Facebook and Instagram ads for concrete contractors
Before and after creative, pour time lapses, the offers that book patios, realistic budgets and cost per lead, and the retargeting setup most crews skip.
Concrete is one of the few trades where social ads consistently beat their reputation, and the reason is simple. Nobody scrolls Instagram wishing for a water heater. Plenty of people scroll Instagram, see a stamped patio with a fire pit and string lights, and think about their own dead backyard.
That makes Meta a demand-creation channel for concrete, not a demand-capture channel. Google catches the homeowner who already decided. Meta creates the homeowner who had not thought about it this year. Both matter, and the second one is cheaper.
Expect $18 to $60 per lead for residential decorative and flatwork in most markets, against a job average that is often several thousand dollars. The creative decides everything.
The three creatives that work
Everything else is a variation on these.
The before and after pair. One image, split or swiped, shot from the exact same spot. A cracked, heaved, oil-stained 1970s driveway on the left and the new broom-finish pour on the right. This outperforms professional photography because it is legible in half a second on a phone. Shoot the before on every job from now on, from the street, at the same height. It costs nothing and you will run those images for years.
The pour time lapse. Phone on a tripod or clamped to a ladder, one shot, 20 to 40 seconds of finished video: gravel base, rebar, trucks, screed, bull float, power trowel, saw cuts, sealer. People watch this to the end. It is the single best retargeting fuel you can make, because everyone who watches 75% of it is a person interested in concrete right now.
The stamped closeup carousel. Five to eight images of pattern and color: ashlar slate, seamless texture, wood plank, cobblestone border, colored and sealed, wet and dry. Homeowners shop patterns the way they shop tile. Caption each one with the pattern name, the color and the town.
What does not work: stock photos, a picture of your truck, a logo on a colored background, and anything that looks like a flyer. If the image could belong to any of the 80,873 concrete companies on Google, it is not your ad.
Offers that produce leads instead of likes
"Free estimate" is not an offer. Every concrete company on earth gives free estimates.
Offers that pull:
- A specific price anchor: "480 square foot stamped patio, installed, from $11,900. Booking September." Numbers stop the scroll and disqualify the tire kickers in the same breath.
- A design preview: "Send a photo of your backyard and we will text back a mockup with two pattern options within 24 hours." This converts extremely well because it costs the homeowner nothing but a photo, and a photo tells you the job size immediately.
- A season deadline: "Last four pour slots before the ground closes on us in November." This is honest in northern markets and it is the strongest thing you can say there. Do not use it in Phoenix.
- A pattern and color guide as a lead magnet, delivered by text. Cheap leads, longer sales cycle, good for the slow season.
Avoid percentage discounts. Ten percent off a $14,000 patio invites negotiation on a number that was never inflated to begin with.
Budgets and campaign setup
Start at $25 to $40 a day. Below $20 you cannot exit the learning phase inside a month; above $75 you are usually buying more leads than a two-crew company can quote.
Structure:
- One Leads campaign with an instant form, or with click-to-message if someone answers within minutes.
- One audience: 12 to 20 mile radius from the yard, ages 30 to 65 plus, homeowners. Do not stack interest targeting on top. Meta's delivery finds homeowners better than your interest guesses do, and a small local radius is already a tight audience.
- Three to five creatives in one ad set. Not one ad set per creative. Let them compete.
- Turn Advantage+ audience expansion on only if your radius is under 15 miles, otherwise it drifts into towns you will not drive to.
Instant forms need qualifying questions or you will drown in junk: what type of project, approximate square footage, what is the timeline, and the address or zip. Four questions cuts volume by a third and roughly doubles the quality.
Retargeting, the part most crews skip
This is where the cheap leads live and almost nobody in this trade runs it.
Build three custom audiences: everyone who watched 50% or more of your pour videos in the last 90 days, everyone who visited your website in the last 180 days, and everyone who engaged with your page or Instagram in the last year. Run one campaign at $5 to $10 a day against all three.
The retargeting creative should be proof, not offers: a testimonial video shot on a phone at a finished job, a review screenshot, a photo set of a job in a neighborhood they recognize. Cost per lead here typically runs a third of cold traffic.
If you do nothing else on Meta, run the video plus the retargeting. That combination produces the highest quality inbound calls a concrete company gets from social.
What to measure
Not likes, not reach, not cost per click. Three numbers:
- Cost per lead, at the form.
- Percentage of leads that are in your service area for work you do. Under 60% means your targeting or your form questions are wrong.
- Cost per booked job. On a $6,500 average job, anything under $600 in ad spend per booked job is working.
Track it weekly on paper. Meta's dashboard will happily show you a beautiful $9 cost per lead that never turned into a single pour.
Instagram specifically
Post the same content organically three times a week and keep the profile alive. Concrete does well on Reels: a 15 second stamp release reveal, a saw cut, a power trowel spinning. Add the town name in the caption. Organic will not fill your calendar, but it is where a homeowner goes to check whether the ad they clicked belongs to a real company, and an empty grid kills the ad's conversion rate.
Link the Instagram account to the Facebook page and run ads in both placements. Roughly a third of concrete leads in most accounts come from Instagram, more if your work is decorative.
Frequently asked
Should I boost posts instead? No. Boosting optimizes for engagement, which buys you compliments from people 400 miles away. Use Ads Manager and optimize for leads.
My leads never answer the phone. Call inside five minutes, then text. Social leads are colder than search leads by nature and the drop-off is steep after ten minutes. The speed to lead guide has the sequence.
Do I need a website to run Meta ads? For instant forms, no. But conversion drops noticeably without one, and 25.7% of the trade has no site at all, so it is a cheap advantage. See website essentials.
Meta ads, creative included, are one of the services in the free 14-day trial. We shoot from your own job photos. Text or call (385) 832-6175.