We have been running Facebook & Instagram adverts for salons and clinics in the UK, Ireland, USA and Australia for many years and have unbeatable knowledge of what works.

So the VERY detailed guide on this page shows you HOW to create your own adverts, or you can contact us for help at any time.

The buttons below give more help on Social Media for Salons & Clinics...

Before You Start

Our guide assumes that you have the basics in place, but you can get help by following these links...

Sections in this Guide

Click to jump to the section

The Campaign Overview Screen

Campaign overviewWhen in your Facebook Ads Manager use the left navigation bar to open the Table screen, shown in blue in the image above. This gives the Campaign screen shown above.

The key things to understand.
Hovering over many fields on Facebook will give their explanation.

1. Shows your account ID number
2. Lets you choose a period for the reports. You can also choose a period to Compare to.
3. The last icon on the left expands the sidebar.
4. This column shows your Campaigns. It also includes any posts you have boosted.
5. Use this to customise the columns shown. My example has the stats that are most helpful. If you tick "save as Preset", you can see your own layout next time you view the screen.

Expanding the Campaign to show Adsets and Adverts
salon faceook adverts campaign expanded

To drill-down into the details for a Campaign you have two options.
1. tick the Campaign (we have ticked NCO 2019) and then move across the tabs to Ad sets or Ads.
2. or use the small down arrows v to open the adset or adverts.


What are Campaigns, Ad-sets and Adverts?

We provide more info on the many options when we show an example later.

  • Campaigns are where you set your objective and daily or total budget.
  • Ad-sets are where you choose your audience, locations, ages range & gender (you can set the budget here too)
  • Adverts are the images or videos plus a headline and text and then a link to your website or a lead form.

For example, you may have...
a New Client campaign aimed at getting client sign-ups (leads)
within it 3 ad-sets targeted at females of different age ranges, within 10 miles of the salon and each with a budget of £10 a day
and each has 2 adverts with age appropriate videos and text

You can run a single campaign with 1 ad-set and 1 advert. But later we explain why more is better.

 

Creating your first Salon Facebook and Instagram Campaign

Objective & Budget

Your 1st choice is the "objective" of the campaign as this will affect the way you create the adverts and also how Facebook will work to give you the best result.

This page explains in a lot more detail but the key choices are what do you want the target client to do?

1. Visit your website  - Traffic
2. Complete a form within Facebook - Lead
3. Send you a Message

There are other options, but lets keep this simple for now.

The following image (click to enlarge) shows the first screen when you create your campaign with...

1. Your choice of objective. Normally 1 of the 3 above.
2. Name your campaign
3. Choose a daily or lifetime budget (normally daily)
4. Set the budget amount

 

salon facebook campaign screen 1

Create the first Ad-set

This is where you define who you want to see your advert. The following image shows the most important part and most other settings can be ignored.

First add the Ad-set Name - this should remind you of "who" in the settings e.g. Female 18-40

If you chose Traffic as your objective (sending people to your website) scroll down to Audience to define "who".
Note : If you chose Lead or Messenger the questions and layout will vary slightly. 

You can use Custom Audiences, more about this in our second Advanced Guide.

Next to Locations you can choose people who live in the location or visited recently. For most salons the best choice is "Everyone in this location" so you include both visitors and residents.

You can then choose the county and beneath that the local area. This can be your full address, a postcode, a town or city.

Depending on your choice you may then add a Radius that draws a circle around you chosen area. TIP: to target a smaller area you can "drop a pin" on the map and then reduce the Radius to as a little as 1 kilometer (you may have miles as your unit depending where you live).

adset1

Your Audience size numbers

Once you add a radius a chart to the right (see the image Audience Size) shows the number of people in your target area that you will reach.

You can then add an age range and gender - Male, Female or Both. As you add this information the number of people in the Audience Definition is updated.

The Potential reach number are all the people on Facebook and Instagram that you could see your advert based on your radius, age range and gender choice.

Beneath that the Reach and Links Clicks numbers are estimates of how many people will see and click your advert based on the budget you set previously.

 

 

facebook audience size 1

Budget and Schedule

In this section the key things to set are listed below....

In most cases choose Link Clicks for Optimisation for Ad delivery.

Set your Budget as either a daily amount or a total (Lifetime Budget). Daily is normally the best for more control.

You can run the advert continuously, but to ensure you do not get overcharged it is better to set a start and end date. You can always revisit the ad set on the final day and extend the period.

A final and important setting is "When you are charged". Choose Link Click so that you only pay for each person that clicks your advert not each time someone sees it (Impressions).

advert budget


Creating your Facebook & Instagram Adverts

You use the Facebook adverts screens to create your adverts for BOTH Instagram and Facebook.

On the Adverts creation screen there are some simple settings that need no explanation...

  • Choose an advert name.
  • Choose your Identity (your Facebook page and Instagram account). If your Facebook page is not linked to your Instagram follow these instructions.

For most salon adverts the best Format is either a single image or a video. If you do not have a video you can create one on the following screens from 5 still images.

Our vast experience of running these adverts shows that a video will cost (per click) about a 1/4 of still images and have more than double the engagement rate. So we will explain that first.

Creating a Video advert from a set of still images

Choose "Single image or video" in the format and then in the Media section choose "Use video template".

This will give you a screen where you can choose the layout and format. Feel free to try each style but our preferred choice (and the example shown) is the fourth "Show product benefits".

The following two images (click to enlarge) show the key settings.

Using this format you add 5 images - note that the first image is duplicated as the 6th video in the video.

On our 1st screenshot we have clicked Select Image and added the 1st. Note that we have NOT added a Logo or Optional text. You can say all you need in the text around the advert so it is not needed ON the video and can cause issues (more on this later).

Our 2nd screenshot shows the video fully created but note that on the 6th image (a duplicate of the 1st) we have chosen to add some text, chose the font and also a background colour for the text. This can be useful to highlight your offer, key text or your location.

Note that no more than 20% of an image or video should have text - so we limit our text overlays to the final video still.

If you want to see what your video looks like (you cannot edit the images afterwards) select the 1st image in the set and press the video play button. If all OK press Continue.

salon facebook Advert

salon instagram Advert


Advanced Facebook and Instagram options

 

Understanding and testing Placements

When you run your salon adverts on Facebook and Instagram they can appear (the placement) in many places and formats. A selection of the list ...

Facebook Newsfeed on a big PC screen Instagram feed on a mobile Instagram stories on a tablet Facebook articles and many more.

You can create images/videos for each of the perfect size (they vary) or tun placements on and off. But the best option is to select a format that fits all (a square image/video at least 500px wide) and leave all placements turned on.

To see what your advert looks like in various placements, scroll back from the section in your adverts where you add the text and look for the drop-down selector "select a placement to customise". You can swap between placements and also the screen sizes.

 

Creating more adverts

Once you create and publish an advert you may want a 2nd version that is very similar and in the same adset i.e. targeting the same people and using a shared budget. The easiest way to create  2nd advert is to hover over the advert name on the Campaign screen and use the Duplicate link. This will create an exact copy of advert 1. Just rename it and then swap either the image/video or make changes to the text.

If you want two adsets or more you can Duplicate them too in the same way. Create all your adverts in adset 1 and the duplicate it to adset 2. You can then edit the targeting to give you two adsets for different ages/genders/locations - and make changes to the adverts to make them suitable.

 

Using videos

Our example shows how to use images to create a video. These are our tips to use a full video...

  • Keep you videos short and visual - less than 15 seconds - read more here
  • To ensure it fits all screen sizes and placements we use a square format. This tool allows you to crop to square format or shorten the length
  • The tool above also allows you to mute the video - so you don't get background salon noise

This page has examples of videos and still images made into videos.

 

Lead Forms for Data Capture

A recent addition to Facebook has been Lead Forms.  At the very start of your campaign when you choose the Objective you can select Lead rather than our example of Traffic. Instead of sending people to your website to claim a voucher or add their data, the lead form pops-open in Facebook and saves the data in a table on your page. We use this option all the time as it makes sign-ups quick and easy, but if you are new to adverts you will find the Traffic option easier at first. Read more about Facebook Lead Ads here.

 

Your Facebook Pixel

Did you notice the last step of the advert creation was to set up your pixel? This is a small piece of code you add to your website that allows Facebook to not only track who visits your site but also what action they take. If you are serious about using Facebook long-term this is a vital step as it will help you better target your adverts and spend less in the future. Read about pixels here.

 

Advanced Targeting

We have shown how you can use age, gender and location to reach a target audience, but you can reach groups of people in many more ways. One of the best uses of this is for recruitment adverts. Rather than reach all people aged 18-55 in your location you can target your advert for a stylist to reach ONLY people who have a job title of "stylist" or whose interests include magazines like Hairdressers Journal or Behind the Chair. You can also target members of organisations like National Hairdressers Federation. You can use the same approach to target Beauty Therapists by magazine and trade organisation.

Targeting lets you reach a smaller but better defined group of people and spend less money for better results. You can even save these definitions as Audiences. Read more here.

Using Audiences

As well as saving your target definitions as an audience, there are other options to suit the kind of promotions you run. You can upload files with names and emails and run adverts to only those people. Useful for a file of "lost clients". More about this here.

Or you can target people who visited pages on your website. So you could run an advert only to people who visited one of your pages about hair extensions or balayage.