Facebook ads for beauty salons: a guide to gorgeous results

What kind of returns can you expect from Facebook ads for your beauty salon? Get set for success with our complete guide.

When you’re a small business with ambitious plans for growth, you really need your marketing spend to be accountable. That’s why you need to take healthcare lead generation seriously.

Facebook is one of the best platforms for getting paid ads working quickly – driving new customers to the entrance of your beauty salon.

Let’s dive in.

One quick thing, before we start…

What if we told you that it’s possible to use Facebook ads for beauty salons in a way that practically guarantees a positive return on your ad spend? Let us show you how – it won’t cost you a penny. In fact, we may even be able to cover your ad spend. Interested? Find out more.

“The digital strategy the Adbetter team created for us immediately started paying for itself several times over, in just the first month, by delivering significant new customer revenue. It has also allowed us to open up our customer base to new audiences that I never thought would be our target audience.”

– Kiana Djazeb, Director & Founder, Snatch & Glow

What are Facebook ads for beauty salons?

Essentially Facebook ads are a vehicle to get your salon in front of Facebook users who don’t follow you – helping you to reach out to new potential customers. There’s a vast suite of targeting options at your fingertips – including where your ad appears, what format it’s in and how it helps you hit your desired outcomes. 

Let’s take a closer look.

Objective: what do you want your ad to achieve?

When creating your ad, Facebook allows you to specify the outcome you are hoping to achieve. There are five core campaign objectives to choose from:

• Conversions
• Impressions
• Reach
• Link clicks
• Lead generation

For Facebook ads for beauty salons, we’d recommend focusing on lead generation as your objective.

What type of audience can I reach?

Facebook has 2.96 billion monthly active users. In short: that means roughly 37% of the world’s population is using Facebook every month. We’re guessing you’d struggle to fit all of them inside your salon.  

That’s where Facebook’s audience targeting tools come in. And they’re so sophisticated that it allows you to reach people who are highly likely to be interested in your salon’s services. Audience variables you can work into your targeting include:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Connections
• Relationship status
• Education
• Job title
• Online browsing behaviour

…and an awful lot more.

By zeroing in on specific audience criteria, a crowd of 2.96 billion can quickly dwindle to a few thousand. Or a few hundred. And that’s a good thing. When you know who your audience is, it’s easier to craft a message that gets their attention.

Now, as you run a beauty salon, it goes without saying that you’re going to want to utilise location targeting. And you can set that to target Facebook users within a set radius of your salon entrance – for example, 5km or 25km.

Maybe your customers’ interests include health, beauty, fitness, cosmetics and so on. You can even target people who visit specific websites. Give yourself time to experiment with the audience targeting options. And remember: the more targeted, the better.

Format: what sort of ad should you post?

You can place ads right across the Facebook platform – including: 

• In-feed
• Stories
• Messenger
• Marketplace

In terms of making cost-effective use of your budget, in-feed ads are one of the most effective options. Here you can post everything from static images to 4-hour videos.

• Image ads: Nice and simple. A single image that appears in a user’s feed. You can also include a headline, a description and a call to action. They’re good for campaigns with a single, clear message or strong visual content.
• Carousel ads: With a carousel ad you can show up to ten images in sequence – each with the potential to have its own headline, description and call to action. These are a great option for showcasing a series of your services or treatments.
• Video ads: Video ads are an effective way to take people behind the scenes at your salon: showcasing your staff, your services or both. Facebook allows you to post videos that are up to four hours long. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. We’d recommend sticking to around 15 seconds or less.

What sort of content should you use for your ad?

You know what they say. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That’s worth remembering when it comes to creating your ads. You have to try and put yourself in the position of the audience you’re targeting.

Here are some tips for creating your ad’s focus, visuals and messaging.

Follow the money

Deciding what your ad should be about can involve plenty of mental wrangling. One tip is to focus on promoting the treatment(s) that make the most money for your business.

Not only does that make sound commercial sense, it gives you more margin for error if your ads aren’t initially successful – and more room to spend enough to get Facebook’s algorithm working in your favour. (More on that later in the article.)

If you want to promote more than one of your most lucrative treatments, create different ads and treat them as individual campaigns. Here are some additional ideas for the type of content you could produce.

• Walkthroughs of specific treatments explaining the process and the results
• A video compilation that reveals a day in the life of a beauty specialist
• Bust some of the myths about certain treatments or call out bad practice
• Interviews where previous customers talk about treatments they have received

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Messaging and visuals

Think about the way you use Facebook. Chances are you don’t open the app just to look ads. It’s the same for your audience. You have a second or two – sometimes less – to grab your reader’s interest.

Clear messaging is key. Try to address the likely ambitions or doubts of your audience in a way that’s short, sharp and punchy.

Oh and stay away from stock images. You have a smartphone at your fingertips. Use it to create your own visual content that is completely unique and authentically yours.

Clinical photography tips for aesthetic professionals

Facebook ads for beauty salons: watch out for red tape

Facebook is strict with ad regulations – not least when it comes to health, beauty and cosmetics.

For instance, before and after shots are banned. Not just in your ads but on any webpage your ads drive traffic to.

Here are some other tips for avoiding a regulatory wrap on the knuckles:

• Make sure your language is as clear as possible
• Make it clear that your cosmetic procedures are not medical procedures
• Don’t make any unrealistic claims – e.g. “it will take 20 years off!”
• If you are showcasing images of a client following a treatment, do not alter the part of the image that shows the focus of the procedure
• Don’t try to rush your audience into a decision – e.g. “Sale must end tonight!”

And remember that it’s not just the Facebook overlords whose regulations you must comply with. There’s also national regulatory bodies to content with – such as the Advertising Standards Authority in the UK or the Federal Trade Commission in the US.

Ad regulations for medical aesthetic clinics

Take advantage of built-in testing

Let’s say your ad consists of four elements:

• Image
• Headline
• Description
• CTA

Facebook gives you the option to provide multiple variants of each when you are creating your ad. That’s an option you should take. By doing so you can easily create an ad with dozens of potential variations.   

And this is where it gets interesting…

When you publish your ad campaign, Facebook will initially fire out various versions of your ad to a small percentage of your audience – measuring which variants receive the most engagement. Based on that initial test, Facebook will then preferentially display the best performing ad variants more frequently.

It’s a great way to get your ad spend working as hard as possible for your business.

How much do Facebook ads for beauty salons cost?

Your beauty salon helps people to feel like a million dollars. Unfortunately you don’t get to charge them that. The reality is that your marketing budget is finite – and it needs to drive results.

Facebook’s exact charging policy isn’t public knowledge. What we do know is that cost is determined by many factors – including:

• The type of audience you are targeting
• Where your ad is placed
• The duration of your campaign
• The competitiveness of your industry
• The time of day it’s displayed
• The time of year it’s displayed

You can get started with ads on Facebook for less than the price of a couple of coffees each day. However, you need to share your ads at volume for the Facebook algorithm to begin learning what works in terms of driving results for your brand. So it’s best not to scrimp on your spend.

Whatever happens, you have various powers to control your ad spend – including setting daily, weekly or campaign spending limits. You can also pause your ad at any time or during certain times of the day.

Your first ad is just the start…

It’s easy to become preoccupied with your Facebook ads – especially when you start seeing data on how your ads are performing. But don’t forget they are just the start of the journey. Your ads should drive your audience to a landing page on your website that acts as a continuation of your ad.

Landing pages are a science all of their own. But here’s a super-speedy run through best practice.

• Design and copywriting. Your landing page should feel like a continuation of your ad. That means using similar messaging, images and colours, making sure your logo is prominent and so on. Make sure it’s optimised for mobile and create a compelling proposition above the fold.
• Create a closed journey. Single-mindedness is a strength when it comes to landing pages. Limit navigation options and stay focused on one clear call to action.
• Utilise social proof and trust signals. Testimonials from previous customers are a great way to build credibility and help to establish trust in your company. Ideally, take your customer reviews from a verifiable source such as Trustpilot or Google Reviews. If applicable, utilise trust signals such as industry accreditations, qualifications or awards.
• Gather data. The main aim of a landing page is to gather information on your new leads. Create a form that allows you to start the marketing conversation – perhaps asking questions about the type of treatments that your lead is looking for.
• Remember your GDPR obligations. For your forms that means having a tick box that forces people to actively opt in to your comms, the name of the person or business that will be contacting them and the method that they will be contacted by – such as email or phone. You must also include a link to your full privacy policy.

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Lookalike audiences

Have you heard of Meta Pixel? It’s a tracking device that sits on your website and gathers information on how your visitors are interacting. It’s a seriously clever piece of tech – and can be invaluable in helping you to find new customers.

Here’s a crude example.

Meta Pixel knows who has made an enquiry through your website or visited your Contact page over the last twelve months – and can then crunch their Facebook profile data.

You can then create a lookalike audience of Facebook users that share the same characteristics as people who have already got in touch with you – and are in your local area. Serve your ads to these people and there’s a good chance they’ll be responsive.

Audience retargeting

Retargeting is about serving new ads to people who have engaged with one of your previous ads. Let’s say they clicked a link or completed a form. They are clearly interested in your services. But they may not be ready to convert and become a customer just yet. With retargeting campaigns, you can serve new ads that build additional awareness of your brand and (hopefully) encourage people to become a customer.  

Once you have Meta Pixel installed on your website, you can also target your ads at Facebook users who have visited your website in the past (suggesting they’re interested in your services) but failed to get in touch. Just make sure you exclude existing customers from your targeting.

Your efforts go more than skin deep. So do ours.

When you help people feel better on the outside, you help them feel better on the inside. And we take a similarly non-superficial approach to our work. We look beyond the vanity metrics to analyse what’s really happening with your campaign performance.

Creating campaigns that consistently drive revenue requires getting the right tracking and analytics in place – allowing yourself to be driven by data. That way you can double down on the ads that work and ditch the ads that don’t.

But it takes time. And time is in short supply when you are trying to run a salon.

That’s where we can help.

At Adbetter we have proven customer generation strategies for Facebook – and we can share them with you. Maybe. You see, we only work with businesses when we are 100% sure we can deliver new customers and revenue growth. You can expect us to handle everything on your behalf. No secretive processes. No confusing marketing terminology. Just fully transparent lead generation – all done for you. And a monthly report showing the impact we are making. 

Could it work for you? Find out with a no-obligation, fee-free proposal. Let’s go.

>> Adbetter: officially an award-winning PPC agency

You may also be interested in:

• How to grow your medical aesthetics business with marketing
• (Almost) everything we know about winning big with aesthetics PPC
• Using Google ads to grow your aesthetics clinic
• Using Instagram ads to grow your aesthetics clinic
• Using TikTok ads to grow your aesthetics clinic
• Aesthetics advertising: the obstacles and how to avoid them