by /
Dalworth Restoration is a damage restoration company around the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In the past, They were pulling $70 in spend with a CPF (cost per fan) of between $3 and $23 across 3 campaigns. 3 promoted posts didn’t do much.
We followed a 3 campaign strategy of audience, engagement, and conversion, neatly tending and applying “miracle-gro” to our audience garden.
So our first campaign is for fan acquisition.
We are starting with traditional page like ads (headline, images, descriptions) and sponsored stories (page like ads). 108,000 people 24+ within 50 miles of Euless who are friends of fans of Dalworth Restoration.
Including the phone number generally isn’t as effective in driving conversions, but it may drive some phone calls that don’t have associated clicks. If you’re wanting to measure phone conversion, you can set up multiple tracking codes passed through the URL like Dalworth did, displaying different numbers for each campaign.
Try some other combos– likely relying more on page like stories (which don’t require you to come up with body copy).
So we now have 5 ads– four standard ads that rotate through these four images and one sponsored story (that uses a friend’s endorsement).
To be able to target homeowners (since renters are not likely to call a restoration service), we must replicate this ad in Power Editor. There are now 1,063 partner category targets available.
There are 69 million homeowners in the US, a subset of which are in the DFW metroplex. We also have renters, recent homeowners, and property value ranges. Sometimes Facebook’s audience estimator doesn’t provide the counts.
For now, we chose “all Facebook” for the placement, since CPF will likely not differ significantly. For engagement and conversion ads, we will want to separate these out, especially if we are sending people to the website, which may or may not be mobile friendly. We can choose to not show on mobile or not show on the RHS (right hand side).
We got the initial ad approvals back within a few minutes of submission. The more spend history you have and the longer you’ve had your account, the faster your ads are approved. In the early days, before Facebook had ad operations teams in different countries, it would sometimes take days to get ads approved.
The heart of our campaigns is on engagement (named 2_engagement), where we have “always on” ads that promote the most recent post into the newsfeed.
We set a budget of $20 a day, which should be more than enough to cover this. Of the 893 fans, we can expect that half will be online each day (about 450), which will cost us about $5 a day to reach. Setting a budget that is above the actual spend is unlikely to hurt us, since Facebook limits newsfeed frequency.
Without turning these on, our organic posts are getting only 50-60 people to see them.
Above, we see that we got only 54 people out of 893 fans to see it, which is 6%– normal. But with the engagement ads that are always on, we can expect 35-50%, which is 6-8 times better.
We have one ad that is always on, targeting just the newsfeed.
We are targeting just homeowners within 50 miles of Euless that have home values north of $150,000. Interestingly, in the United States there are 133,100 folk who have home values above $2MM we can target on Facebook.
By targeting homeowners who are also connected with people who are fans of Dalworth Rug Cleaning and Dalworth Restoration, we chop the audience from 220,000 down to just 5,600. As the audience campaign does its job, the social reach (the number of folks we can reach who have a social connection), increases. Right now we’re at 5%, but would like to be at 50% by the end of 2014.
Custom audiences are the most powerful feature of Facebook ads, since we can upload existing lists of customers to be matched and targeted on Facebook, plus find look-alike customers (people who are not customers, but have similar characteristics of existing customers).
We’ll create a separate set of campaigns for Dalworth Rug Cleaning, but still use property managers and insurance agents for Dalworth Restoration.
By the way, it’s okay to have multiple pages listed in the “friend of fans” connections box, which is hidden under “advanced connection targeting”.
We don’t have conversion campaigns set up yet, since we need to have marketing automation place to collect emails and then nurture prospects. Need something like Infusionsoft here to be smart about managing this funnel.
“It’s not the fan count that matters, but the quality of the engagement and how this turns into eventual conversion. We see social as an assist to other channels.” Says Evan Islam, who handles marketing at Dalworth.
Readers, how do you grow your audience? Have any experience/advice to share?
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is co-author of the #1 best-selling book on Amazon in social media, The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads. He has spent a billion dollars on Facebook ads across his agencies and agencies he advises. Mr. Yu is the "million jobs" guy-- on a mission to create one million jobs via hands-on social media training, partnering with universities and professional organizations.You can find him quoted in major publications and on television such as CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, and LA Times. Clients have included Nike, Red Bull, the Golden State Warriors, Ashley Furniture, Quiznos-- down to local service businesses like real estate agents and dentists. He's spoken at over 750 conferences in 20 countries, having flown over 6 million miles in the last 30 years to train up young adults and business owners. He speaks for free as long as the organization believes in the job-creation mission and covers business class travel.You can find him hiking tall mountains, eating chicken wings, and taking Kaqun oxygen baths-- likely in a city near you.