Facebook Ads for Your Beauty Business

While scrolling through your Facebook and Instagram feeds, you’ve probably stumbled upon multiple advertisements. Maybe more than once you’ve been inclined to click on the advertisement because it’s something that you have shown interest in. Facebook ads are one of the most cost-effective ways for beauty businesses to expand their reach and grow their client lists.

Facebook ads are not to be confused with boosting posts from your Facebook page. A boosted post is the simplest way to advertise on Facebook by showing your content to an audience of your choosing. They differ from Facebook ads because they’re created outside of the Ads Manager and don’t have the same customization features.

Why Should I Use Facebook Ads?

Your Clients are on Facebook

Facebook is too large of a platform for any business to ignore. It has a large, engaged user base that spends a lot of time on the platform every day. There are over 2 billion monthly active users on Facebook, making it the biggest social media platform.

Highly Targeted Form of Advertising

Businesses all over the world are using Facebook advertising because of their ability to reach their exact audience. You can advertise to your ideal client by age, interests, behavior, and location. This helps to get your ads in front of the right people, especially if you know who your ideal clients are.

Facebook Ads Manager gives an estimate of your potential reach and daily results. These estimations will give you an idea of how your ads will perform based on your targeting and budget.

Customizable to Your Marketing Needs

You can customize your ads to meet your marketing objectives on Facebook Ads Manager. Whether it’s to gain awareness, increase consideration or conversion rates, Facebook can help you with that.

It’s so customizable that you can decide where your ads will show up and how. Since your ideal clients are also on Instagram, you can have them show up there as well. You have a choice to select “Automatic Placements” or by manually choosing where you want your ads to show up.

It’s recommended to select “Automatic Placements” to maximize your budget and help show your ads to more people. Facebook will display your ads across many placements on Facebook and Instagram based on where they’re likely to perform.

We spoke with Permanent Makeup and Lash Lift Artist, Winnie Luu, who uses Facebook Ads to cater to her Instagram audience. She created graphics that fit her branding, showcases her work, and encourage a call-to-action. In this case, this story has a swipe up feature that allows potential clients to effortlessly direct message her.

Take Advantage of the Analytics

Facebook Ads Manager is a powerful tool that allows you to analyze the data you’re receiving from your ads. It looks at more than the likes or comments that your ads will get. You will be able to see your results based on your objectives and metrics. These metrics are beneficial in determining how well your ads are doing and how you can further improve them.

• Results: The number of times your ad received an outcome based on your objective (if you set your marketing objective to increase traffic through link clicks, then your results will be the number of link clicks that your ads get)
• Reach: The number of people who saw your ad at least once
• Impression: The number of times your ad was on a screen (not to be confused with reach⁠—impressions include more than one view of your ad by the same people)
• Cost per result: The average cost of each result
• Amount spent: How much you’ve spent on your ads so far
• Frequency: The average number of times each person saw your ad
• Unique link clicks: The number of people who performed a link click
• Link clicks: The total number of link clicks you received

These analytics allows Winnie to understand her audience and see what they respond to. “I’ve seen different results based on budget and the type of post I set,” she says. “I’ve found that they respond really well to stories sharing a promotion.”

Budget-Friendly Advertising

The word “advertising” tends to scare business owners. A great thing about Facebook Ads is how budget-friendly it is. You’re in control of how much you’re spending on each ad whether you want to set a daily or lifetime budget. You also have the option to easily increase or decrease your budget at any time.

Winnie felt skeptical when she was first introduced to Facebook ads, however, she enjoys how budget-friendly it is. “The first couple of paid posts don’t need to cost you an arm and a leg,” she says. “You can do it for as little as $1 a day for however many days you want.” This allowed her to play around with the results and see what could work for her business.

Creating Your Facebook Ads

Plan Your Campaign

Before jumping into creating Facebook ads, you will need to determine what your campaign goals are and how you will achieve it. For beauty business owners, your main goal is to bring in new clients and increase your bookings. To do this, you will need to create an incentive for new clients to book with you. This can be an introductory price or a limited-time promotion.

Promotions work very well with time or quantity sensitivity, meaning that there’s either an end date to the promotion or a limited quantity involved. Knowing that the promotion won’t be around for very long will encourage your ideal users to take action.

For example, you can offer an introductory price to your beauty services for a limited time only. The time sensitivity adds a sense of urgency and encourages potential clients to contact you.

After determining what you want your campaign to be about, you will need to decide on the image and text. You can use Canva to create an eye-catching graphic to showcase your work. For the text, ensure that it will grab your target client’s attention. You need to build an emotional connection with your ideal clients. Your text should be friendly and personable to build trust. They will want to know that they will be in great hands.

Facebook is a social media network. You will need to integrate your Facebook ads in a way that fits with the platform. Have a conversational tone and connect with your audience on a personal level.

Set up the Ads Manager

Once you’re ready to create your ads, you can start setting up the Ads Manager. Create a new campaign and Facebook will take you through each step. You will have to choose a marketing objective, choose your audience, and set a budget.

When selecting your audience, be as specific as possible. As much as you would like to target your advertisements to everyone, you should narrow it down. Targeting your ads at a broad audience can make your ads show up to the wrong people. This leads to spending unnecessary money that can be put to something else.

When selecting your audience, consider gender, age, and location. Location is a huge factor because you’ll want to target clients that are in your surrounding area. Targeting clients that live far away creates a barrier between you and the clients. What is the likelihood that they will be willing to drive the distance? Clients strive for convenience and accessibility.

Try Split Testing

If you’re not sure how effective your ads will be, you can take advantage of split testing. Split testing, commonly known as A/B testing, is the act of experimenting between different versions of an ad to see which one will perform better. It allows you to test the creativity and design of your ads, placement, audience, and delivery strategies.

You can play around with various media formats, visuals, text, or audience setting. Your audience may engage more with one versus another. Once you have concluded, you can focus on driving the ad that has the best results.

Here is another version of the Facebook ad that Winnie ran on Instagram. While it’s the same promotion, she changed the visual to see how the audience will react to this versus the other one.

Keep Track of Your Results

Facebook ads will bring you results in real-time. This means the data is always changing depending on how your ideal clients are engaging with your ads. You should always be analyzing the data and keeping track of your results to see how your ads are performing. If they are not performing as well as you would like, then it is time to re-evaluate. This is why we recommend split testing!

The next time you’re on Facebook and Instagram, pay attention to the ads you see. Take note of how you feel towards them. Do they catch your attention? Does it make you want to purchase this product or service? This will allow you to understand how you can plan your future campaigns to evoke similar reactions.