Facebook and Instagram ads for pressure washing companies
How to shoot the before-and-after clip that sells, the offers that fill a route, neighborhood radius budgets, retargeting, and what local Facebook groups do.
Pressure washing is the best-suited home service on earth for Meta ads, and most washers waste the advantage by posting a logo with the words "call today for a free quote."
Nobody wakes up wanting a driveway cleaned. They see a driveway get cleaned and then they want theirs done. That is a demand-creation trade, which is exactly what Facebook and Instagram are for. Google captures people who already decided, which is covered in the Google Ads guide. Meta creates the decision. If you are only running Google, you are only fishing where somebody else already fed.
The clip is the whole campaign
One piece of creative outperforms everything else we have run in this niche, by roughly two to four times on cost per lead: a vertical phone video of a surface cleaner cutting a clean stripe across a filthy driveway.
How to shoot it so it works:
- Vertical, 9:16, phone locked to something. No walking, no zoom, no drone for this one.
- Start recording on the dirty surface with nothing happening for one second. The contrast has to be visible in the first frame because that first frame is your thumbnail.
- Push the surface cleaner across at a steady walking pace so a clean band opens up. 12 to 20 seconds total.
- Do not add music. The machine noise is the sound. Do not add a logo bug over the surface.
- Caption the first three seconds with plain white text: "Driveway in Holly Springs, 14 years of dirt."
Then cut a second version that is just the before frame and the after frame, three seconds each, alternating twice. That still-pair version performs almost as well and takes 90 seconds to make.
Refresh the creative every three to four weeks with a new property. Same shot, new address. Fatigue in a local audience of 80,000 people arrives fast, and a new surface resets it.
The offers that fill a route
Keep the offer concrete and tied to the season. Vague offers ("free estimate") produce cheap clicks and no jobs.
- Spring: "House wash plus driveway, $525 for most single-story homes in [city]. Booking two weeks out."
- Summer: "Deck and fence cleaning, $0.20 a square foot. Photos before and after, every time."
- Pre-holiday, October to early December: "Driveway and front walk cleaned before your guests arrive. $189 to $325."
- Winter: "Book your spring house wash now, $50 off, nothing due until we show up."
Every one of those is a bundle rather than a single surface, which is deliberate. The reasoning behind good-better-best pricing is in the pricing guide.
The pre-holiday offer is the underused one. Between roughly October 10 and December 15, homeowners are staring at the approach to their front door and thinking about people seeing it. Cost per lead in that window is often lower than April because your competitors have all gone quiet.
Campaign setup, in plain terms
Run one campaign, objective Leads, with an instant form, plus a second sending to your site. In this trade the instant form usually wins on cost per lead and loses on lead quality, so run both and judge on booked jobs rather than lead count.
Targeting:
- Radius: 8 to 15 miles around your shop, or drop pins on the three or four suburbs you actually want to work. Do not target the whole metro.
- Age 35 to 70. Homeowners.
- Detailed targeting: leave it off, or use only the homeowner behavior if it is available in your market. Meta's delivery finds the buyers better than your guesses in an audience this small.
- Exclude renters-heavy zip codes if you know them.
Budget: $10 to $20 a day is a real test in a single suburb. $25 to $50 a day is a metro-wide spring push. Expect $9 to $28 per lead for residential work in most markets, worse in April, better in November. Before you judge any of those numbers, make sure the leads are being answered; the calculator shows what the ones you miss are already costing. Roof and commercial leads cost more and are worth more.
Neighborhood clustering, which is the actual strategy
The thing that makes Meta pay in this trade is not the ad alone. It is stacking the ad on top of physical presence in one subdivision.
Run the sequence in a single neighborhood:
- Wash one house there. Shoot the clip.
- Put a yard sign at the curb and leave it three days.
- Drop 20 door hangers on the neighbors with the actual address written on them: "We cleaned the driveway at 412 Ellerbe today. Yours is next door, so here is $25 off this week."
- Run the clip as an ad to a two-mile radius around that house at $10 a day for a week.
- Post the same before-and-after in that neighborhood's Facebook group.
Route density is the hidden profit in this business. Four jobs on one street beat four jobs across a county by an hour of drive time each, and the marketing cost per job in a cluster typically lands under $15.
What local Facebook groups are worth, and the rules
Neighborhood groups, buy-sell-trade groups and "recommendations in [town]" groups are the cheapest lead source in this trade and the easiest to get banned from.
What gets you removed: posting your flyer weekly, dropping a link with no context, commenting "DM me" on every thread.
What works:
- Answer recommendation threads within an hour with one sentence and no link. "We are in Fuquay, happy to take a look. Ryan, [company]." Someone else tagging you is worth more than you posting.
- Post an actual before-and-after only when you worked in that neighborhood, and say the street. Ask the admin first whether that is allowed.
- Answer the free questions people ask about mildew, rust and roof algae without pitching. The person who watches you answer three of those calls you in June.
Consider it a two-hour-a-week habit for the owner, not a task to delegate. It fills April and May for a lot of one-truck operations with no ad spend at all.
Retargeting, which almost nobody runs
Install the Meta pixel on your site and run a $3 to $5 a day campaign to everyone who visited in the last 30 days and did not call. That is it. In a local audience this is a handful of dollars a day and it converts at a fraction of the cost of cold traffic, because a pressure washing quote is rarely decided the same hour it is requested.
Add a second tiny audience: people who watched 50% of your video. They are self-identified fans of watching dirt come off, and they are three miles from your truck.
Frequently asked
Do drone shots work? They look great and they sell roof and commercial work well. For residential driveways the ground-level surface cleaner shot converts better, because the viewer recognizes their own driveway in it.
Should I boost posts instead of running ads? Boosting is fine for keeping a page alive, but it gives you almost no targeting or reporting. Put the money in Ads Manager where you can see cost per lead.
How many leads before I judge it? Thirty leads or two weeks, whichever comes second. Judging a local campaign on four days of data is how good campaigns get killed.
If you would rather have the footage edited, the audiences built and the leads routed to your phone, Meta ads management is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.