By Jen Kiaba Barry

Many wedding pros balk at the idea of using online paid advertising tactics to drive leads.

Perhaps they’ve tried it in the past and seen their bank accounts get drained with little return on investment. Or perhaps they’ve seen the Cost per Clicks rise on the Bing and Google AdWords platforms over the years, and can’t stay competitive on their industry keywords.

Enter Facebook Ads.

While they certainly aren’t the new kid on the Pay per Click ads block anymore, they’re still an underutilized advertising channel that many small business simply aren’t taking advantage of.

So here are four reasons to use Facebook Ads to grow your wedding business, plus a dollar-a-day challenge to get you started!

#1 – Your audience is already on Facebook.

One of the most basic tenets of marketing is to go to where your audience is already spending time, and to get in front of them.

Lucky for you, your audience of brides and grooms is likely already spending a pretty significant amount of time on Facebook. In fact, as of the end 2015, Facebook boasts 1.59 billion monthly active users! And those 1.59 billion active users are spending, on average, 40 minutes per day on the platform.

That’s a lot of attention span available for you to get in front of your audience!

#2 – Facebook Ads are great for creating awareness.

Simply put, if no one knows about your business then there’s no demand for what you offer.

In marketing we like to talk a lot about The Funnel. At the top of the Funnel is the Awareness Stage – and just like the funnel in your kitchen, it’s always wider at the top.

You’ll always have more people who are aware of what you do than are currently customers. So, what good is it to have people who are aware of your services without them being customers?

Because awareness opens up a path to begin to create customer demand and, in turn, generate leads for your business. In short, by getting in front of people who could potentially need your service, and continually providing value to those people while they are researching, means that when they are ready you’ll be top of mind!

#3 – Facebook Ads have amazing targeting.

So we already know that your audience is on Facebook. Still, that doesn’t mean that everyone on Facebook is a potential customer for your specific service. In fact, not everyone in a 50 mile radius of your business is a potential customer!

But Facebook Ads have the targeting capability to get in front of the right people at the right time so that your services are relevant to them when they need them.

Some of the targeting features that Facebook offers are:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Education
• Job
• Life events
• Likes – such as music/sport/film interests
• Purchase behaviour
• Travel

So let’s say your service is as a wedding venue; you can target couples who live within a certain radius of your business and who have recently gotten engaged. But why stop there?

If your venue’s speciality is bespoke weddings with rustic themes, and your customers tend to be lawyers who work in a nearby metropolitan area then you can layer that in with your targeting!

Don’t be afraid to go niche. The more relevant your ads are to your potential audience, the more Facebook will serve those ads at a lower cost to you!

#4 – Facebook Ads are inexpensive.

Speaking of that lower cost to you, Facebook Ads have the potential to be amazingly cheap when done right. Gone are the days of amazing organic reach on Facebook. These days days it’s become a pay-to-play platform.

But, when done right, you can reach that amazing built-in audience for relatively cheaply.

For example, take a look at this graph from Brian Carter’s Moz article:

This graph shows the average cost per 1,000 impressions on each channel.

As you can see, Facebook ads are by far the cheapest option listed coming in at $0.25 per 1,000 impressions.

And for Ad Sets with automatic bidding, the minimum daily budget for Facebook Ads is just $1.00!

So at the risk of sounding like Sally Struthers (am I dating myself here?), for just a dollar a day you have the potential to reach 4,000 highly targeted people who could turn into prospects down the road!

Take the Dollar a Day Challenge!

I bet you have at least $30 a month from your marketing budget that you can use to test out Facebook ads. After all, like Sally Struther would often remind us, that’s less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day.

So, taking that math, I want to pose a question to you: what could you do with an advertising budget of $1 a day? How many new, relevant people can you reach per day in order to grow the awareness and demand for your service or product?

I bet it’s more than you think, and I’d love to hear how you’ve taken $30 to grow your business using Facebook!

What do you think about Facebook Ads?

Jen Kiaba Barry is an award-winning fine art photographer, educator and digital marketing specialist at DragonSearch, based in the beautiful Hudson Valley, NY. Her photography has been published internationally in magazines and on book covers. To see more of her work, visit http://www.jenkiabaphotography.com