Facebook is a valuable – and FREE – marketing tool for contractors that can help you build customer relationships and gain new leads. If you are ready to move beyond the included elements that Facebook offers, dark ads are a paid option that can put your business profile in front of thousands of new prospective customers and still cost only a fraction of what you pay for print advertising. Best of all, you are able to customize what kinds of ads appear in front of people of chosen demographics. For contractors, dark ads can significantly increase your online selling success.
Facebook for Contractors
Contractors have great opportunities on Facebook for building relationships with customers and sharing images of your work with prospective clients. Don’t limit yourself to pictures of the finished project. Take snapshots of your clients happily enjoying their new space and tag them in the photo. That automatically puts you in front of each one of their Facebook friends and well as your own, and your work is featured in an extremely positive light.
Use Facebook to create a connection with your customers by providing them with information that is useful to them, not just sales material that you would like them to be interested in. Share information that they can use that does not benefit you as a business, besides building a good relationship. For example, a blog on home winterizing tips or fall landscaping. Feel free to follow up these posts with information on your services that could help, but not in the same post.
Contractor Dark Ads on Facebook
Dark ads can help you reach out to more prospective clients while using your Facebook page to build loyalty and exclusivity with your existing customers. Also known as unpublished posts, dark ads are items that you can share on Facebook but limit who sees them. This enables you to customize different posts for various demographics and avoid inundating your followers with posts that are not relevant to them.
For example, if you have a special that you would like to promote to new families and another that is dedicated to empty nesters, you can choose only those people to see each post rather than putting ads in front of people that aren’t relevant to them. Since the risk of being unfriended or unfollowed exists if your posts become too much of what people do not want to see, dark ads are incredibly valuable for Facebook marketing that avoids becoming a nuisance.
While you can create groups and post to specific followers among those who are already your friends, dark ads allow you to personalize status updates that show up as ads to people who do not already follow you. If you carefully craft these posts and choose your target audience wisely, these posts can significantly increase your Facebook followers, who will hopefully eventually become paying clients.
These posts do not clutter up your timeline and profile, but only appear in the news stream of the demographic that you have chosen. This means that your followers find the helpful posts that they are looking for when they visit your page rather than a stream of ads.
Dark ads can also be used for testing marketing messages. You can play around with various posts and measure which are the most effective before choosing one for wider distribution. Ads with images tend to be the most effective, and a link to more information is always preferred over a lengthy post.
Dark Ad Follow Up
Once you have created posts targeting specific groups, make sure that you follow up with posts that will continue to appeal to them. Your organic posts need to be broad interest enough to appeal to a majority of your followers. Anything that is likely to appeal only to a fraction of your followers should be designed as a dark post and targeted to the appropriate audience. With a cleverly designed dark post campaign, you can develop an exceptionally successful marketing campaign with no larger investment than the time spent crafting your message and posting schedule.
It is important to continue maintaining your public posts while creating your dark posts. When you do attract new followers, they will want to see fresh material and evidence of an interactive page within the content of your timeline. Remember that your dark posts will not show up on your profile, so if that is all you are posting new visitors will not see any evidence of communication between you and your followers.