Facebook ads in Nowra that reach the Shoalhaven, and the people planning to visit it.
Facebook and Instagram campaigns for local businesses, aimed at the customers who have not started looking yet and the visitors who have not arrived.
A good share of your future customers are not in the Shoalhaven yet.
A family in Canberra books a week at Jervis Bay in September for January. By the time they search for a cabin, a charter or somewhere to eat in Huskisson, the decision that mattered was already made weeks earlier, on a couch, two and a half hours inland. Google can sell them the booking. It cannot sell them the idea, because at the point the idea forms nobody has typed anything.
That is the gap Facebook and Instagram fill, and this region has an unusually large one. The Shoalhaven's customers arrive from a long way out and decide a long way ahead: Canberra, Sydney, the Southern Highlands, the caravan that leaves Melbourne after Boxing Day. Search advertising can only bid on a decision that has already been made. Paid social gets a say in making it.
It works the same way at home, just slower. The couple in Bomaderry who will replace the deck next autumn are not searching for a builder today. The bloke whose ute is on its last legs is not shopping yet. Both will be. The question is whether your name is already familiar when they start, or whether you meet them for the first time at the exact moment they are comparing three quotes.
Ask around Nowra for a sparkie and you will not get a Google result. You will get a name, usually three or four times over, from a community group, a school gate or a bloke at the counter. That is how work moves here, and it is the strongest thing a local business has going for it.
You cannot buy your way into those replies, and you should not try. What you can do is be the name that already looks familiar when somebody scrolls past it in the comments. Recognition is the raw material of a recommendation, and paid social is the cheapest way there is to build it in a defined patch of coast.
Which brings up the awkward part. Most local businesses have a Facebook page with a few hundred followers collected over years, post to it now and then, and assume that is the channel covered. It is not. A business page reaches a small fraction of the people who followed it, most of whom followed it a long time ago and have never been customers. Your page is not a broadcast any more. It is an archive with a good photo on it.
Paid reach is what puts you in front of people who have never heard of you, in the towns you actually service, as often as it takes to stick. Every posting cycle brings new families into the district who do not know a single trade, hairdresser, mechanic or dentist here. None of them follow your page. All of them are on their phones.
What we actually do with the budget.
Seven things, none of them glamorous, all of them the reason an account works.
Geography set by what people will drive for
Your service area is not a circle, it is a highway and a bridge. Somebody in Ulladulla will make the trip to Nowra for a specialist trade and will never make it for a coffee. For tourism we point the ads at where the visitors live, not where they will be standing.
We start with the people who already know you
Your customer list and the people who have been on your website come first, then we ask Meta to find more people who look like them across the region. Picking interests off a menu is a last resort here, not a starting point.
Creative shot where the work happens
The job, the yard, the shopfront, the boat, the van everyone has seen on the highway. A recognisable street does more for a local ad than any amount of polish, and stock photography actively works against you when the whole point is looking like you are from here.
A reason to act this month
The calendar gives you one, and we use it: get on the list before the books close for Christmas, the pre-season service, the quiet-month rate, the thing that has to be done before the crowds arrive.
A second go at the near misses
Most people do not enquire the first time they see you. If somebody watched the video, opened a page or started a message and got interrupted, they get a different message next time rather than the same one again.
Tracking wired to enquiries, not applause
Meta pixel and Conversions API installed and tested, with calls and form submissions counted properly. If clicks are the only thing being measured, clicks are what you will be sold, and clicks do not answer the phone.
New creative before people are sick of you
The smaller the market, the faster an ad wears out, and this market is small. The same person can see the same image a dozen times in a fortnight here. Fresh angles go in on a schedule, not after the results fall over.
Some of this belongs on Google, and we will say so.
Paid social is not a better version of search advertising. It does a different job, and there are jobs it is wrong for.
It earns its place when the decision takes a while.
Accommodation, tours and charters. Cafes, restaurants and functions. Salons, cosmetic and dental work. Gyms and studios chasing a January intake. Retail with something worth looking at. Events, markets and anything on the Shoalhaven calendar. Trades doing planned work: decks, kitchens, bathrooms, landscaping, pools, sheds. All of these are decided over weeks, which is exactly the window Facebook and Instagram can get into.
It is the wrong tool when the customer is already looking.
A blocked drain, a dead hot water system, a flat tyre, a locked door at nine on a Sunday. Nobody scrolls their way to an emergency plumber. That is search, every time, and we would rather put you there than take your money for the wrong channel. Google Ads
It is also the wrong tool for a buyer who is not a consumer.
A South Nowra workshop supplying into defence contracts is not won on Instagram. Procurement people do not buy from a feed. That work is won on capability, references and a website that stands up to being checked, which is a different conversation and a different page. Website design
Most businesses here end up running both channels once they can afford to. If you can only afford one to start with, we will tell you which, based on how your customers actually decide rather than on what we would rather be running.
Paid social, answered without the hype.
The questions we get asked across the desk once someone has already tried boosting a post and watched nothing happen.
Everyone in the Shoalhaven is on Facebook already. Why do we have to pay to reach them?+
Because being on Facebook and being seen on Facebook stopped being the same thing years ago. A business page reaches a small slice of its own followers, and almost none of the people who have never heard of you. Paying is how you reach the second group, which is the group that turns into new work. Being remembered and being findable are two separate jobs, and the other one lives elsewhere.
Can you reach people who are not in the region yet?+
Yes, and for tourism and accommodation it is usually the main reason to be there. We can put your ads in front of households in Canberra, Sydney or wherever your bookings actually come from, weeks before they start searching for a place to stay. Google cannot reach that person, because that person has not had the idea yet.
Is this the same as managing our Facebook page?+
No, and they are worth keeping separate in your head. Advertising reaches people who do not follow you. Posting reaches a fraction of the people who already do. Both are useful, they are priced and run differently, and we can do either or both. If someone has sold you posting as advertising, that is the confusion this answer exists to clear up.
How long before we know, and are we tied in?+
Social campaigns run on a three-month minimum, and we would rather explain that than bury it in a contract. The first weeks are Meta learning who responds, and the real gain usually comes from the second round of creative built on what the first round taught us. Judging the account at four weeks means judging it at its worst point. After the initial term it continues month to month.
What does it cost?+
Two bills, and only one of them is ours. Your ad budget goes straight to Meta and stays yours to set. Our management is a fixed monthly fee quoted up front, based on how many campaigns are running and how much creative work you need. Before you commit we will tell you what a budget has to be to do anything useful in your market, and if the number you had in mind is too small we will say so rather than take the fee.
The rest of what we do, from the one office.
The ad and the page it lands on are the same argument, so the rest of this matters more here than it looks.
Tell us what you sell and who buys it, and we will give you 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.
A quote from us is free, fixed and yours to sit on. No countdown timers, no chase-up calls.