Grasping the Potential
One of your biggest opportunities with Meta is your ability to scale. If you can spend $2,000 per month, get 40 leads, book 10, close 2, and make $20,000 - you've just gotten a 10:1 ROAS.
If you had a machine that you could put a dollar in and get 10 dollars out - you'd probably put as many dollars in as you can, right?
So if you can spend $2,000 per month with Facebook and make $20,000, the next logical step should be how can you spend $20,000 and make $200,000 per month?
In this article, I'll attempt to answer that question.
The Challenge
Scaling up the ad budget for a local service business isn't always as simple as the initial example. You don't just want to keep throwing more and more money at Facebook.
Now, if there are a million Facebook users over 30 that you can target in your specific service area, you can easily spend $5,000 to $10,000 per month. But scaling past that - especially in a smaller market - you might encounter some issues.
What may happen is that you end up spending twice or three times as much money - only to get the same amount of leads. Lead volume stays the same, but cost per lead goes up. If that happens it's likely because you reached the cap of what your market will bear.
I'm assuming you're still reading because you want to scale past $10,000 a month - and maybe you're in a small market.
The next sections will show you how to make it happen!
Start by Walking up the Budget 20% Each Week
Rather than doubling or tripling your budget right away, walk it up little by little. Most experts agree a safe increase is 20% per week.
This gives the algorithm time to learn, reach its new audience, and optimize for the new budget.
When you scale the budget too fast, or if the algorithm isn't able to optimize quickly enough, you may just end up increasing the frequency of the ads (how many impressions they get) without increasing the reach (amount of people seeing them.) Even if there's enough demand in your market, this would just cause you to needlessly burn through cash.
Now, even with scaling 20% each week - you may see lead costs rise, and you may see frequency go up. If that's the case, in the next week, simply duplicate your campaign and turn off the old one. This will force the algorithm to completely re-learn everything. If after another week or two the lead costs are still way higher, you might have hit the cap in your area.
Run Different Offers Simultaneously
Think of your "market" - the people responding to your ads - as being in different segments.
Some segments of people may respond well to a Tune-Up ad. Another may respond well to a 0% APR financing offer. Another segment may respond well to an ad that's just written really authentically and asking for work to keep your guys busy.
If you're only running ONE type of offer, you're only going to appeal to that one segment. You will cap a lot faster than if you are advertising a variety of offers and a variety of services.
If you're already at $5,000 to $10,000 per month with Meta ads and it doesn't seem like you can spend more ads efficiently, try adding in other services or promotions.
Rotate Your Campaigns and Creative Assets
Different types of creative (graphics, images, videos, ad copy) will appeal to different types of people.
If you've run the same campaigns for a while and now they're starting to slow down, it probably means you've gotten all the interest you can out of the segment of the market that's going to respond to that creative.
Add in new creative, and test the new and old creative side by side. See what performs better. Whatever performs the worst, turn it off, and throw more creative into the mix. Rinse and repeat!
I don't recommend completely halting your old campaigns before the new ones have had a chance to prove themselves. Don't assume the new ones will work - just test side by side, and keep rotating. The bigger your budget, and the smaller your market, the more often you will probably have to rotate.
Expand Your Audience Size
By far, the easiest way to scale your ad budget is to expand your audience size on Facebook. And the easiest way to do that, is to target a bigger area geographically.
Most service business owners are resistant to this, due to driving time. But if it's not crunch time and your techs need more work, and your comfort advisors need more calls to run - it's probably better they drive longer distances than do nothing at all.
If you've been using tight parameters, such as "married" or "has kids" or "over 40 years old" you can also remove some of those to get in front of more people.
Don't worry - the algorithm does a great job at getting your ad in front of the right people, even with open targeting.
Give it Time
Ad results can fluctuate way too much on a daily basis to get any meaningful data from split tests. Any change you make, you'll need to give it more time. We usually check our client's ads on a weekly basis.
Conclusion
Facebook ads not only allow you to scale your leads, your way, but also tend to be more effective during slow seasons.
Scaling can be difficult, especially in smaller markets. But in my opinion the effort is well worth it!
I hope you learned something from this article - good luck with your Meta campaigns.
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