How to Use Facebook & Instagram Advertising to Grow Your Design Agency

Attracting new clients to your design agency can be a tedious process. Cold calling and emailing, networking or word of mouth are all basic ways to grow your agency, but these tend to take a lot of time and energy – two resources which no business owner can afford to waste! Running paid ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram to promote your agency is yet another (relatively) simple way to get your name out there that doesn’t require you to spend hours networking at an event or calling hundreds of ‘potential’ clients only to be told that they are not interested, most of the time. 

Paid Facebook and Instagram advertising is one of the most effective ways to reach new potential clients and build awareness faster than you can say “Hi, my name is…”, if done correctly. Advanced targeting tools allow you to create audiences for your ads based on the specific target market you want to reach down to the age, location, interests and job titles of your ideal client. Ads can also be optimized for certain objectives such as awareness, engagement or leads, giving you the freedom to decide what exactly it is that you want out of the campaign based on your overall agency goals. 

The success of a Facebook and Instagram ad campaign comes down to implementing three important elements: strategy, content/creative and analysis. 

Strategy

Start planning your strategy with the end in mind. Your agency will generally have one overarching objective for every campaign you run and that is to get more clients. The first thing that you need to get from a business to have even a slight chance of turning them into a client is their contact information. So, the question is: how can you get the contact information you need to make that call or send that email? A great way to do this is to offer something that may be of value to them for free in return for their email address and phone number. This is called a lead magnet. Your lead magnet can be in the form of a free download that provides insight on a particular topic such as user experience guidelines specific to website design or a free audit of their website or company branding, for example. Advertisers on Facebook and Instagram can run lead form ads, which will allow the audience to fill out their information on a simple form and download/access your lead magnet within the app once they click on the ad. Another option is to run a standard Facebook and Instagram ad, linking to a page on your website where the audience are then able to complete a form and download/access your lead magnet once submitting their information.     

Content/Creative

With tons of content on social media today, it is difficult to stand out in the feed. Your content i.e. the copy for the ad, as well as your creative must be relevant to your brand, concise and eye-catching. Video (under 15 seconds in length) is always recommended over using a still image as video has a higher chance of attracting the attention of the audience and gives the audience an experience that they are more likely to remember. As a design agency, showcasing your work is always a good place to start if you’re looking for creative ideas. Put together a short video of your latest and greatest work, a testimonial from a few clients or a quick behind the scenes video of you working on a project. Get creative and remember to keep it relevant. 

Analysis

This will either be the most boring or the most exciting part of Facebook and Instagram advertising for you. To ensure that your advertising budget is being spent optimally, the analysis of each ad campaign has to happen on a daily basis. Facebook and Instagram advertising happens in real time which means that real time issues could occur. Monitoring your ads daily gives you the chance to adjust and fix any potential issues before they have time to impact on your campaign. It’s also important to look at how your audience is responding to your ad as this provides valuable insight into whether your content/creative or lead magnet is relevant to them or not. If you’re seeing a low click-through-rate or if the audience is watching only a small percentage of your video, for example, it might be an indication that the ad or lead magnet is not relevant to them and something needs to change. 

Paid Facebook and Instagram advertising presents an amazing opportunity for design agencies to put themselves out there in a non-invasive, strategic way which can add value to the potential client before you’ve even spoken to them. Designers have the opportunity to showcase their talents in the actual creative of the Facebook ad for all to see which is a huge added advantage above most other types of businesses when advertising on this platform. 

If you are looking for further advice on how to market your business using Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We will happily jump on a 30-minute free consultation call to discuss how your current/future social media marketing plans and strategies can be optimized using this form of advertising.

Guest Post Contributor

Lauren Quibell - Paid Ad Specialist
Lauren Quibell is the co-owner of Blue Rabbit Digital, a specialised social media and Google ad agency which focuses scaling businesses by planning and implementing high performing, ROI driven ad campaigns.