How To Use Facebook Ads To Grow Salon Leads and Grow Sales

Facebook ads for salons works so well that you can now create a steady flow of ongoing leads every month for many different salon retail services - lash extensions, hair, brow, nails, Brazilian blowouts, and more.

If you’re searching for beauty salon Facebook advertising ideas, the strategies outlined in this post will demonstrate to you how you can skyrocket your sales and lead generation efforts using Facebook ads (a related post here on med spa marketing is a good read on developing your overall marketing strategy).

What You Will Learn

In this post, I will show you, through demonstration and actual results, the 9 most critical factors necessary for a successful Facebook marketing campaign that will produce a steady flow of leads month after month for your salon.

Equally important, however, is that many of your salon or spa competitors are stuck in the dark ages and have not embraced Facebook ads. So you have an advantage - seize the opportunity.

Follow the below recommendations and you are on your way to rapidly growing your sales.

Who is this post for?

Any salon or spa manager, or owner that offers salon services such as hair styling, hair cuts, coloring, blow dry, nails, eyelash extensions, and other retail beauty services, such as, but not limited to the following:

The good thing about Facebook advertising is that you have almost unlimited ability to reach your ideal target customer with ads.

I will use lash extensions as a retail service to demonstrate how to target your ideal salon or spa customers to get leads that convert to sales. The Facebook advertising approach we’re demonstrating here is a similar strategy with any salon service.

At the end of this, you will know the essential elements necessary to generate a list of customer leads from Facebook ads (see below). Read our related post here on Google Ads For Beauty Salons. 

The below screenshot shows a partial list of customer leads from one such Facebook ad campaign. Imagine accessing leads like this on a daily basis - eager fans wanting your services. And these Facebook leads are you unique to you and delivered right within your Facebook page where you can easily access them. You can also integrate them into a CRM if you have one as well.

Consistent Ongoing Flow of Leads

Below is a line chart showing how many leads came in per day and the cost per lead each day. All the leads had a first name, last name, email address, and phone number so they can be contacted right away and booked for an appointment.

These Facebook campaigns can produce leads as low as $3. 

Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on many factors (product/service you’re promoting, competition, seasonality, etc). But the good thing is that we’ve successfully run these lead generation campaigns from the northeast to the southwest and everywhere in between in the US with similar results, and you can find the same success, too. 

466 Total Leads from end of September to mid-December

Stay with me here...

For this post, I will show you the essential success factors for running a Lead Generation campaign that uses Facebook Lead Ads – arguably one of the most effective Facebook ads for salons. (read my related post Unstoppable Lead Generation Technique for a more in-depth read on utilizing lead magnets and lead nurturing to skyrocket leads evern more. 

What is a Facebook Lead Ad, you ask?

Lead Ads are a special Facebook ads that allows you to capture salon customer leads right within Facebook. 

What makes Lead Ads unique?

They are super easy for you, the advertiser, to set up and use, and even easier for the potential customer to use and send you her contact info.

With Lead Ads, there is no need to set up a landing page (more on that later) or forms that a prospect must awkwardly try to fill out on a mobile device.

Lead Ads capture potential customer information right within Facebook using a form that Facebook will prefill with the customer’s information. All the customer has to do is hit the Submit button and away goes their contact info to your inbox.

The 9 Critical Success Factors To Capture Salon Leads

Each of Facebook's 11 campaign objectives aligns with a different business goal.

For example, Brand Awareness, or Reach (showing your ads to as many people as possible), or Engagement (related post here on why you should not use the Boost Post option, which is the same as an Engagement campaign objective).

You likely have many salon products and services that you offer. If you have a limited budget, how do  you decide which service or product to promote?

Your choice here is driven by several factors:

1. Which salon service or product provides the most profit?
2. Which service or product are you the best at? Which differentiates you from others?
3. Which service or product has the most demand from existing customers and least competition?

Other considerations include, do you have imagery or video content to display and demonstrate the product or service in an ad? For example, before and after pictures, or a video of the product or service.

Because Lead Generation campaigns are a direct response advertising tactic, the more specific you can be with what you are promoting, the better. 

What you want to avoid is a general ad such as, Contact Us About Our Full-Service Salon Services. Or an ad that is more branding oriented reflecting a social cause that you're aligned with. These types of ads have their place, but Lead Generation is a direct response marketing tactic so you have to appeal to the immediate need and pain points of the customer to get good conversion rates. 

What always works better is specificity, for example:
Book Your  Appointment For An Initial Set of Lash Extensions - $89.

Includes the exact product  you offer, a price, and a call-to-action.

And when you are more specific with your ad, you can tailor the ad imagery and copy to that specific service or product and the unique needs of the customer, which then affects how you choose your Facebook ad targeting as well (we'll get to more of that in a moment). For this example, we can specifically identify people that have an interest in lash extensions.

For for our purposes here, we’ll use Lash Extensions as a service.

Ad targeting is where Facebook really shines and rises above all other ad platforms – its advertising offers unmatched targeting abilities for you as an advertiser.

For this campaign, we are drilling down into the following customer features of our ideal customer persona and women we know that will highly likely be interested in our services.

Facebook offers the following general buckets for Detailed Targeting:

Here are more targets as well – people that have an interest in eyelash extensions.

Keep in mind that as you layer more targets, your audience size will change. What’s important is maximizing the size of your audience with the right balance of Interests and Behaviors.

Your targeting will change depending on the product or service you’re advertising.

If your salon was advertising its Hair Stylists and hair-cutting, coloring, and styling services, here's an example of the targeting you would use to find local customers (related post here on using Google ads to find local customers):

What if your salon is advertising its blowouts? Here's the targeting you can use to find women interested in blow dry services. 

Imagery:

Because Lead Ads are a direct response marketing tactic, hone in on the product or service features and benefits for your ads - be specific. Make sure you choose an image that reflects the service. Consider before and after images if you have.

If not, use a service like Adobe Photos to find a quality image. 

For example, for lash extensions, this image reflects the look you might have after receiving this service. Don't make it hard for people to understand what you're selling. On mobile devices people are scanning their newsfeed quickly so use images that have an impact.

Copy:

People buy the benefits of your service.

Write your copy so it reflects your product or service's most important benefits.

Here's an example of  those benefits for lash extensions:

Offer or Discount:

Direct response conversion rates are almost always better with an offer. 

For example:
Introductory offer - $50 off your first full set. Only $49.99 Now!

Do not be afraid to promote an aggressive offer. People are often hesitant to promote a service at a discount. 

But here's why you should consider discounted offers. 

Consumers react to "deals." 

But you might be thinking, but I'm going to lose profit. And while that's true, the catch here is every customer you have has a lifetime value far beyond one service, right. I know salons where the yearly value of a customer is over $1,000. 

So, with discounts, you acquire more leads and get more people booking appointments and you will make far more money on the long-term value this customer will provide to your business than what you might give up on the initial service. 

I recall a salon that was offering an initial set of lash extensions for $39.99 - he was giving the service away. But he knew, once they come in the average customer is worth more than $1,000 in the first year. So would you rather make $60 more on the first service, or $1,000 over the course of the next year?

Call To Action:

With Facebook Ads, you have several options for the call-to-action button. Since we want appointment leads choose, Book Now:

Whether you’re in an urban, suburban, or rural area will determine how you should set your geographic targeting for your ads.

Some of the smallest geo-targeting is a 1 km radius – appropriate in a densely populated area like NYC. However, if you’re in a suburban area, your customers are likely willing to drive 5 miles, perhaps 10. And if you’re in a rural area, 10+ miles is not unreasonable for a customer to drive to see you.

Facebook provides many options to target the locations that are ideal for you – you can target by state, city, county, zip code, a radius by dropping a pin on a map, and more.

As we discussed with Interest, Behavior, and Demographic targeting, you also want to maximize your audience size here, too, so go as wide as you reasonably can. Of course, you can always adjust the targeting later if you find you’re getting people too far out.

For example, here I typed in Del Mar, CA. You will notice a slider that you can drag out to include a larger target area, or you can click, “Current city only.” So choose the widest radius you can reasonably go here to maximize your audience.

You can also exclude geographic areas where you do not want your ads to show but use that sparingly again to maximize the audience size so that Facebook’s algorithm has the most data to work with.

You will notice in the screenshot above where it says Del Mar, there’s another drop-down that is set to, “People living in or recently in this location.”

The below screenshot includes all the options– select the first drop-down option.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Facebook is pay-to-play. Larger ad spends equate to more exposure and more leads.

Start with your sales goals. 

Salon and spa lead costs vary, but a reasonable place to start is to assume $12 per lead and back into the spend (based on historical data from many campaigns we have run in the past, but the cost per lead can range from $3 - $20). 

If I want 40 new leads, I need to spend approximately $500 in ad spend per month, assuming $12 per lead.

You could stop right there for estimating an initial budget to reach your marketing goals.

But if you want a handle on managing your campaigns like a pro, build a simple ad spend model and track your results (here's a related post I wrote: how much should I spend on Google Ads).

Here’s a simple model with reasonable estimates you can use. This one was built using Excel.

You can then plug in different numbers into the Ad Spend Model to see how your sales and profits change.

Try lower or higher cost per lead; perhaps your average order is larger or smaller than $100; what is your closing percentage? Work the numbers and see where your profit is optimal (after all, the ultimate goal of any business is to maximize its profit).

Operations play a crucial role in the success of your marketing campaigns. For example, if you don’t follow up on leads quickly enough, if your staff is not trained well and does not have sales skills, then your investment in advertising is not as profitable.

Some people will interact with your ad but will not fill out the form and abandon the process for whatever reason. However, because these potential prospects did show initial interest, we want to retarget them and give them another opportunity to convert – this will further squeeze more leads and more value from your Facebook ad spend.

We want more than one bite at the apple.

Facebook allows us to target these looky-loos.

Here’s how:

All we have to do is create an Audience within the Audience Manager.

Once you click Next, you have more options:

Then all you have to do is click “Create Audience” and use it in your targeting which we discussed above when selecting Interests, Behaviors, and Demographics. However, in this case, you would want an ad set dedicated specifically to retargeting the Lead Ads campaign – do not add any other targeting.

Retargeting Lead Ad forms is one of the hugely compelling reasons why using Facebook ads can be so successful for leads and return on ad spend. What other advertising channel can you leverage retargeting like this?

Custom landing pages, in this case, are not necessary but will help squeeze even more value and more sales from your ad spend.

Because we are using Lead Ads, the prospect’s contact information is already captured within Facebook, so you already have the lead. But you can direct people to a landing page aligned to that product or service that the prospect sees only after they have submitted their information.

A landing page can help give them a warm fuzzy, build rapport and trust and increase conversion rates. In addition, some potential prospects will want to learn more or possibly act right now, so we want to give them that opportunity.

For a landing page, make sure to include an in-depth description of the service, features and benefits, customer testimonials, and, of course, a click-to-call phone number so they can call and book right away instead of waiting for you to contact them.

Not all leads will want to book an appointment right away for various reasons – perhaps they were distracted with other events or just not ready for whatever reason.

But…

If you can avoid it, don’t let those leads go.

Those leads you don’t close right away, put them into a lead nurturing campaign where you use email to drip them helpful content over time. You paid for this lead, don’t let it go until they either book an appointment or have opted out entirely.

There are many email service providers (ESPs) to chose from. Some that go from simple and inexpensive to robust, powerful marketing automation platforms. Whatever you decide, email drip campaigns are hugely effective at squeezing out even more value from your initial ad spend and not hard to set up.

So to wrap up successful Facebook ads for beauty salon products and services that produce leads:

Related Post: Common Facebook Ad Campaign Questions and Answers