The Ultimate Guide to using Facebook Ads to get New Customers for your Local Business.

Today, I want to write a post that has been on my mind for a while.

There are so many great businesses out there struggling because they don’t have a well defined process to get customers through the door. If that’s the case for your business (or a business that you’re helping to grow), you’ll want to make sure that you save this article.

This post is going to be a step-by-step walkthrough of a process that I’ve used to help thousands of local business owners over the years.

If you’re a small business owner, someone that works at a small business that you love, or a marketing professional who helps small businesses grow, this post is what you’ve been looking for.

It’s all about how I finally figured out how to run Facebook Ads to get new customers into Brick-and-mortar businesses.

How I discovered this unique Facebook Ad System (hint: I spent way to much money screwing it up first).

Before I was a full time digital agency owner that helped small business owners from all over the planet, I made my living as a Chiropractor. I loved that gig, but it didn’t come without it’s challenges.

The biggest challenge I faced as a Chiropractor and Brick-and-mortar business owner was getting new customers through the door the first time.

I didn’t have a ton of money to spend on marketing back in those days, but I tried a lot of things that I was told would help my business grow.

Some of the things I did to grow my Chiropractic Office:

• Radio Advertising.
• TV Advertising.
• Newspaper Ads.
• Yellowbook Ads.
• Going to every Business Social Gathering I could.
• Becoming (a very active) member of the local Chamber of Commerce.
• Direct Mail.

I’m not here to tell you that all of that stuff didn’t work to some extent. It was just expensive and the results were never consistent. The worst part of all of it was that it took a lot of my time to do (which pulled me away from treating patients).

The Reason I turned to the Internet to Grow my Business.

I started trying to figure out marketing myself on the internet because it was much cheaper and it allowed me to reach more people in a day, then I was able to reach in an entire month using all of the above.

And that’s where I discovered Facebook Ads.

I started testing Facebook ads the day that they became available (yes… I’ve been doing this for way longer than I’d like to admit… lol). Let me perfectly up front with you about that process.

I failed miserably the first 25 times that I tried to run a Facebook Ad to grow my little Chiropractic Office.

The Reason my Early Facebook Ads Failed

I didn’t realize it right away, but looking back there were 3 core reasons that my early Facebook Ads didn’t get off the ground.

Why my Office’s Early FB Ads Failed:

1. My early offers were Boring.
   Simply put, not every offer is the kind of thing that will get someones attention. When I first started putting together Facebook Ads, I was guilty of putting together offers that people just didn’t care about.
   
   I quickly learned that you have to offer something really unexpected and that has a high perceived value to your audience. (I would fix this later and I’ll talk more about it below)
   
   
2. I was running my Ads to a General Audience.
   When I finally nailed down my offers, and things started to get attention, I ran into another problem. I wasn’t getting as much interest for my offer because I was trying to put it in front of as many people as possible.
   
   As a result of this “too general” targeting, I ended up spending a ton of money putting my office in front of people that I would never convert into actual paying customers (I’ll show you how I fixed that below).
   
   
3. When someone did act on an offer, I didn’t follow up correctly.
   When I finally started targeting the right people and put the right offer in front of them, I got frustrated for another reason. People would sign up for the offer online, but then they would get lost in the shuffle and never call or come in to claim the offer (thus defeating the purpose of the whole account and wasting a ton of money)
   
   I didn’t realize until later how important it was to give interested potential customers a subtle reminder to claim what they had said they wanted (or several subtle reminders).
   
   I’ll explain the process of how I finally fixed that too.

How I finally figured out my Facebook Ad Problem.

No… finally figuring out how to get new customers into my business probably wasn’t as momentous as when Doc Brown discovered time travel… but it felt like it to me 🙂

I messed up a lot trying to make my ads work.

Somewhere along the way, however, I figured out a process that worked.

Once I dialed in the process, nothing was ever the same in my office. I was able to get new customers into my Chiropractic office on Demand (and I later figured out that this exact process works for all kinds of businesses.

Below, you’re going to see the exact steps that it takes to ACTUALLY GET customers with Facebook Ads.

A Warning:
What you’re about to read is going to fill your business with customers if you do it right (and if you feel like you’re not doing something right or don’t understand something, feel free to message me and I’ll help you get it right.

The 11 Step Process that I use to get new customers for small businesses using Facebook Ads.

This is going to be an in depth documentation of exactly what I do. Because of that, I built a handy little table of contents so that you can navigate easily to each section of the process.

Click any of the links below to jump directly to that part of the post.

Table of Contents

• Step 1: Deciding on an audience to target.
• Step 2: Finding the “situation you audience is in” to target more effectively.
• Step 3: Picking an offer that solves their problem.
• Step 4: Creating a Landing Page.
• Step 5: Creating a Thank you Page.
• Step 6: Creating the Facebook Ad.
• Step 7: The follow up SMS Message.
• Step 8: The 2 follow up Emails.
• Step 9: Using call recording for quality control.
• Step 10: Following up if they don’t call.
• Step 11: How to make money with your free offer.
• Bonus: How I set up all of the above in minutes (a big shortcut).

Let’s dig in and let me show you how this all works…

One of the number one mistakes that all businesses make (I was guilty of this myself at first… even though I knew better) is to not focus on a small group of people.

It’s an easy mistake to make.

We all want to see as many customers as possible and we think that if we run an ad or promotion that is geared to only one kind of customer, that we’ll scare other customers away.

Scaring Customers away is good (really)

That’s true. That’s exactly how it works. Successful businesses, however, make it an everyday practice to scare customers away.

That may sound extremely frightening if you’re in the trenches right now and doing everything you can to make ends meet, but there is good news.

The Big Lightbulb Moment for my Business.

My Chiropractic office didn’t truly start to grow until I stopped trying to get everyone to become a patient.

When I finally stopped focusing on the needs of everyone, and started focusing on servicing a smaller group, my business started exploding.

Here’s why Niching Down is your Answer.

When you start marketing to just one kind of client, you become known as the specialist for that type of client. Not only will they see you as their only option, they’ll tell their friends.

Niching down your business to only target one kind of person is the only way that you’ll become a business that people talk about.There are rare exceptions to this rule, but 99% of businesses out there will never succeed by being a “catch all”.

The businesses that succeed and thrive are the ones that focus on serving one type of client to the best of their ability. Thus, they become the only option in the eyes of those types of clients.

An Example:
When I first opened up my Chiropractic office, I would market to everyone. If you had a spine, I wanted you. Because of that, it was extremely hard to stand out over the noise that the other “general focused” Chiropractors were making.

The change came when I started focusing my practice on one type of client.

I started aiming all of my marketing efforts (and products) at serving females around the age 35. All of my ads started discussing issues that affected them. All of my products and services were aimed at helping them.

Did I lose out on some potential new business? yes.

Did I gain more than enough business to make up for that lost business and then a ton more? ABSOLUTELY.

The reason?
I became known as the person that was the EXPERT at serving that demographic (while all of the other Doctors were left wondering why females around the age of 35 were leaving them to come see me)

All that said…
It wasn’t just focusing on females around the age of 35 that helped me grow faster. I also started running ads that focused on situations that those types of patients were going through.

Make sure you pay attention to step 2. This will change everything about how you market your business.

Step 2: Finding the “situation you audience is in” to target more effectively.

Once you decide on exactly who you want to turn into customers for your business, you have to start paying attention to what they are going through.

Some questions to ask yourself:

• What is my Niche Audience’s biggest problem?
• How can I help them fix that problem?
• What does their day-to-day look like?
• What are some other related problems I can help with?
• What is their greatest worry
  (even if it doesn’t relate to the service you provide and you can’t solve that problem directly)?

When you start to understand how to tie your business into what your audience is going through and a unique situation that only applies to them, you can do some amazing marketing (especially on Facebook).

Let me give you an example of how to do this.
In my Chiropractic office, I didn’t just run ads that were targeted at Females that were around the age of 35 years old. I ran ads that spoke to them about the situations they were going through.

I knew they were:

1. Moms of toddlers or Grade Schoolers.
2. Had demanding schedules that kept them running all over the place.
3. Most likely the keepers of their household.
   (the actual boss at home that kept everything running)
4. Most likely the gatekeepers of their families healthcare.
5. Worried about their Husbands health.
6. Uniquely open to treating themselves to deal with all of the above.
7. Dealing with their kids schools, schoolwork, and ultimate success as a young human being.
8. Dealing with the job and actively trying to further their career (while doing all of the other things above).
9. Worried about maintaining their physical appearance.
10. Worried about maintaining their physical health.
11. Worried about their own mental health.

Knowing the above about my target audience was a huge factor in why my ads were successful. If I understood the above, I could really speak to my audience and make them understand that I was their only choice when they needed help.

Understanding the above situations that they were going through also allowed me to build attractive offers that would get them in my business the first time (and get them to come back often).

What is your ideal prospect going through right now?
What situations are they dealing with daily that you can use to speak to them and show them that you understand them?

Once you know those things, it’s time to start crafting an offer that will be hard for them to resist.

Step 3: Picking an offer that solves their problem.

Now that we’ve defined the demographic that we’re targeting and really dug into a few of the situations that they face on a daily basis, it’s time to craft an offer that will be something that is hard for them to refuse.

The key is to speak to them as directly as possible.

Here’s my most successful Chiropractic Facebook Ad Offer.

I crafted a lot of offers to grow my Chiropractic office over the years, but the most successful one was hyper focused.

The offer can be broken down as follows:

• Aimed at Females around the age of 35.
• Aimed specifically at Mom’s of Grade school kids.
• We give a free chair massage from our massage therapist.
• The ad specifically states that the massage is a Salute to all working Moms who are currently running like crazy to take care of their kids.
• The ad specifically states that we appreciate them and wanted to provide this public service to them for free (more on how this “freebie” turns into money spent at your business below).

Some important things to note about this offer:

• It is a 15 minute chair massage.
• It is administered by our massage therapist.
• The goal is to get them to come into our business the first time.
• We use this to make an amazing first impression.
• I make sure that I say hello when they come in.
• We make sure that we make an offer to them before they leave (more on that soon).
• Most importantly, this offer is extremely low cost to deliver but it carries a high perceived value to our target audience.

In short… This offer is tailored for our audience and it is an extremely low cost way to get our ideal customer through the door the first time (and give them a big incentive to come back a second time).

The Big “2x Secret” of this Process

The most important thing for any small business is to build systems that get new customers to come in two times. If you can get someone to come in your business twice, and deliver an above average experience, the odds are high that they will be your customer for life.

That said, everything that we do from this point is designed to get the customer to come into our business twice.

Now that we have an offer, what’s next?

I hope that you’re already getting some ideas on some offers that you can offer in your business.

From here we have a great offer that is going to attract a ton of our ideal customers, now we just have to get it in front of people. To do that we are going to need to build some webpages to talk about the offer.

Let’s talk about what those pages should look like (don’t worry, these are simpler than you think they would be).

Step 4: Creating a Landing Page.

First things first…

What is a Landing Page and why do we need it?

A landing page is simply a web page that we’re going to use to explain what our offer is and why we’re making the offer.

This page serves as a simple explanation of what the offer is and explains to our target costumer why it’s good for them.

A good landing page should do the following:

• Tell them who we are.
• Tell them what we’ve got for them.
• Convey why they should care.
• Tell them what to do next (call to action).

You’ll see all kinds of landing pages out there when you start looking. When I first starting marketing my business online, I made it way too complicated. The landing pages that were the most effective however, always seemed to be the simplest.

Below you can see an example of a landing page that we use to target females around the age of 35 (who are the Mom’s of grade school kids). This page is simple and explains the offer in as few words as possible.

You can use a variety of web page creators to build something like this. If you aren’t overly technical, you will need help to make all of the pieces work (unless you use the shortcut we’ll talk about at the end).

Once we create the landing page to explain the offer and capture their information, we need a page for them to land on once they submit their info.

Step 5: Creating a Thank you Page.

A good “thank you page” does a few core things well.

First, it has to let the person know that they successfully did what we asked.

Besides that…
A good thank you page does some very important things:

1. It tells the prospect what to do next.
2. It reinforces the scarcity behind the offer
   They don’t just get the offer because they put in their info. Now they need to do one more thing in order to claim what they told us they wanted (schedule an appointment).
3. It makes a secondary offer that sweetens the deal.
   You’ll notice in the example below that we make a second offer for those that call in now.

Here is the Thank You Page for our “Grade School” Campaign:

You can use a variety of web page creators to build something like this. If you aren’t overly technical, you will need help to make all of the pieces work (unless you use the shortcut we’ll talk about at the end).

Once we create the thank you page to encourage them to act now, we need an ad to put our pages in front of our ideal audience.

Step 6: Creating the Facebook Ad.

Now that we’ve got the webpages ready, it’s time to dip into the ad that drives traffic to it. We should also talk about the targeting for these ads.

Below you can see an example of how we set this up for our “Mom’s Campaign”.

The Image we use for the ad.

The above image is simple.

We’re not trying to everything with this image. The main focus is for it to pop off the page and get attention. Once we’ve done that, we can use the ad copy to tell our prospects exactly what to do next. (more on that below).

The Ad Targeting.

I will be the first to confess that I hate having to constantly mess with my ads targeting. For this reason, we always try to make sure that we are doing something that I call “dynamic targeting”.

What is Dynamic Targeting?
Simple stated… I want to set up an ad that is targeting new people every week. When I set these ads up, I am selecting an age range that new prospects will move into every single week as they age and meet my criteria.

You’ll see in the images below that my ads don’t target anymore that is currently under the age of 30. This targeting is dynamic in the fact that the audience is always changing.

As someone goes from age 29 to age 30, they will be brought into the audience that sees this ad. Because of that, I don’t just have a static audience that is always seeing my ad. I have new people being shown the ad as they age into our selected age criteria.

Below is a sample of how we would target our Chiropractic campaign that is aimed at Grade School Moms.

A) Our Campaign Objective

B) Audience Targeting
You’ll notice below that we are specifically targeting around 11,000 people at a time. In a local setting, this is more than enough to do what we need. I’m specifically targeting Females, Ages 30-40 that live within 15 miles of a certain town.

C) Placements and Budgets
We’re going to let Facebook place our ad in a lot of places in our opening campaigns. We’ll dial it down to only certain placements after we gather data, but we keep it pretty broad to get started (to test the offer).

In the image below, you can also see that we’re spending around $20/day (but you can get away with starting lower in some cases).

D) Identity and Page Format
We’re going to attach our ad to our Business’ Facebook page. This is going to make our ad more effective because people can instantly see that it’s from a legitimate business in their town.

We’re also selecting the single image format for our ad.

E) Ad Copy and Links to our Landing Page
We’re going to add in a little copy to explain our offer (keep it simple) and then we’re going to link our ad to our landing page (the one we created above). This ensures that when someone sees our ad on Facebook, they can instantly go click to claim the offer.

Finishing up..

Once we get all those settings in place, we click the publish button and start waiting for the magic to happen.

The big keys, however, are making sure that we have some clever followups in place after someone claims the offer (This makes sure that they actually come in after the tell us they want the offer on the landing page).

Let’s walk through what happens after someone opts in for the offer.

Step 7: The follow up SMS Message.

This is where the fun really starts.

Once someone puts their information into the landing page, we want to start making it easy for them to call and book an appointment to claim the offer they just said that they wanted.

I also want to make sure they have a reminder to claim that offer if they are currently doing something that doesn’t allow them to call right after they opt-in (they might be laying in bed at 1AM after a hard day).

This is where the text message come in.

As soon as they put their phone number into the box on the landing page and click submit, we will automatically send them a text message. This message looks like this.

There is nothing super complicated about this message at first glance.

On closer inspection, however, you’d find out that the number listed to call isn’t actually the number of the business. The number it tells them to call is a tracking number. It allows us to know that this person is calling about this campaign.

Because of this, we know exactly which new customers came from which offer.

NOTE:
This is something that is somewhat difficult to set up for the more non technical crowd. Check out the bonus section below to see how we made this whole process easy (and how you can set it up in 2 minutes, even if you aren’t technical)

Step 8: The 2 follow up Emails.

Once someone puts their information into the landing page, we want to start making it easy for them to call and book an appointment to claim the offer they just said that they wanted.

Just like with the text message, I also want to make sure they have a reminder to claim that offer if they are currently doing something that doesn’t allow them to call right after they opt-in (they might be laying in bed at 1AM after a hard day)… but I want to put that reminder in a different medium.

This is where the Email messages come into Play.

As soon as they put their email into the box on the landing page and click submit, we will automatically send a couple of emails to go along with the text message.

We will send them one email right away with details, and then we’ll send them another reminder email, 24 hours later.

These messages looks like this.

The Immediate Follow Up Email

The “24 Hours Later” Follow Up Email

Step 9: Using call recording for quality control.

This next big lesson shocked me, but it’s the truth.

The #1 killer of Facebook Ads when it comes to Brick and Mortar businesses is… the person answering the phone.

I’m sure you think that your business is different and that your staff would never sabotage something that’s designed to grow your business. In all my years of running these campaigns, however, I’ve seen hundreds of receptionist and front desk staff ruin these campaigns because they handled them incorrectly when they answered the phone.

The good news is that they aren’t doing it on purpose.

The reason that these campaigns get ruined (and you waste a ton of money and time) is because of a few core reasons.

Why Receptionist ruin this so often (at first):

• They haven’t been trained properly to respond to the campaign.
• They haven’t been let in on how important the campaign is.
• They’ve got a million other things that they were doing before you started running this campaign and those things still take priority (even if you think they shouldn’t).
• They don’t believe in what you’re doing (giving away something free or at a discounted rate to create a lifetime customer). In short, they thinks this looks like one of the Groupon campaigns that have failed so many other busineses.

Often it manifest itself like this…
You run the a campaign like the one I’ve been showing you above for around a month. The receptionist answers the phone calls and then proceeds to tell you that all of the leads that are coming in are just freebie seekers.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times.

And that’s why we starting recording the calls.

Once we started recording the calls we found out that, in 99% of the cases, the person answer the phone was blowing it and crippling the campaign at the most critical point… When they call in to schedule the first time.

Because of that, we now record every phone call that comes through for a campaign by a special tracking number (it’s the one that goes out in the email and via text message).

Every time a new lead comes in, we now have the call play a short message as the receptionist picks up that alerts them it’s a lead from our campaign (this is called a whisper message). We then record the calls to make sure they are top notch and that we have done a good job training our people to convert the lead.

Step 10: Following up if they don’t call.

When it comes to lead generation and getting new clients into a business, I don’t like to leave anything to chance. For that reason, we triple down on the follow up with the lead.

Every time a new leads comes through, we send an email to the receptionist at the office we’re working with. If the person who fills out the form doesn’t call within 24 hours, we have the receptionist reach out to them to book them.

They filled out the form, we want to make extra sure that they follow through. For this reason, we manually call them to book the appointment. This gives what we’re doing a personal touch.

When the automatic emails and text messages don’t get the job done, we reach out to them with a personal phone call. This takes our already great results and puts them through the roof.

The Script is pretty simple:

Hey Becky, This is Samantha at Magellan Chiropractic. I saw that you signed up for the free Chair Massage package and I wanted to make sure we got your schedule before the schedule fills up.

What day is good/time is best for you in the next couple of days?

Heard at hundred of offices that we’ve helped.

And that’s the ballgame.

What you just read above is how we use Facebook Ads to get new customers through the doors of thousands of small businesses.

But… I know what you’re thinking…
How do we make any money if we’re just giving things away for free?

Let’s dig in to why this is insanely profitable when done correctly.

Step 11: How to make money with a free offer.

So how do we make money from a the free offer that we give away?

Simply put, we have a simple upsell process that we train our staff’s to carry out. In the example above, we do some very special stuff.

Here’s how the Up-sell Works for our “Mom Campaign”.

1. The person calls to book their appointment and our receptionist puts them down for a time with the massage therapist.
   
   
2. When the person comes into the office, we make sure that we great them and have them fill out some short paperwork so that we can get to know them and figure out how best to perform the chair massage. This form also alerts us to any other possible things they may need from our office (do they have low back pain? do they suffer from headaches? etc)
   
   
3. The Doctor in the office says hello to them as they are going back for their massage and lets them know that they are here if they have any questions or every want some help with anything.
   
   
4. They get their 15 minute chair massage.
   
   
5. When they come out… they feel great.
   
   
6. Even though this is a free massage, they always come to the front desk before they leave (our massage therapist lets it slip that we have a gift bag for them).
   
   
7. We hand them a gift bag that has a few small goodies and a letter that is inside a red envelope.
   
   
8. Our receptionist tells them not to open the envelope until they get home.
   
   
9. Inside of the envelope we offer them an hour long massage for half off (this gets them to come back in a second time).
   
   
10. During the second massage we talk to them about how Chiropractic can help with some of the issues that massage can’t and we convert them into patients.

So…
Just how effective is this Upsell campaign?

Around 60% of the people that get the red envelope book their second massage right away. We capture 10-15% a few weeks downs the road (typically).

The Power of Knowing your Customer Lifetime Value.

One of the things that we know about all of our clients is how much each new customer is worth to them on average.

For example:
Every new customer we get from the “Mom Massage Package” ends up being worth around $1200 to the office. That’s not including the referrals that these people bring in (remember that we’re targeting the gatekeepers of their family’s healthcare so we see a lot of kids and husbands as a result of this kind of campaign.)

Knowing this number, we know that we can spend $100 just to acquire one new lead and come out way on top when all is said and one.

While you do have to give away some free 15 minute massages, it ends up resulting in a ton of future business for both the massage therapist and the Chiropractor.

And… we help the customer solve some big problems.

What we just went through above isn’t limited to the kind of business we used in the example. You can do something like this in any business.

You might be thinking that setting up the above sounds very technical. Truth be told, it is if you set it all up manually or hire somenoe to code it all together for you.

These campaigns were so profitable to my business and to the businesses I help, that we ended up building a giant shortcut to building them and getting them going fast.

Let me walk you through that below.

BONUS: The tool we built that makes this 100x easier (a big shortcut).

How to get started now.

If you want to set up a campaign like this for your own business, we’d like to invite you to use MeetRoost to make it all work.

You can get started with MeetRoost by clicking here.

Click to get started now so that you don’t wait another day to implement a system to consistently drive customers to your business using Facebook Ads.

Got Questions?
Ask them below in the comments.