How we spent $170 on ads, generated 23 leads and closed 2 projects

In this post I'll go over one of the simplest paid ads strategies that we implemented for one of our clients who's doing landscaping to land 2 projects by spending a bit over $170 on FB ads.

Before I go into the details, some context.

Most home service business owners & contractors that run their own show rely on buying leads from Angies & Friends, word of mouth and organic like GMB. There's nothing wrong with latter two (besides not being predictable), but paying Angies list and Homeadvisor imo is lighting your money on fire in most cases (not always).

Why? because the leads are shared with your competitors which means that

1. It's harder to get in contact because as soon as a lead requests a quote, their phones are lit on fire by companies calling and trying to get an estimate going

2. It's harder to close because essentially at this point you're really competing on price. Race to the bottom.

This company came to us saying that most leads that they buy from Angies in the $40 - $60 range are price shopping and not ready to pull the trigger. This made them very skeptical about ALL paid online lead generation services, understandably.

We needed to get a quick win in here to first prove that we can do what we say we can do and second, to actually get paid as they were on a 2 week free trial of our services.

(Don't roast me on giving out free trials, market is getting sophisticated and most home service business owners that CAN hire outside help have done so and been burned so the trust in marketing agency services is not high to say the least)

To get that quick win, we implemented the easiest lead gen strategy which is direct facebook messenger ads.

Why messenger ads? Because those allow you to have most real conversations with your potential clients for the money you spend.

And these conversations happen in the messenger itself making it very easy for both parties to communicate without calling the leads first. (this is crucial because most people don't like to answer random phone numbers)

This meant that we could pre-qualify those leads with pre-set questions, then have a real conversation with the leads to really understand if they're a good lead that's looking to get the job done soon or a tire kicker that's just fishing for a price.

Only when we determined that the lead is indeed qualified and potentially high-value, we asked if we could call them to set up an in-person appointment. If they said yes, we passed the phone number that we got from the initial questions to the business owner who then took it from there.

This process saved a lot of time for my client who didn't have to allocate time to deal with shitty leads themselves while they're on-site doing their job.

This THE most important part.

The more conversations you have with your potential clients, the more deals you'll close.

If you don't get back to leads in time (sub 10 minutes), you're loosing jobs.

If you don't prequalify them with a simple questionnaire, you're wasting your time.

So can you do something like this without hiring an agency? Absolutely - here's how.

First, decide who's going to be talking and weeding out leads for you. A front desk person can easily do this, but if you don't have one yet, you can hire a VA from SEA or LatAm with near-perfect written english to do this part for you.

This alone will be the highest ROI activity that you can do.

It will turn more of your organic leads into jobs and will 10x your paid advertising results, whatever the platform. Even if you use Angies & Friends, having a person like this who gets in contact with your leads, filters them and sets appointments will drastically reduce the headache of you juggling actually working on clients projects and contacting the leads.

When you have a person like this in place and ready to go, only then you should start to think about increasing your lead flow through paid channels.

Next, here's the basic facebook ad setup that you can run to "test the waters"

Go to Meta business manager, sign up, verify your business.

Then go to campaigns, create new and select "leads" objective.

Next, Click on "Messenger" location.

For location, select your zip code and set appropriate radius. You can select more than 1 here if you service multiple locations.

Interests, leave them empty - if you select an interest with a narrow location targeting, your audience will be too small and your cost per lead will be too high. I let FB to the targeting and it works well.

Placements, leave them on default too.

Next, the creative. This is the most crucial part as you're essentially targeting WITH the creative.

I keep the copy simple.

Sentence 1: Call out the location: "Hey North County homeowner"

Sentence 2: Reel them in with a question: "When's the last time you looked at your backyard and said "Damn, this looks awesome"?"

Sentence 3: Drop your offer: "Get a FREE fire-pit with any paver patio project 400 ft.² or more."

Sentence 4: Testimonials: Copy/paste your best google review

Sentence 5: Call to action: "2 more spots left in August, click "learn more" to schedule a free conversation and get an estimate"

That's it for the copy. Nothing too crazy going on and you don't need to go over the top here.

Next, the visuals. I always start with before & after image because those really catch the attention. So if you have good before/after images, go to canva, put them side by side on a square layout and add "before/after" text.

If you want to stand out more a bit, create a video where you show your finished products and basically narrate your ad copy. Download Captions app to add captions for people that watch w/o sound.

Let me reiterate - you don't need to be tech-savy to do any of this. All of which I describe here can be done if you can read english and answer questions.

Next, the messenger automations.

Create a new messenger bot and add 2-3 qualifying questions.

Question 1: "Are you in pricing & planning stage or are you looking to get this done soon?"

Question 2: "What's your backyard size?" (or any question that gives you a good idea of the possible scope)

Question 3: "What's a good number to reach you for the quote?"

These questions will go out automatically when your lead clicks on "learn more" button.

Next, turning those leads into actual appointments.

Speed to lead is key here. If you get back to your leads the next day, this won't work. You have to schedule them while they're still hot and the intention is not lost. Your leads are in an emotional state and want to move FAST at this point, they've taken the first action by going through the messenger flow so you must book them in or get on a phone with them ASAP.

Ask more questions if you need to, talk with them to establish the initial relationship and get on their property asap.

Last, the numbers.

For the example I gave above, we spent $170-ish, generated 24 leads at $7 per lead, gave out 7 estimates so $24-ish per estimate and had 2 closes, $85-ish per close.

Typically, we see $20 per lead with every 3rd - 4th turning into an estimate and every 3rd - 4th estimate turning into a project.

Anything OVER $50 per lead, something is likely wrong with your ad copy / visual or there's no demand for the service you're offering. Try different ads and if those don't work, try a different service.

From more expensive services like home building and real estate, the ratios drop drastically. For a home building client we generated 520 leads using a lead magnet where we paid around $3 per lead of which we got 2 $340k projects on the front end, probably more on the back end which we don't track. The more expensive your service, the longer your sales cycle so account for that.

It's really that simple.

Decent ad + quick speed to lead = more projects.