How to Use Facebook Ads for Your Lawn Care Business

To expand their customer base, enhance brand awareness, and generate more leads, numerous lawn care business owners leverage Facebook (currently undergoing rebranding as Meta). However, effectively reaching your target audience and optimizing social media marketing expenditure demands expertise.

Read on to learn how to trim the competition and acquire more leads through Facebook Ads, including:

• Facebook advertising benefits 

• How to set up lawn care Facebook Ads

• Cost of lawn care Facebook Ads

Do Facebook Ads Work for Lawn Care?

About 70% of U.S. adults use Facebook, according to the Pew Research Center, making Facebook a valuable tool for lawn care business marketing. On average, businesses realize a 1-10% return on investment depending on goods and services offered, local competition, and the effectiveness of their campaign. 

Unique value props that make Facebook Ads an effective marketing channel for lawn service businesses include:

• Precise targeting: Facebook Ads allow for super accurate targeting, which includes demographics like age, location, and household income, as well as interest-based targeting. Advertisers can also use custom targeting to retarget consumers who have engaged with their brand recently. 

• Low cost: Facebook Ads Manager allows you to set your budget with no minimum ad spend investment, meaning there’s less of a barrier to entry than many other ad options. 

• Real-time data: Within Ads Manager, the advertiser can monitor ad performance (and associated costs per result) in real-time and tweak the ads if they aren’t achieving their desired results. Facebook even provides ad delivery recommendations based on performance. 

How Do I Set Up a Lawn Care Ad on Facebook?

Ready to launch ads on your landscaping business Facebook page? Follow these best practices:

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

Using the Facebook targeting options, narrow in on your ideal customer. To maximize advertising efforts, identify your buyer persona and select targeting criteria that closely align with their characteristics.

You can also build your audience based on what your existing customer looks like. Are they married? Do they have a certain household income? Do they live in a specific ZIP code? 

Many lawn care businesses like to run new mover campaigns using the “Recently Moved” behavior targeting. Consider promoting discounted maintenance contracts or special offers to entice new homeowners and secure their business.

Because Facebook allows you to adjust ads in real-time, you could create a couple of audiences, A/B test them, and then turn off the ads that generated fewer results, allocating that budget to the ads yielding better ROI.

Step 2: Design Compelling Visuals and Ad Copy

On average, people are exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 advertisements daily. With declining attention spans, designing a lawn care Facebook ad that cuts through the clutter and stands out proves paramount. 

So, how do you make an ad stand out? Start with high-quality, engaging photos or videos. Consider pictures of before-and-after transformations, reels that showcase your lawn care company’s services, or video testimonials.

Complement these visuals using the art of persuasive ad copy. Craft your message with a clear call to action that motivates potential customers to take action. Address their specific pain points, illustrating how your lawn care services provide the ideal solution. Promote compelling savings or special offers they simply can't resist. Use language that resonates with your target audience, grabbing their attention from the outset and delivering your message concisely—before they can scroll away.

Step 3: Set Ad Objectives and Budget

Consider what you want your campaign to accomplish. For example, are you trying to generate new leads, or would you like to send a seasonal offer to existing lawn care customers? This helps determine the objective. 

Facebook offers several objectives to choose from. They include:

• Awareness: Show your ads to people most likely to remember them. This objective works well for expanding your reach and creating brand awareness.

• Traffic: Use the traffic objective to send users to a destination, like your website. 

• Engagement: Get more messages, video views, post engagement, page likes, or event responses. If you have a video promoting your services, choose the engagement objective to get more people to watch it. 

• Leads: The lead gen ads offer a built-in form to collect leads from your Facebook ad. Or encourage users to message or call your brand. You can also link to a lead form page on your website. Remember, the fewer hoops you make your potential new client go through, the better their chance of converting.

• App promotion: Find new people to install your app and continue using it.

• Sales: Find people likely to purchase your service. Use this objective for remarketing or bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns.

Next, decide how much money you want to spend on your Facebook Ads campaign. You can set a lifetime Facebook Ads budget with a start and end date, and Facebook optimizes the budget over the entirety of your campaign, or you can set a daily budget. 

Step 4: Choose Ad Format

The format you choose for your ad may depend on your creative options. You can also A/B test formats to determine the best for your brand. Format options include:

• Photo: Try a photo ad if you have high-quality and attention-grabbing images or illustrations. According to a Facebook study, photo ads are the quickest format to build and outperform other formats in driving unique traffic.

• Video: Using the video ad format encourages engagement. You can also segment out the audience who tunes into the video, then retarget them with bottom-of-the-funnel ads.

• Stories: Stories use a vertical, edge-to-edge format that matches how people interact with their phones (vertically). According to Facebook, 58% of people surveyed say they have browsed a brand's website to get more information after viewing a Story ad.

• Messenger: Get personal with current or potential new customers using Messenger ads. Use ads that send people to Messenger for scale, then continue interacting with each of them individually.

• Carousel: Showcase up to 10 images or videos in a single ad, each with its own link. This is a great way to highlight different service offerings, like lawn mowing, shrub trimming, or mulch installation.

How Much Does Lawn Care Advertising on Facebook Cost?

An auction determines Facebook Ads pricing, and you can set a maximum bid amount if you prefer. Ultimately, Facebook’s machine learning optimizes spend to increase your desired outcome (based on the objective you chose). 

So, how much does it cost to advertise your lawn care services on Facebook? While the cost varies, Hootsuite crunched the numbers to provide some conversion rate benchmarks:

• Average cost-per-click overall (based on 2021 metrics): $0.43

• Average CPC for impressions objective: $1.20

• Average CPC for reach objective: $1.53

• Average CPC for lead generation objective: $0.59

• Average CPC for conversions objective: $0.82

• Average CPC for link clicks objective: $0.20

Factors that impact the price include the time of year, competition, objective, targeting, and industry. Once you begin advertising, you’ll quickly find out how much it costs your company to generate a lead. Use that information to inform future ad budgets.

Lawn Care Facebook Ads Best Practices

Anytime you spend money on advertising, you want to ensure a maximum return on your marketing budget. Follow these digital advertising best practices for your lawn care Facebook ads.

• Set up the Meta Pixel to accurately track ad performance and retarget website visitors.

• Use the Custom Audience function to upload a list of current customers and direct Facebook to generate a lookalike audience. 

• Build custom landing pages for your ads, optimized for the best user experience. For example, if you’re advertising lawn fall cleanup services, build a page highlighting that offering and including everything the potential customer wants, including price, expiration date, and your contact information (phone number, email address, etc.).

• Incorporate testimonials, customer reviews, ratings, or case studies into your ad copy as social proof.

• A/B test different photos, creatives, and audiences to find what garners the best ROI.

• Check performance and make necessary tweaks to optimize your campaign and maximize your budget.

Examples of Lawn Care and Landscaping Facebook Ads

Gain inspiration from these lawn care Facebook ad examples.

1. Image Ad from Clay’s Lawn Care

This ad from Clay’s Lawn Care is clear, concise, and straightforward. It captures attention with a high-quality image of an in-progress job that showcases the company’s trimming services. It also includes a direct call to action that prompts the user to send a message to the company. 

2. Video Ad from Spring Green

In Spring Green’s video ad, they lean into seasonality with copy and imagery evoking summer. They also show kids playing and stress the importance of a healthy lawn, which targets a specific customer — parents. The description, “serving local neighborhoods for 45 years,” helps to build trust and credibility as a local business. 

3. Carousel Ad from Brian’s Lawn Care

Brian’s Lawn Care uses the carousel ad format to highlight their different services. There are cards for lawn mowing, weed spraying, insect control, garden beds, pruning, and gutter cleaning. Each card uses similar graphical elements and high-quality, bright images for cohesiveness. This is an excellent option for multi-service businesses.

Start Your Facebook Ad Campaign

Now that you understand how to set up a lawn care ad campaign and the associated benefits and costs, build a Facebook campaign and rake in the leads. Remember that Facebook Ads are just one part of the puzzle. Acquiring today’s customers in the lawn care industry requires a multi-channel marketing campaign. 

FieldRoutes, a full-service software company for lawn care businesses of all sizes, offers a seamless integration with ServiceTitan - Marketing Pro. With Marketing Pro’s automation tools, you can build direct mail and email campaigns in just a few clicks. A marketing dashboard allows you to see attributed revenue to determine ROI. 

Request a free demo to learn how Marketing Pro can help you get the right message to the right customers at the right time.