thousand ad views costs ~$1!)

You can give it a shot! It can be inexpensive, it offers lead ads and some decent creative options. However, Twitter advertising is less sophisticated in it’s targeting than other platforms and doesn’t have the financial targeting (net worth, income, etc) of a platform like Facebook. Twitter is typically a channel we work in as a test to see if it works for your business. If you want to connect with a more tech-savvy audience, it could be a fit.

Pinterest offers search and video ads, as well as buyable pins for the e-commerce minded. Traffic is considered more high-funnel, but they can often be buyers. If you’re trying to get product sales and have a female-centric audience it’s the perfect channel to advertise in; however, it’s not much of a B2B channel.

The answer is exactly what you would expect, it depends! You should be prepared to spend at least $3,000-$5,000 in advertising minimum to evaluate the long-term potential of a new advertising venture. This can be spread out over anything from a week, to several months, but keep in mind the faster the rate at which you spend, the faster you will collect more data to determine viability and optimize.

Yes. Lots of them. Facebook is an excellent channel for driving both leads and sales, you are able to target your audience in ways that are somewhat startling. Need to advertise only to men over 35 in Minnesota who own homes and make over $100k annually? Done. You’ll have a hard time doing it anyway but IN Facebook.