Facebook and Facebook Ads for Salons

This is the Build Your Salon podcast with me, Phil Jackson, here to help salon owners master the skills you need to build bigger profits and a fuller life. Hi everyone, Phil Jackson from Build Your Salon, here to help you master the tools you need to generate the profits you deserve and lead a fuller life. Today we're talking Facebook and Facebook ads. Before we plunge in though, I'm a little bit worried. Look, I've got worry lines. I am a salon consultant and coach, so I go into businesses and they either employ me to help with a specific project or just kind of general mentoring for salon owners. And I can't take everybody who asks me for help, so I have quite a lot of contact with salons who are thinking of employing me ahead of time. And I'm getting a little bit concerned about Facebook, actually, specifically, because what I'm seeing is quite a lot of salons that are building their presence on social media, specifically on Facebook, and they're putting all their effort into their Facebook page, which is fine. But it's a little bit like trying to build a house with foundations that are very lopsided. What they're doing is putting one marketing pillar in place and neglecting lots of other marketing pillars. So they're putting all their efforts into their Facebook page, and I'm seeing very little effort going into things like their websites or even other social media platforms. So what they've got on Facebook is this massive amount of content, really rich, deep content, good engagement with their Facebook page, and then nothing going on on their website. And I think that's dangerous for a number of reasons. Firstly, Facebook, as with everything in life, one day will be no more. As will Twitter, as will LinkedIn, as will Pinterest. All these social media platforms one day will end. May not be in my lifetime even, but there will come a time when Facebook is no more. If you've invested all of your time and energy into putting stuff on Facebook, what happens when the traffic dries up? What happens when people don't go there anymore? What you should be doing is in tandem with your social media, putting some effort into your website. Because when Facebook is no more, there will be a replacement. Something else will come along and replace it on the social media front. But what you don't want is to have a new profile on whatever this social media platform is going to be. And it looks like you haven't done anything for the last 10 or 15 years because there's nothing on your website either.

Secondly, I think people are using Facebook pages in the same way as they're using their personal timelines. They're not looking at it as a business page. And I think there's a way that your Facebook page and your web page can be working a lot more closely, which I don't think very many salons are doing. And it comes down to something called a Facebook pixel. OK, when you go to a new website, very often there'll be a banner at the top of the website that says, This website uses cookies. Is that OK? Or do you want to go somewhere else? And it happens on lots and lots of websites. Even my own website has cookies on. And cookies are a little bit of invisible code. And what it does is just places a little tag on your personal record, if you like, to say that you've been to that web page. Well, the Facebook version of that is called a pixel. And what you can do is install a Facebook pixel on your web page. You drive traffic to your web page through any means, through your Google ads or through YouTube or even Facebook and other social media. And your offline advertising as well. So you're pushing all these people onto your web page. And then what they're doing is picking up that pixel so that you can then advertise to those people through Facebook advertising, which is really powerful. So now instead of Facebook advertising to strangers who you've never met and have never heard of you and you've got no relationship with, which we call cold data. You're actually trying to build a relationship and sell to people who have been to your website already. So they've heard of you. They've got a certain amount of information where they can make a judgment and a buying decision. And trying to preach to the converted is a lot easier. So what you're doing then is advertising to what we call warm data. So I want you to have a look, have a look on Facebook ads manager and see if you can find the bit where it says about pixels. If you can't do that yourself, get it over to your web developer and you want that pixel on every page of your website. What that will do inside Facebook advertising is start building up something called a custom audience so that you can advertise to those people. So even if you've got no intention of doing Facebook ads for a little while, get your Facebook pixel on there so that you can start building up that custom audience. So when you do start to advertise on Facebook, and we're going to talk in a minute about some of the brilliant reasons why you should, that audience is there and waiting for you. Is that clear? And don't neglect your website. If you're updating your Facebook page every single day, the minimum you should be looking at your website is once or twice a month. Okay, because Google, apart from anything, likes fresh content, interesting content for its subscribers and viewers.

So what you need to do is make sure that you're delivering really new stuff on your website as well. Also, don't forget you can put your Facebook feed onto your web page. So you can show people that go to your website that you are up to date on your Facebook feed as well, and that you are putting great content out there. Lots of people also using their personal profile to advertise their business rather than setting up a Facebook page. And I've also come across a fair few salons that are using Facebook groups instead of Facebook pages for their salons. Now, the advantage with Facebook groups is that your content gets shown to lots more people in the group. Okay, so if you put a post on Facebook pages, it gets shown to a certain number of people. And if they like it, if they engage with it, if they share it, comment on it, then it will get shown to more people on that page and more and more. So the engagement breeds the engagement, if you like. The engagement swells the audience. If you put something on a Facebook group, it gets shown to everybody in that group according to their preferences, of course. So you get to reach a lot more people organically. But if you're using your personal page or you're using a Facebook group, you're really limiting how you can do paid for promotion through Facebook. There's a lot of advertising that you can't do from either a Facebook group or a personal feed. So set yourself up a proper business page. And Facebook makes this so easy. If you have a look on my blog, there is an infographic that I've put there, which I work through every time I set up a Facebook page. It's just a little flowchart. So that will be in the downloads on buildyoursalon.uk. Now, Facebook advertising. There are three main ways that you can advertise on Facebook. The first is to promote your page. And you can do this with groups as well. You can promote your group. But if you promote your page, what you're trying to do is get more people to like that page, to follow you and see your content over time. I very, very rarely do this. The only time I will promote my page is if I have less than 100 subscribers. So usually when I'm setting up a new business, a new page, then I will promote my page until I've got to that magic 100. After that, there are better ways to promote to your audience that will also grow the number of likes that you have on a page. The second way is to boost a post. And boosting a post is really, really easy. What you do is type in your post on your page in the way that you normally would.

And then a little box pops up on the bottom right hand side and it says boost post. You click it and Facebook will talk you through the rest of the process. Now, it's a slightly, and I mean slightly, more expensive way of advertising than running a Facebook ad campaign, which is what we're going to talk about next. But it's really quick and it's really simple. So I don't tend to use it where I'm going to be advertising for a week or longer. Certainly, if I'm getting towards a month-long promotion, then I wouldn't be doing a boost post. But I will use it for something like, let's say I'll go into the salon tomorrow, which is Tuesday, have a look at Friday, and it looks a bit ropey. And I want to throw out a couple of offers or a quick promotion just to get a couple of bums on seats on Friday. Then I will boost a post because it's a really, really quick way of doing it. And you can target who sees that post. And we're going to talk about targeting in the Facebook ad campaigns, which we're going to talk about next. So setting up a Facebook ad campaign is bringing in the big guns. This is the gutsy stuff. This is where Facebook gives you loads of options so that you can get exactly the right response that you want. Now, one thing I want to make really clear at the start is when I say we're bringing in the big guns, it does not mean we're bringing in the big bucks. Facebook advertising does not have to cost a lot of money at all. And I would very strongly recommend that you either play a little bit with ad campaigns or at least boost a post and talk about targeting just once or twice so you're familiar with it. So when it is time for you to run a campaign and put some cash behind it, you at least know what you're doing. The first step of your campaign is to figure out what your objective is. What's the reason that you're running this campaign? And Facebook gives you a number of options. And I'm going to take you through the ones that I think are relevant for salons. The first is to boost your post, which we've already talked about. I find it a lot easier to do this from the timeline, so I don't tend to go through the ads platform for this. Next up, we get to promote your page, when we've already talked about the reasons why you might promote your page. So if you've got very, very few subscribers, then have a look at that. If not, I think there are better options and better ways to spend your money. The big one for me is when we send people to your website. So you will tell Facebook a specific webpage that you want to send people to. Now, I never send people to my homepage. What I will do is set up a separate page for an offer, or a promotion, or a video, or a blog. Something that I want people to go and say I want to drive traffic to. And Facebook is incredibly good at this.

So you need to be really clear about where you want them to go. Similar to this, but a little bit more complicated, is increasing conversions. This tends to work best if you're either selling a product or service online, rather than just taking an appointment for something later. Increasing conversions, it's something that I use, but I use it more on the build your salon side, when I'm selling information products, rather than something I would do in the salon. A fairly new option is to increase local awareness with your Facebook ads. And you can target this slightly. You don't get as many options as you do when you're pushing traffic towards a certain webpage. So I don't tend to use this one very much. But it could be a good one if you've got, say, a new salon, or you're renting a chair and haven't been in that area before. Next up, we can drive people to try and get more of them to claim an offer on Facebook. Facebook offers, if I'm really honest, I never use. But I know salons that do, and you can use Facebook ads to increase the take-up of that offer. And finally, we can use Facebook ads to collect leads. And this is one that I wish I saw more salons using. So you will have seen this sort of thing all over the web. And it's things like where you swap your email address for some information. So you type your email address in. I will send you my seven tips on increasing the volume in your hair. Send me your email address and I will give you five ways that you can get laid this weekend. That kind of thing. You see it all over the place. What it's a really good thing to do is to start building up your email marketing lists. And there are loads of options on little cheat sheets or bits of advice that we could be handing out from salons. And I don't see salons doing it nearly enough. I've had some good success. I've had some really good results on things for fine hair, thinning hair, coloured hair, a guide that I did for hair extensions. It takes a little bit of work because you need to figure out how you're going to deliver that information to someone. And normally you would email it and I email it with the attachment. But apart from that little bit of work, it's a really good way of building up a list of people that you can then market to. But whichever objective you choose for your Facebook advertising, you're going to want to make sure the targeting is really good. And this is where Facebook is really, really powerful. So, for example, rather than just running an ad pushing someone towards a web page, if I know what my target market is, I could only run that ad to people who are, say, between the age of 30 and 45.

They're female and they live within 10 miles of the town where my salon is. Because I know that generally 10 miles is about the limit for someone to just give us a go. We could also target people on Facebook that have specific interests. Now, here's a tip for you. If ever you are struggling to recruit in the salon and apparently half of the world is struggling to recruit to fill positions in salons, this is where you need to get really clever. So, all of my recruitment now is done through Facebook advertising because I can say that I want people of a certain radius around the salon. So, I know that most people won't travel more than about 20 to 25 miles to work. But also, I can target that ad to people that, for example, like Hairdressers Journal International or Creative Head Magazine. So, go through your trade magazines, enter those as interests and then you can run Facebook ads to people that have expressed that interest. It's a really powerful way of niching down and getting your recruitment ad in front of the right people. Next up, Facebook will ask you to set a budget and a schedule. So, when you want to start sending your advert out and how much per day that you want to be spending. Now, if you're looking to tweak an advert and try and get better results, I would run it for at least three days before you start messing about. So, I would have in your mind that you're going to run the ad for, say, a week or even longer if it's going to be something that you're going to tweak. When you're boosting posts, of course, sometimes I'll boost a post literally for 24 hours. Next up with Facebook ads, we get to put some images on our adverts. And what I really like with Facebook is that it will run an advert with six different images. So, what Facebook will do very cleverly is it will display the same ad across six different images and then it will start to target the most popular image. So, if you put your ad in to drive traffic towards a website, what it will do is say, well, actually this image seems to send more people to that website than this image. So, we run this one slightly more often. After three to four days, you can see a real difference in the number of clicks that you're getting from each advert. And then all I do is switch off the least popular or the most expensive ones. There is a 20% rule which Facebook have been running for years which says that you can't have more than 20% of your image taken up by text.

So, no big logos or lots and lots of text on an advert. That rule now isn't quite the same as it used to be. So, use 20% as your guideline. What Facebook are now saying is that if you've got more than 20% text in your ad, the ad may still run but that it will probably cost you more per click than if you have less text. Next up, we get to play with some text. So, we get to choose a headline. We get to choose a little bit of body copy, so a bit of advertising text. And you also get to choose from a number of calls to action. Things that say book now or find out more. When I talked earlier about the things that we're going to tweak in our advertising, these are the things we can play with. So, what I will do after say a week of advertising, I then know Facebook has told me which is the most popular image that I uploaded. I will take that most popular image and then for the next week, I will run the advert with six different headlines. The next week after that, I know which is the most popular image and which is the most popular headline. So, then I'll play with the body text a little bit. So, you can keep tweaking elements of the advert until you've got your best performing ad. Then I put the bigger budget behind that and push it out to a bigger audience. Then we get to submit our ad for approval. Now, Facebook has a number of automated processes that it goes through. And then if it's not quite sure, it seems to get a human being to have a look at that ad afterwards. If you get an ad rejected, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of the world. Usually, they're very good at telling you the reasons why an advert may have been declined. There are lots of guidelines and there's lots of help in the Facebook Health Centre if you're not sure why an ad might have been disapproved. The main thing is to give it a go. Get some money behind it. It doesn't need to be an awful lot. Maybe set yourself a budget of £25 and have a little play with some targeting and boosting posts. It's a really powerful platform. But stop using it for chat all the time and start using it to drive some traffic into the salon. If you get a good result with a Facebook ad, please share it with me. I love hearing about how salons are hitting success. I'll speak to you again soon. Take care. Hey everyone, it's Phil. Did you like the episode? Be sure to subscribe and tell your friends. For more help in getting more from your salon and your life, head over to buildyoursalon.uk. Enter your name and email for our newsletter list. In the meantime, keep on building!