A contractor's ads should show your own jobs, your own crew and ideally you, filmed on a phone, with the finished result or a person talking in the first three seconds. Video usually beats photos on Facebook and Instagram, stock photos usually cost more per lead, and you need new ads every week or two because a local audience wears them out. Most of what you need for spring can be filmed on the jobs you finish this fall.
Should your ads be video or photos?
Run both and lean on video. On Facebook and Instagram, most of what people scroll past is video, and a ten-second clip of a driveway getting sealed or a crew setting the last step of a patio shows the job better than one photo can. Photos still earn a spot in the mix. A before-and-after pair of the same backyard can be one of the cheapest ads in an account, and it takes ten minutes to make. The mix I'd start with is mostly short vertical video plus a few before-and-after photos, with the platform left to find which one your customers answer. On Google search the question mostly doesn't come up, since search ads are text, and the photos that show up there come from your Business Profile and your site, which I went through in Google Ads or Facebook ads.
What should happen in the first three seconds of a video ad?
Something that tells a homeowner what they're looking at before they scroll. That's usually one of three openings, the finished result, a person talking to the camera, or something moving that people don't see every day, like a skid steer pulling out an old patio or a pressure washer cutting a white stripe through a grey driveway. Put a line of text on screen in the first second, because a lot of people watch with the sound off. Keep it short and plain, like "Interlock patio, Vaughan, 3 days." Leave room at the edges for the buttons. Meta's own ad guide says to keep about 14% of the top, 35% of the bottom and 6% of each side clear on Reels, so text in those spots gets covered. Logos and slow pans across a sign belong later in the ad, if anywhere.
Is video from your phone good enough for ads?
Yes, and for a local contractor it often does better than polished footage, because it looks like the job, and the job is what people are buying. A phone from the last few years shoots 4K, which is more than any ad needs. What ruins phone footage is easy to avoid. Shoot vertical, 9:16, since that's how most people see the ad. Brace the phone against something or hold it with both elbows in. Shoot in daylight with the sun behind you, and wipe the lens on your shirt first, because it's been in your pocket next to a tape measure all day. If anyone is talking, a clip-on mic in the $30 to $100 range fixes most of what makes phone audio hard to listen to. I've spent about 11 years running a production studio, JP Productions, and on most ad shoots the phone is enough.
Should the owner be in the ads?
If you can talk to a camera for 30 seconds without a script, yes. Homeowners are letting a crew onto their property and handing over a deposit, and seeing the person who answers for the job helps them say yes. You don't have to be polished. Stand in front of a finished job and say what it was, how long it took and one thing the homeowner was worried about going in. That clip often outlasts anything with music and graphics. If you freeze up in front of a camera, put the crew lead on, or record yourself on a call or walking a job without looking at the lens. The one thing I'd skip is reading a script off the screen, because people can hear it. Some owners want nothing to do with it, and that's fine too, since the jobs can carry the ads by themselves.
Why do stock photos make ads cost more?
Because the platform charges more to show ads people scroll past. Meta runs an auction for every ad slot, and the winner isn't the highest bid by itself. Meta also weighs how likely people are to click and act, plus a quality score built partly from how people react to the ad. A stock photo of a smiling family in a kitchen gets scrolled past, so it scores lower and costs more to show for every lead it brings in. Stock photos also aren't yours. Anyone can license the same image, so a homeowner might see your kitchen photo on another company's site and stop trusting both. Your own jobs are the one thing in your ads a competitor can't copy, and real photos of a slightly messy job site still beat a stock photo that looks like a magazine.
How many new ads does a home service business need each month?
About 2 to 8 a month once the account is running, plus a bigger batch at the start. A new account usually launches with 8 to 12 ads so the platform has enough to test, and after that it needs a new ad or two every one to two weeks. In a local service area the same few thousand homeowners see your ads over and over, and once each person has seen the same ad about two and a half to three times, results tend to slide (why your ads stopped working covers how to spot it). Most new ads won't win, which is expected, and a batch usually turns up one or two winners and several that flop. The ads also shouldn't look like your competitors' ads, which I went into in the same marketing plan for every business.
What should you film before the season ends?
Every job you finish between now and the first snow, from four angles, so the spring ads have fresh footage. For each one, get a before shot, a wide shot of the finished job, a slow walk-up at the homeowner's eye height, and a close-up of the detail you're proud of, like the edge on an interlock border or a straight flashing line on a roof. Add ten seconds of the crew working. If the homeowner is happy, ask them to say one sentence about it on camera, and get their OK in writing before anything runs, along with their OK to show the house. Film in the morning or late afternoon, when fall light is soft. Ads in March need footage of finished work, and in most outdoor trades there's nothing new to film between December and April. If you're turning the budget down for the winter, should you turn your ads off for the winter covers the timing.
How I shoot ads at a client's jobs
On the bigger packages I come out to the jobs for a production day and shoot the footage myself, usually a few jobs in one day with the crew working. On the others, the client's team films to a shot list I send for each job, the same four angles above plus whatever that job needs, and I build the ads from what comes back (what a marketing company needs from you covers the rest of the handoff). The same approach works in other trades, like the detailing shops in selling high-ticket auto work. Every ad is built from the client's own work, and you approve every ad before it runs. If you've got a phone full of job footage and don't know what to do with it, book a call and I'll tell you what I'd make from it.
