Facebook ads that reach the people still deciding where to go.
Facebook and Instagram campaigns for South Coast businesses, aimed at the customers who have not started searching and the visitors who have not booked.
The holiday was decided months before anybody searched for you.
A family picks the South Coast in August for a week in January. Where they stay, where they eat and what they book gets half decided in that same fortnight, on a phone, hundreds of kilometres away.
By the time anyone types anything into a search engine, most of the choosing is already done. Search ads can only bid on a decision somebody has already reached. It is very good at that and it is not what this is. Paid social gets a say in the deciding, weeks earlier, in the lounge rooms the visitors are sitting in.
The same thing happens locally, more slowly. The couple replacing the deck next autumn are not searching for a builder today. The tradie whose ute is on its last legs has not started looking either. Both will be. The only question is whether your name already looks familiar when they start, or whether they meet you for the first time while comparing three quotes.
Your Facebook page reaches almost nobody, and that is not your fault.
Most South Coast businesses have a page with a few hundred followers gathered over years, post to it occasionally, and reasonably assume the channel is covered. It is not. A business page now reaches a small fraction of the people who followed it, and most of them followed years ago and have never bought anything.
Paid reach is what puts you in front of people who have never heard of you: in the towns you service, and in the cities your visitors come from, often enough to stick. That matters more here than in a city, because the population you are selling to turns over constantly. Every school holidays brings people into the region who do not know a single cafe, charter, hairdresser or mechanic on this coast.
Where the budget actually goes.
Geography set by where the customers live, not where they will be standing.
For tourism that usually means Sydney, Canberra and the Highlands. For local trade it means the towns along your radius, which is not a circle.
We start with the people who already know you.
Your customer list and your website visitors first, then we ask Meta to find more people who resemble them. Picking interests off a menu is a last resort, not a starting point.
Creative shot where the work happens.
The job, the yard, the shopfront, the boat, the view from your deck. A recognisable place does more here than any amount of polish, and stock photography works actively against you when the whole point is looking like you belong.
A reason to act this month.
The calendar hands you one: book before the long weekend, the pre-season service, the off-peak rate, the thing that has to be done before the crowds.
A second go at the near misses.
Most people do not enquire the first time. Anyone who watched the video, opened a page or started a message and got interrupted gets a different message next time, not the same one again.
Tracking wired to enquiries.
Pixel and Conversions API installed and tested, with calls and forms counted properly, so nobody can sell you engagement and call it a result.
New creative before people are sick of you.
Small market, fast burn. The same person can see the same image a dozen times in a fortnight here, so fresh angles go in on a schedule rather than after the numbers collapse.
Half of this belongs on Google, and we will tell you which half.
- It works when the decision takes a while.
- Accommodation, tours, charters and anything booked ahead. Cafes, restaurants and functions. Salons, dental and cosmetic work. Gyms chasing a January intake. Retail where the product does the selling. Markets, festivals and events. Planned trade work: decks, kitchens, bathrooms, landscaping, pools and sheds. All of those are decided over weeks, which is the window paid social can get into.
- It earns nothing once the customer is already searching.
- A blocked drain, a dead hot water system, a flat tyre on the highway, a locked door on a Sunday. Nobody scrolls their way to an emergency tradesperson. That is search, every time, and we would rather send you there than take the fee for the wrong channel. Google Ads
- It is also wrong when the buyer is not a consumer.
- Supplying into contracts and tenders is not won in a feed. That is won on capability, references and a website that survives being checked by somebody sceptical, which is a different conversation and a different page. Website design
Paid social, without the hype.
What owners actually ask once they have boosted a post and watched nothing happen.
Everyone here is already on Facebook. Why pay to reach them?+
Because a page and an audience are two different things now, and they have been for years. Your page reaches a slice of your own followers and almost none of the people who have never heard of you, and that second group is where new work comes from.
Can you reach people before they get here?+
Yes, and for accommodation and tourism that is usually the main reason to bother. We can put your ads in front of households in Sydney, Canberra or wherever your bookings actually come from, weeks before anybody searches for a place to stay.
So this is separate from whoever posts for us?+
No, and it is worth keeping the two separate in your head. Ads go to people who have never followed you. Posts go to a slice of the ones who did, years ago. Both are useful, they are priced and run differently, and if someone has sold you posting as advertising, this answer exists to clear that up.
How long until we know, and can we stop?+
Social campaigns run on a three month minimum and we would rather say that here than bury it in a contract. The first weeks are the platform learning who responds, and the real gain usually comes from the second round of creative built on what the first round taught us. Judging it at four weeks is judging it at its worst point. After the initial term it runs month to month.
What do we end up paying?+
Two bills, one of them ours. Meta bills you for the ad spend directly, and the number is yours to set. Our management is a fixed monthly fee quoted on how many campaigns run and how much creative you need. If the budget you have in mind is too small to do anything useful in your market, we will say so rather than take the fee.
The other seven, and why one supplier holds all of them.
The rest of what we look after, on the same number and the same invoice.
Tell us what the business sells and who actually buys it. You will get a straight read on whether Facebook and Instagram would work for you, what it would take to do properly, and whether your money would do more somewhere else first.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.