So, you’re a photographer and you’re ready to run Facebook Ads? Fabulous!

Facebook Ads can be a powerful tool in your business to help bring in more leads so that you can book more clients and ultimately have a fully-booked calendar.

Facebook Ads can also help you grow your visibility and your audience so that you can not only create more impact in your local community, but so you can grow your network and stay top of mind of the people in your existing network.

The truth is, I could talk for several hours about all that goes into making your Facebook Ads successful — and I do in my NEW COURSE— but I want to empower you with the basics first.

One thing many photographers are NOT aware of is that there are many different types of ads.

I am sure you are aware that there are ads you can use to generate leads, but a savvy advertiser there’s more to running ads than just trying to get inquiries.

In fact if you ONLY focus on lead generating ads you might not get as much traction because you won’t have built up a large warm audience or built any know like and trust factor.

There are three basic ad types and I will break them down for you here!

Engagement Ads

Engagement Ads are NOT about generating leads. They are about growing an audience and engaging with them. This is one of the most overlooked typed of Ads but it’s so important.

Engagement Ads might look like

An Ad with the goal of getting more views on a video post
An Ad with the goal of getting more likes, comments and views on an existing post
An Ad with the goal of increasing traffic to a popular blog post or other piece of high value online content you have

So you might say… wait you want me to pay for ads to get more eyeballs on my content? WHY?

Well yes engagement Ads are exactly that— paying to get even more people to view and connect with your Facebook, Instagram and other high value online content.

And WHY? Well I bet you know that getting engagement organically on social media is HARD. Especially if you have a small following.

Look, Facebook® now Meta® is a business and they make their money with ads. They don’t give a ton of reach to people because they want you to buy it. Maybe that upsets you, but as a business it makes sense. Meta® wants to be profitable, and they will show your content to more people if you pay them. It’s as simple as that.

The good news is you can often see a lot of results from Engagement Ads with a low ad spend of just $5-10 a day.

Getting your content out to more people will

grow your audience
make people more aware of you are, what you do and what you offer for sale
likely increase your following

This will give you a bigger warm audience to work with when you go to run lead generating ads OR when you run re-targeting ads (read on to learn about those types.

Lead Generating Ads

This is what you are probably most familiar with when it comes to Facebook® Ads. The type that get you inquiries!

This is by far the sexiest type of Ad because who doesn’t want more inquiries and bookings.

There a few ways to approach lead generating Ads.

First, you can run what is actually called a “Lead Generation” Ad on Facebook which has you create a little form for people to fill out RIGHT on Facebook. Then you will get a spreadsheet with all the contact info to contact the people.

I’ve coached photographers who have had great success with these, but to be honest I don’t find they get the most qualified leads. The reason? It’s hard to convey your value as a photographer in the small space they give you for the ad form. Especially if you are a portrait photographer charging thousands for your services (like me)!

So what to do instead?

I recommend creating a landing page for your specific service or offer and run a custom conversion ad to that page.

Ok let’s pause.

What is a Landing Page?

It’s a one page website that has no outbound links. Literally, the only action a viewer can take on the page is to fill out the contact form to inquire about a shoot.

The entire page, and it’s layout and copy, is designed to qualify leads and get them to fill out the contact form.

A landing page really is crucial to getting the most qualified leads.

If you just send your ad traffic to your website, there are too many places they could click around and get lost and ultimately bounce before inquiring.

WHAT IS A CUSTOM CONVERSION?

A custom conversion is a way to tell Facebook that a viewer of your ad converted into a lead.

It’s a bit techy, but it’s a way to make sure Facebook tracks the leads you are getting from your ad that sends people to a landing page.

Essentially, a person will view your ad, if they like what they see, they will click on your ad and read your landing page. If they still like what they see, they will inquire and fill out your contact form. (Yay— you have a lead!) Once they hit submit on your contact form, they need to reach a thank you page that you have designated within Facebook Ads Manager as the point at which the viewer has converted to a lead!

When Facebook recognizes this, they will see your ad is working and will give you statistics like your cost per lead. It will also help Facebook understand the type of person who likes your offers and converts into clients. The more data your pixel builds the better results you will have in the future.

If just the term “custom conversion” makes your head spin a bit, don’t worry! Six years ago I felt the same way, but now I can do this in my sleep! So, you definitely want to check out my course where I can walk you through the set up of custom conversions.

WRAPPING UP LEAD GENERATION ADS

So basically what you want to do to maximize the effectiveness of your lead generating Facebook Ads, and get the most qualified leads is to

decide on specific offer / genre / package you want to sell
make a landing page for that offer
set up a thank you page that your inquiry will land on after they fill out your inquiry form and hit submit
set up a custom conversion in Facebook Ads, and then run your ad with the objective of getting conversions
run your ad, get inquiries and sell to them!

Again these ads can be really powerful in filling up your calendar, and you’ll get even more leads and higher quality leads if you were running engagement ads about 4-6 weeks before you launch your lead generating ads!

Re-Targeting Ads

Have you ever bought an item you saw on Facebook Ads? Some of my absolute best purchases have actually come through Facebook Ads. But when I think about my own consumer behavior, I often didn’t buy these items at first sight. No, I clicked on the ad, learned more, closed the window, convinced myself I didn’t need it or I shouldn’t spend the money. And THEN the ad (or variations on the original ad) followed me around for weeks making me want the items even more. And finally? I gave in and bought!

Has this ever happened to you too?

This is a form of re-targeting advertising. A re-targeting ad is an ad that goes out to someone who is already somewhat familiar with your service/product.

And the amazing thing is that we can set up re-targeting ads too– just like the big companies like Amazon and Target do!

The key is setting up all the proper audiences in the ads manager, so that when you go to build an ad you are only choosing to show the ad to these pre-made warm audiences.

You can set up audiences such as

people who have interacted with your Instagram account within the past year
people who have interacted with your Facebook business page in the past year
people who have been to your website within the last month
subscribers to your email list or your customer database
people who have watched your videos on Facebook
people who have filled out your lead forms

To set up these audiences you need to go to your Audiences Tab. Then choose create audience then choose custom audience.

From there you will want to choose the source you want Facebook to use to create your Audience (your Instagram, Facebook, Videos, Lead Forms etc).

I show all the steps via screen share in my video course called >>Get Fully Booked With Facebook Ads<< which is sold through The Portrait Masters store.

Once you have your custom audience set up, you can select to target your ad only to this audience!

So check this out, if you create a custom audience from your website, and you have people checking out your website / landing page from your lead generating ad, then they are being captured and tracked in your pixel. THEN you can run a Re-Targeting Ad to those same people who’ve been to your website recently and have your ad say something like “Only 4 Photoshoot Openings This Month! Don’t Forget to book your spot now!”

Isn’t that clever?

Re-targeting ads are highly effective and make it so people don’t forget about your offer.

If you aren’t seeing the results you want on your lead generating ad, remember that it’s possible one of the following things happened

The potential client got busy or distracted so they didn’t inquire
The potential client decided they didn’t know enough about you so they didn’t inquire
The potential client is considering the investment so they didn’t inquire

By having a solid re-targeting strategy, you can overcome these objections and stay in front of your potential clients. The more they keep seeing you pop up in their feed, the more likely they are to inquire and book.

To Recap

Running Facebook Ads isn’t all about lead generation. Sure that’s a huge piece of the puzzle but you will see more results when you focus strategically on running three types of Ads.

These Types of Ads Are:

Engagement Ads so that you can get more eyes on your content, grow your audience and know-like-trust factor
Lead generating Ads so that you can show your offers / services / packages to more people and get those inquiries
Re-Targeting Ads so that your offer stays in front of the people who are the most interested in your services (because they visited your website or landing page, your Instagram or Facebook Business page or perhaps are on your email list already).

Now one other important thing I want to mention is you can have your Ad strategy in place and you can be getting tons of leads. But that might create a whole new problem you’ve never thought of before… How are you going to reply to all these leads and get them to connect with you in a quick turnaround?

It sounds like an AMAZING problem to have if you aren’t currently sitting on a fully-booked roster, but it is actually a challenging issue to have. The last thing any business owner wants is to start dropping balls and messing up on customer service.

So, I suggest you get yourself all set up when it comes to the systems of your business. What can you automate, and what can you do to have your booking system work as efficiently as possible?

What I like to do is text all my leads a friendly hello message. I then link them to an FAQ page and ask them to read through it. This FAQ page fully explains my process and my pricing and packages. I tell them if all sounds good after to reading the FAQ to please use my calendal link to book a call.

I will be honest that out of 10 leads usually

3 will ghost me and not reply to my text
3 will usually reply that they read my FAQ and didn’t realize the cost and they can’t afford it
BUT the last 4 will say they read the FAQ, are so excited, book the call and then the call is a very quick chat and they pay on the call

I like this method because it allows me to protect my energy and only get on the phone with people who are truly interested in what I do. Because I am transparent with pricing and boundaries and what to expect, only people who really WANT to work with me get on the phone with me. I think this is courteous to my inquiries as well, because why would they want to spend time on a phone with me if they can’t afford me.

Now you may have a different system that works for you, which is totally ok! I just want you to at least think through how you will handle all your new inquiries and have a system in place to handle the high volume of inquiries in such a short amount of time.

As you can see, there’s a lot that goes into running successful Facebook Ads for your business, and I have only scratched the surface!

I haven’t even begun to discuss how to write a high converting landing page or scroll stopping Ad copy. I also haven’t walked you through how to split test Ads so you get the best cost per lead.

Facebook Ads is a topic I can really GO DEEP on, and I do inside my new course >>Get Fully Booked With Facebook Ads: Facebook Ads For Photographers<<

In this course we deep dive every single point I’ve outlined above.

I even walk you through:

ALL the tech of setting up and building ads so that you can be sure you have everything set up right.
How to write effective and persuasive Ad Copy so that your ads can bring in as many leads as possible.
How to set up your landing page and thank you page to get you more qualified leads.
How to troubleshoot your ads in case you run into issues.
How to set up many different types of ads and empower you to know when to use each type in your business.

If you have been wanting to start running Facebook Ads for your business or maybe you’ve tried running them in the past without seeing the results you were looking for, you definitely want to check out this course! >>Grab It Here<<

The 3 Types Of Facebook® Ads Every Photographer Should Use In Their Business