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Business Tips

Local Business Facebook Ads: A Step By Step Guide To Create Ones That Will Attract Clients To Salons, Spa And Barbershops

Local Business Facebook Ads Local Business Facebook Ads

If you are an entrepreneur operating a local business—especially a personal services one—chances are that you are well versed with the benefits of having a business page on Facebook.

A Facebook business page will help you elevate brand awareness, build authentic relationships, boost engagement as well as allow your clients to book your local business using the book now button.

But here’s the thing…

While a Facebook business page offers a great platform to win more clients, you’re limiting your reach if you aren’t using the platform’s paid advertising prowess to your benefit, especially when research shows that a user clicks an average of 11 ads everyday on this platform!

That’s massive, isn’t it?

The best bit? You can kickstart your ad with a budget as low as $5/daily.

But whether it is $5 or a few cents, choosing a new channel to attract clients should be a calculated decision.

So before we take you through a step-by-step guide of running a facebook ad campaign for your local personal services business. Let’s first talk about the various ways in which you can leverage this advertising channel.

Why Facebook Ads For Local Businesses? 

Facebook ads, however cliched they may sound, are one of the most used marketing channels to pull in clients for personal services business like salons, spa and barbershops.

But here are are the major benefits of running a Facebook ad for your spa, salon or barbershop

  1. Help people discover and reach your local personal service business—use the platform to sell special offers, increase footfall in your store, or just educate them on best selling services and treatments. 
  2. Tap the right audience with Facebook ads—reach people that actually matter i.e people in your neighbourhood and the ones near your location.
  3. Set the right trigger—Nudge them to drop in for a service that they’ve been thinking about and create demand. 

Don’t believe it will work for your spa, salon or barbershop? Well there are plenty of examples that say otherwise. The Grooming Company, for example, experienced a 45% increase in new customers when it used Facebook ads to drive visits to its salons through engaging online activity.

Why Facebook Ads For Local Businesses

Now that you know what Facebook ads can do for your salon, spa and barbershops, let this article teach you a step-by-step process of setting up and creating your first ad. 

Creating a Facebook Ad from Scratch

In the next few paragraphs, I’ll walk you through the steps of running Facebook ads that attract clients.

Note: Facebook owns Instagram which has a similar advertising platform. The steps of running & setting up ads is the same for Instagram too.

Step 1: Create your Business Manager Account 

The Facebook Business Manager is where all your Facebook pages are managed. From here, you get access to Facebook Ads account – the tool with which you will create and manage Facebook ads.

To run Facebook ads, you must have a Facebook business page. We assume that you’ve already got one, but if you haven’t, go to ‘create’ option if you are using the classic version of Facebook.

In case you’re using Facebook post its recent upgrade, you will see a + sign instead of the create option, but does the same job.

There are three main things you will need to set up your Facebook Page –

(1) Your business name and description : Name your page after your business name, or any name that you identify with and would be easy for your clients to search your business. Use the ‘about’ section to tell your clients what services you provide and the kind of clientele you cater too. The more details you add, the better it is for your clients to know about your business.

(2) A profile picture and a cover image : Pick images that represent your business well. Ideally, the profile photo is the business logo. For cover image, you can use an image of your salon, spa or barbershop, or showcase a range of beauty products that are available at your store, or highlight the current marketing campaign you are doing. For dimensions, you can look up Facebook’s guide. Alternatively, you can use design tools like Canva or Crello that come with templates with the right kind of dimensions.

(3) Action that you want your clients to take : At the top of your page, you can add call to action buttons that will direct your clients to do something – like book an appointment or pre-order a product – in a few clicks.

For instance, take a look at how Manly and Sons— an LA based barbershop has laid down all the information. The profile picture and cover image highlights the business logo and an in-store image for clients to recognize the brand immediately. It also has a clear call to action button for its clients to take action directly from the page. 

Step 2: Learn how to set up a Facebook campaign

To set up your first Facebook campaign, go to Facebook ads manager. You’ll see that the campaign creator dashboard looks like this.

You can skip the special ad categories for now. The first thing to choose is your marketing objective i.e. what you want to do with your ad.

There are three types of objectives that you can achieve with your ad – Awareness, Consideration, and Conversion. 

Your target is to get new clients to your store. Choose Store Traffic and click on Continue. 

The store traffic objective lets you create and deliver localized ads and encourage your clients to visit your spa, salon or barbershop. Facebook has very recently added this option to target local clients in and around your store location. Ensure that you have your store location and business hours added to your Facebook page to do this.

Now this has a bit of the process involved, so glance through this detailed guide to set up your store location and leverage the store traffic objective. 

Creating an ad campaign for store traffic is pretty much similar to creating any other campaign. You can follow the same steps to direct your clients to your website to take further action as well.

The above video explains steps to set up your Facebook store and create an ad. As you read on, you will also see how with similar steps you can send your clients to your website or landing page to make a specific sale or promote a specific offer.

You find the same set of configuration options like setting up your location, budget, target audience, and ad images and text. The point of difference is choosing the marketing objective and destination.

If you want to direct your clients to your website or a specific landing page, select Traffic as your marketing objective. This helps you direct traffic to your website or landing page where your clients can take further actions like make a purchase or avail an offer or even book an appointment.

When you proceed to set up your ad from here, you will see an option to select your traffic destination. Here the website is auto-selected. You can select as per your requirement.

You can explicitly tell Facebook about your target audience. You need to pay attention here as this is a very important part of your ad set, setup. Creating a target audience is important because you want to show ad messages to the relevant people which will then transcend to offline conversions.

For instance, you can add multiple locations for your ad to target along with your default location. You can add a radius to narrow down your target audience.

Next is age. For a salon, spa or barbershop, the ideal age range is 18 to 55. However, you can play around with this based on your ideal client. In my opinion, you MUST set a lower and upper limit for the ad to work. By default, the upper limit is set to 65. You can select a specific gender if your salon or barbershop is gender-specific. Else, ‘all’ is selected by default. 

You can set up Detailed Targeting (here we will keep it off to keep things simple).

  • Demographics – reach out to an audience based on their employment, education, lifestyle, etc. 
  • Interests – reach to an audience based on their interests, activities, pages they have liked, etc. 
  • Behaviour – reach an audience based on their purchase behaviour, intent, device used, etc. 

Creating a target audience is important because you want to show relevant ad messages and thereby build a relationship with your prospective clients – a relationship good enough to transcend to offline conversions.

There is another section to take note of placements.

You can place your ad wherever you wish to. However, Facebook recommends selecting the automated placement so that it can identify the best placement based on your ad budget and target audience.

The optimization and delivery section is set to ‘Link Clicks’ by default. Let it be as it is. Also, for now, you need not worry about Cost Control.

Last is the budget. You can start with a budget as low as $5 daily. Facebook automatically detects your currency based on your current location.

That’s it. Your ad setup is complete. All the changes are automatically saved. So simply click on next to proceed.

Step 3: Choosing visual assets for your ad

The technicalities are over. Now comes the most important part – creating the actual ad, in flesh and bone!

Catching the attention of your users while they scroll through their newsfeed may sound difficult but a visually enriched and relevant ad can easily do it.

So, our primary target is to make our ad visually appealing with a clear message that has something irresistible for your prospective clients. If someone asks you how to run a Facebook ad for the client, then the first answer is to design an ad that your client will love.

Anatomy of an ad

The second answer to how to run a Facebook ad for a client is to break down the elements of an ad and understand the importance of each element. Let’s start with the most important element of an ad –

(1) Visuals

Visuals, be it a GIF, static image or a short video, has the power to stop people mid-way while scrolling. A good visual with an amazing offer is your ideal ad.

For visuals, the best idea is to showcase images or videos of your salon or barbershops. Even if you don’t have great visuals from your own shop, you can create visuals using easy design tools like Crello, Canva, or InVideo that give you access to professional photos. You can use ready-made templates for your ads. Just pick a template, an image, add your text, and ta-da! your ad’s ready.

You don’t need to be extremely good with words but you must know the right language to attract your clients.

(2) Text  

The text makes all the difference. Just a good visual cannot break the deal. When you are writing the text, be informal in your tone – a tone that you would otherwise use when conversing with your clients in-person. A sense of trust, reliability, and connection with your clients can be established through this one text.

Writing your ad copy may seem tedious but here are a few tips –

  • Talk about benefits rather than features. Always remember, a person’s decision to click on an ad is completely emotional. Making the viewer feel how it’d be to avail the said benefit at your salon is your target. 
  • Create a sense of urgency. Add texts like ‘available for the next 10 days only’ or ‘Hurry, discounts available for 24 hours’. Make them rush to grab the offer. 

(3) Offer

If you can design an offer that is hard to decline, then you are completely set for your first ad.

For instance, check how Chatters Salons’s ad for their in-store grooming products with free shipping for any orders above $50.

(4) Consistency across all channels

Now that your ad content is ready, here’s an important thing to keep in mind – the link that you add to your ad should take your clients to either your website where they can book an appointment or to a specific landing page. Keep in mind that your ad, website, landing page – all should be consistent in terms of design and text. If there is no consistency, the flow will break and your clients may just leave.

For instance, when you click on the buy now option in the ad above, it automatically takes you to the landing page where they have all the products available for online purchase. The ad and the landing page have similar color palette, images, and fonts – giving a smooth transition to clients from the ad to landing page.

Moving on, once your ad copy is ready, you can finish setting up your ad in the Facebook Ads Manager.

Here you can choose how to present your ad. You can have a static image or video, or create a carousel or use a complete collection of visuals.

In case you are not sure about the media you want to use, Facebook Ads Manager has a ready-to-use template library from which you can pick one and customize.


Add your ad text in the primary text box, add a catchy headline (which is optional). I am not a fan of description when it comes to an ad but you can try. If you select your website as the destination, you need to add your website URL. You can choose to add the link in your post as well by adding it in the display link box.

For your ad, you can choose a host of call-to-action buttons based on your ad content. For your spa, salon or barbershop, the most ideal call to action button is “book appointment” because you are looking to get new clients to your store. If you want to sell a new range of products, use the ‘shop now’ option in your ad. Be specific with your call-to-action button text.  


For instance, take a look at this ad from Chatters Salon. The first ad’s objective is to show how to do a particular hairstyle It is a resource-based ad, so a call to action like ‘Learn more’ makes sense here. The second ad is to sell a particular range of products. Hence, Shop Now is used.

When your ad set up is done, click on publish to make it live or click on ‘Close’ to save it in the draft.

  • This ad copy format ticks out most of the to-do(s) –
  • Targets audiences that are most likely to click
  • Stresses on issues that target audience may have
  • Highlights a call-to-action button
  • Offers clarity with discounts, offers, promos, etc. 
  • Creates a sense of urgency
  • Uses an informal tone that aligns with new clients

When you create an ad, Facebook automatically shows you your target reach based on the demographics and budget you set. In this case, it shows that if you run this ad daily for $4.62/day, your ad will have a potential reach of 383-1.1k daily and 8-32 clicks through your salon’s website. Isn’t that amazing. 

Looking for more social media channels to amplify your business growth? Glance through our hand-picked resources.

Make your Facebook ad a success story

Now that you’ve set up your Facebook ads and launched it too, you need to make sure that your campaign is a success story. To ensure that, you need to bank on automation. All it takes is to sync your Facebook app to have a smooth automated workflow.

For example once your ads start to get picked, chances are that your client will reach out to your business with their queries via messages. This can get hard to track, but with a simple integration you can simplify and manage these messages.

Conclusion

Social media is a part of your marketing but does not show results independently. You need to club other marketing activities such as email marketing, local promotion and other advertising methods, to make your small business stand out from the competition.

Lastly, you need to keep testing your ad—the headline, the copy, the image, the placement— everything needs to be tested properly to finally know what will work and what will not.

Just know that it will take some time but you will slowly figure out the ideal range with which you will measure your ad’s success. 
And if you are looking for more more ways to book appointments through Facebook & Instagram, try Booksy for free. Through our book now button, we’ll help you achieve massive success.

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