Top Strategies for Creating Pest Control Facebook Ads

About 70% of U.S. adults use Facebook, according to Pew Research Center, making Facebook (Meta) a valuable tool for pest control business marketing. But reaching the right people and optimizing your social media marketing spend takes some know-how.

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

• Facebook advertising benefits

• How to set up pest control Facebook Ads

• Cost of pest control Facebook Ads

What Are the Benefits of Facebook Ads for Pest Control?

Wondering if Facebook Ads is the right channel for your pest control company? Dive into some of the key benefits for marketing pest control services on Facebook.

Super-Accurate Audience Targeting

Unlike most traditional marketing methods, Facebook Ads allow for accurate targeting that keeps you from wasting valuable marketing dollars. First, Facebook Ads Manager prompts basic demographic information for targeting, such as:

• Age

• Gender

• Location

Then, within the detailed targeting section, Facebook Ads Manager allows the user to narrow in on the right audience with more advanced demographic targeting, including household income, education level, relationship status, work, and life events. Life events include new relationship, new job, newly engaged, newlywed, and recently moved. From there, layer in behavior or interest targeting.

Advertisers can also use custom targeting to retarget consumers who have engaged with their brand recently. For example, you can target people who visited your website, a specific page on your website, or liked your Facebook page.

Lastly, upload your customer list, and ask Facebook to build a “lookalike” audience, or an audience their machine learning finds similar to your existing customer base.

Relatively Low Cost (Compared to Other Ad Options)

Facebook Ads Manager allows you to set your budget, and there’s no minimum ad spend investment. This means there’s less of a barrier to entry than many other ad options.

The cost of Facebook Ads varies depending on a number of factors, including:

• Time of year

• Competition

• Objective

• Targeting

• Industry

Monitor and Improve Ad Performance with Ads Manager

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 the performance.

For example, if multiple ad sets target the same audience, they drive up the cost for ad placement in the auction. In the example above, Facebook recommends turning off overlapping ad sets to run just the ones with superior performance, resulting in more conversions for the allotted budget.

With precise targeting, low cost, and the ability to monitor and adjust, Facebook Ads prove to be an effective advertising method for pest control companies.

Step-by-Step: How to Set Up Pest Control Facebook Ads

Ready to launch your Facebook Ads campaign? Follow these steps:

1. Decide on the Goals of Your Campaign

Before you even open Ads Manager, 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 pest control customers? Do you want to raise awareness of your brand, or are you trying to send traffic to your website?

Your goals help determine the Ad Objective you choose.

2. Choose the Right Ad Objective

Facebook offers a number of objectives to choose from. They include:

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

• Traffic: Use the traffic objective when you want 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, in which you can collect leads right 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 client go through, the better chance they have of converting.

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

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

Ultimately, pest control companies find the most success with Leads and Sales objectives, because they optimize ads toward gaining pest control leads or finding people ready to buy.

3. Define Your Target Audience

Using the Facebook targeting options, narrow in on your ideal customer. If you have a buyer persona, select targeting that matches.

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 service companies like to run new mover campaigns using the “Recently Moved” behavior targeting. Consider an offer that would be appealing to new movers, such as a discounted membership.

Quick tip: Not sure how to target your ads? Use the Custom Audience function to upload a list of current customers, and direct Facebook to generate a lookalike audience.

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.

4. Choose Where to Run the Ads

Next, select the placement of your Ads. Meta offers two options to start:

• Advantage+ placements: Facebook's delivery system will allocate your ad set's budget across multiple placements based on where they're likely to perform best.

• Manual placements: Manually choose which places to show your ad.

Facebook recommends using Advantage+, and it’s also the least time-consuming option. For manual placements, you should keep an eye on how your ads are performing by placement, and optimize in real time. Some of the manual placement options include:

• Facebook feed

• Instagram feed

• Facebook Marketplace

• Facebook video feeds

• Facebook right column

• Instagram explore

• Facebook and Instagram Stories

• Facebook and Instagram Reels

Note: Certain placements require separate creative options. For example, a reel requires a video. Stories require a vertical aspect ratio.

5. Determine Your Ad Budget

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.

Facebook Ads pricing is determined by an auction, and you can also 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).

6. Select the Right Ad Format

Choose a format for your ads, either single image, carousel, slideshow, or video ads. This might come down to your creative options. You can also A/B test formats to find out which one works best for your brand.

7. Launch and Tweak as You Go

Finally, it’s time to build your ad. Facebook walks you through the components, which include media, primary text, headline, description, and call to action. Once you finish the creative section, launch your ads.

Remember to check on performance and make any necessary tweaks to optimize your campaign and maximize your budget.

Pest Control Company 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.

Ensure Your Website Is Spot On

Consider the user’s experience. They see an ad for a spring special on pest control services, click it, and land on a page on your pest control website. You want that landing page to give the user all the information they need, including your phone number and other contact information. If they land on a confusing page that doesn’t outline the special or how to contact your business, they’ll likely click away.

Also, make sure your website is responsive for mobile devices, as that’s where a lot of your ad traffic comes from.

Formulate the Right Messaging

Simply stating your company offers pest control isn’t enough. Consider your consumer’s pain points, and create messaging that speaks to them. Are they wasting time and money buying and setting up DIY pest control solutions? Focus your ad copy on the benefits of saving time and money.

Also, think about ways to differentiate your business. Many of today’s consumers worry about the products they use and how they impact their pets, family, and the environment. Communicate if your products are green and pet-safe.

Advertise for the Entire Customer Journey

A buyer goes through three steps: awareness, consideration, and decision. An advertiser’s goal is to meet the customer at each step of the process.

Awareness: In this stage, a buyer is just becoming aware of a pest control problem. Your goal is to introduce your company and generate awareness for your solutions. Rather than trying to convert them, you want to offer a customer in this stage educational content, like a blog post on common pest problems or a quick video with pest-proofing tips.

Consideration: During consideration, a consumer begins researching solutions to their problem and evaluating different service providers. Your ads should position your company as the reliable and trustworthy option. Advertising case studies and testimonials works well at this stage.

Decision: After evaluating the options, a consumer enters the final stage of the buying journey.

Provide incentives and a clear call-to-action to encourage a consumer to choose your company's services. Ideas include limited-time offers or special discounts.

By strategically targeting customers at each stage of the buyer's journey, a pest control company raises awareness, builds trust, and drives conversions, ultimately attracting and retaining more customers.

Include Social Proof in Your Ads

Build trust with potential new customers by incorporating social proof in your ads. Social proof means showing potential customers that other people have used and liked your services.

Include testimonials, customer reviews, ratings, or case studies as forms of social proof. When a buyer sees high ratings or direct quotes from satisfied customers, it makes it easier for them to trust and choose your services.

Retarget Your Website Visitors

In the consideration stage of a buying journey, potential customers often visit the websites of several pest control companies they might hire. And if you have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website, you are tracking those visits.

Don’t let that data go to waste. Use custom targeting to remarket to those consumers. Consider including an offer or customer testimonial — anything that moves them further along in the customer journey.

What Is the Cost of Pest Control Facebook Ads?

We mentioned the relatively low cost as a pro to Facebook Ads, but what does that actually mean? 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

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.

Start Your Facebook Ad Campaign Now

Now that you understand how to set up a pest control ad campaign, as well as the associated benefits and costs, set up a campaign and let the quality leads creep in. Remember that Facebook Ads are just one part of the puzzle. Acquiring today’s customers requires a multi-channel marketing campaign.

FieldRoutes, a full service software company for pest control businesses of all sizes, offers a full suite of pest control marketing services, including:

• Website design

• Digital marketing strategy

• Search engine optimization (SEO)

• Content creation

• Lead generation

• Paid advertising (search and social media)

• Reporting and analytics

Request a free marketing consultation today for help setting up a pest control Facebook Ads campaign or to inquire about any other FieldRoutes service offerings.