This post is for our buddies in the landscaping industry -
Spending money geo targeting my community with paid ads from our Facebook business page has been a HUGE waste of money this year. We've spent just shy of $2k with Facebook with little return on investment.
Now, money well spent advertising? Our website and our continuous SEO. We started that project last year around this time, and now rank as the #1 organic search result on Google. This has lead to 70% of our new customer base being people who live out of town and have us maintain their property where we live.
The only other advertising channel above Google and the website is of course the almighty word of mouth recommendation.
If you try to use your FB page and pay for advertising, don't get caught up in thinking page " likes " is an indicator of how well your advertising is working online. Although we have around 800 likes on our page, only 1/5th of our paying, continuous income clients have liked our page. Now the majority are friends of us here, but this account really isn't meant as advertising.
TL; DR - Wish I had spent Facebook ad money elsewhere.