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A Quick Guide to Facebook Ads for Lawn Care: Pt. 2

Published on April 16, 2019

This is part 2 of 3 in a series about creating Facebook Ads for lawn care.P

“I know Facebook Ads help generate better profits, but how do I create the ads?”

You can rest assured knowing that you’re not the only one asking this question.

Facebook Ads can get complicated… but with this step-by-step guide, you’ll be a pro in no time at all!

This article will teach you:

  • How Facebook Ads work
  • How to create Facebook Ads (step-by-step)
  • Free resources that’ll help you

This step-by-step guide will show you the secrets to profitable Facebook Advertising:

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Step 1: Create Your Facebook Pixel

The Facebook pixel (or cookie) is the key to all great Facebook Advertising.

It allows you to measure the success of your campaigns, and test other campaigns against each other.

This video will walk you through how to quickly do it:

If you have access to the back end of your website, you can do this yourself. Otherwise, get your Web Developer to do it for you.

Step 2: Choose Your Objective

Navigate to your Ads Manager. You can find it under this drop-down menu on your Page:

FacebookAdsManagerLawnCare

Once inside, you’ll probably see a big blank screen like this:

BlankAdsManagerLawnCare

…a big, blank canvas.

Which we’ll soon be using to generate tons of new clients.

Click the green “create campaign” button.

And it will populate a list of campaign types, or objectives, for you:

Lawn Care Campaign Types Facebook Ads

Whichever one you choose, Facebook’s advertising algorithm will automatically optimize your campaigns for your chosen objective. This means:

  • Traffic campaign: Facebook will serve your ads to people it thinks are most likely to visit your website.
  • Conversion campaign: it will serve ads to people it thinks will most likely buy your services.

… However, there’s still plenty you can do on your end to make sure your ads turn a healthy profit.

LawnCareFacebookAdExample1

An example Facebook Ad for your lawn care business. Feel free to steal any of these ideas!

Which Objective Should You Choose?

Traffic: gets more people to your website. This will help your lawn care SEO, and there is the potential these views become clients.

  • Great for boosting your SEO or getting more name-brand recognition.

Lead Generation: used to get immediate information from potential clients, such as names, email addresses, and phone numbers.

  • A truly successful lead generation campaign gives away something for free. This can be through sweepstakes, gift cards or even a simple, one-page for spring perennials will work.

Conversion: encourages people to hire you as soon as they click.

  • This is the campaign type we’ll focus on in this post.

After you click the “Conversion” objective, Facebook will prompt you to tell it what counts as a conversion. It’ll track the conversions via pixel you placed on your website.

FacebookAdConversionforLawnCare

For a local lawn care business, 9 times out of 10 you will want the “conversion” to be a page on your website – for example, the “Thank You” page after a client signs up. So make sure you have the pixel placed on your Thank You Page.

Step 3: Choose Your Audience

Frankly, this is the main reason to use Facebook.

You can do so many things with this tool:

  • Create audiences based on interests (like home care, lawn mowing, or landscaping services)
  • Tell Facebook to target people like your current fans and clients
  • Target everybody in a specific area

I encourage you to play around with all of the options here.

Start by building your own custom audience, and try to get the number on the right side as high as you can…

LawnCareCustomAudienceFacebookforLandscaping

…unless you live in a Metroplex like Dallas or Toronto. You want to get your audience as close to 600,000 – 1 Million as you can.

FacebookLandscapingAudienceSize

Potential Audience size: 230,000,000 – That’s way too big.

What age and gender should you target?

Gender: Both.

Age: 30+

If you’ve never created an audience before, you should make it as broad as possible. All genders, all languages, and as many interests related to your field as possible.

Later – after you’ve got a few dozen clicks – you can go back and look at the demographic data.

Facebook will show you the kinds of people who want to engage with your ads. Are they mostly women or men? What age are they?

Then, you can hone your ads to better target your ideal clients.

Detailed Targeting

Here, you get to further narrow down your audience. This section allows you to target them based on their interests, which can’t be done on any other platform.

The most important detail here: Make sure you choose specific Demographics and Interests for more detailed targeting. Find out who you’re marketing to and pick those details based on that.

Beyond that, it’s hard to say what your clients have in common. Start by advertising broadly.  

Once you’ve built up some traffic and engagement, you can use Facebook’s Audience Insights to see what your clients’ interests are.  

Step 4: Your Placements and Your Budget

Ad placements are easy.

I almost always choose “automatic placements,” because Facebook will optimize based on which placements yield better results.

Anything more would probably require a full-time marketer working for your lawn care business.

Your Budget: Facebook Ads on $5 a Day?

Yup. You can start seeing results with just $5 per day.

In fact, it’s probably best for most lawn and landscaping companies to start with a small Facebook Ads budget…

…because that gives you the most time to figure out what’s working, and what isn’t.

You can always adjust your budget whenever you want.

Best Practice: don’t increase your budget by more than 50% every 3 days. The algorithm needs time to work, and if you throw too much money in all at once… you won’t see your best ROI.

I recommend setting an end date for your ads, that way if you forget about them… you won’t end up wasting $100s on ads that aren’t working.

Set your “bid amount” to automatic.

Unless you know your prices and client lifetime value to the decimal point. In that case, you can choose your “maximum cost per conversion” amount.

Step 4: How to Create a Facebook Ad (that Actually Generates Clients)

Facebook judges ads based on a relevance score:

  • Positive reactions
  • Negative reactions
  • How many people ignore your ad?

After your “Audience,” your images and copywriting will have the biggest effect on your relevance score.

More engaging pictures and copywriting = more successful ads.

What Format Should You Choose?

Each Facebook Ad format serves a different purpose. I’ll try to outline what each one can do for a lawn care or landscaping business:

An example of a carousel ad for lawn care:

CarouselLandscapingAdFacebookLawnCare

1. Carousel

Great for showing off your best jobs. Carousels are multiple images that users have to swipe through.

Pro Tip: This is a great way to advertise multiple services. Each image or video in the Carousel can have its own link, so you can have an image and a link for each service.

2. Single Image

The easiest ad type to create, and frequently the most eye-catching. Your copywriting will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting around this ad.

Pro Tip: Make your image pop as much as possible. Try to avoid making it look like an ad. Focus on one simple, unique element and exaggerate that element.

3. Single Video

Perfect for when you have a visual message that needs audio. We use these a lot to ask questions, generate engagement, and generally make people aware of our brand – or our special, limited offers.

Pro tip: You don’t need to make high budget videos to have a successful ad.

Pull out your phone and record your next project.

Speed it up, and explain the process with text overlays or subtitles. Sort of like this:

End your video with a “call to action” – such as “Get Your New Deck Built Today!”

4. Slideshow

Very similar to Carousel ads, except these will automatically scroll through the images without the user’s interaction. Think of it as a silent video told in pictures.

Pro Tip: Try to tell a story with your series of images. Show a project going from Before > In Progress > Complete. Highlight the problems, and how you fixed them.

5. Collection

This ad type shows off a “collection” of images, all on one screen. It’s best used for selling specific products.

For Lawn Care and Landscaping Owners: I recommend ignoring this one. The carousel and slideshow ads will serve your purposes better most of the time. However, it never hurts to test for yourself.

6. Canvas (Fullscreen Experience)

Great for capturing clients who live on their phones and other mobile devices. Start by checking out the huge variety of templates, and see which one would work for your business.

Pro Tip: Try to include faces, and especially smiles, in your images. Years of marketing research have proven that people can’t help but enjoy photos with smiles in them.

LawnCareFacebookMobileAdCanvas

Writing a Great “Lawn Care Business” Facebook Ad

What does a knockout headline look like?

Short and juicy. Keep your headlines under 11 words.

Our most successful ads use 7 words or fewer in the headline. We also try to focus on the one, powerful benefit – instead of simply saying “buy now!”

Your Ad Text?

This text shows up right above your image or video.

Keep this short. Use it to expand on the benefit represented in your headline.

News Feed Link Description?

Shows up above the image.

Make it as long as it needs to be. If you’re going to write more than 25 words here, I suggest putting several links to your offer in as well.

Step 5: Publish (and Test) Your Ads

When you’re happy with your ad…

Publish it! Don’t worry, you can change anything about it at any time.

Remember: you should always test ads against each other.

I’ve found that by just changing a few words in the headline, or swapping out pictures… I can see a 3x as much traffic or a 75% decrease in costs.

Testing Ads on Facebook is also exceptionally simple:

  • Go to your Ads Manager,
  • Find your ad
  • Hit “duplicate”
  • Change whatever you want to test

Best practice for testing: only change one thing at a time. Let your post get at least 200 clicks, (or 2000 reach) before you decide to kill a test.

One Final Tip for Growing Your Business on Facebook

Facebook ads – and marketing in general – work best as a funnel.

  1. You make people aware that you exist.
  2. You show them you are valuable to them.
  3. You give them a compelling reason to become a client.

Your Facebook campaigns should mirror this funnel:

  1. Start with a broad, traffic campaign for an interesting piece of content (a video, a “drought watering guide,” etc.)
  2. Next, build a lead generation campaign to capture their info
  3. Finally, you can retarget those people with an ad about your latest limited offer – and tell them to “Sign up now!”

Retargeting is key to incredibly successful Facebook marketing, even in the lawn and landscape industry. Make use of your custom audiences to retarget, and you’ll see a steep increase in your conversion rates.

Soon, you’ll have more clients than you can handle.

When that happens, make sure you stop back here and check out the best lawn care software in the industry. Service Autopilot will help you:

  • Manage your clients and jobs
  • Invoice and route automatically
  • Build a richer, healthier lawn care business

Conclusion

In order to maximize your lawn care business’ potential growth, it’s important you start utilizing Facebook Ads.

This article will show you:

  • The ins and outs of Facebook Ads
  • How to create Facebook Ads
  • How to best use Facebook’s insights to your advantage

If you’re looking to grow your lawn care business and lower your cost of acquisition, start using Facebook Ads, TODAY.


A Quick Guide to Facebook Ads for Lawn Care: Pt. 1

A Quick Guide to Facebook Ads for Lawn Care: Pt. 3


Updated April 16, 2019 7:00 AM

Alyssa Sanders

Alyssa is the Team Lead of Content Marketing at Xplor Field Services. When she's not writing or creating content, you can find her watching a new sci-fi series or shoving her nose into a book.
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