Search "Facebook ads strategy" and you will find people selling frameworks with names. The Ascension Stack. The Value Ladder Protocol. Usually a diagram with seven boxes and at least one arrow that loops back on itself for reasons nobody explains.
Here is the entire strategy for a local service business. It has four parts, it is dull, and it works.
1. One campaign. Not nine.
The instinct is to build a campaign per service, per city, per audience. It feels organized. It is the single most common way local accounts get strangled.
Meta's delivery system needs conversion data to learn from — roughly fifty per ad set per week before it has any real idea what it's doing. Split a $2,000 budget across nine ad sets and none of them ever gets there. You have nine campaigns permanently stuck in the learning phase, all performing like it's day one, forever.
One campaign with a decent budget beats nine campaigns with a ninth of the budget each. Every time. It is not close.
Split later, when the volume justifies it. Most local businesses never reach that point, and that is completely fine.
2. Let the targeting be wider than feels comfortable
Ten years ago you built the audience. Interests, behaviors, layered exclusions, a spreadsheet. That skill is now mostly obsolete, which is annoying for the people who spent years acquiring it.
Meta's algorithm reads who actually converts and finds more of them, and it is better at that than you are — provided you give it room to look and a conversion event worth optimizing for. Hand it a tightly-defined audience of 30,000 people and you have told it where to search before it knew what it was looking for.
For a local service business the targeting is usually: your service area, a sensible age range, and nothing else. That's it. That's the audience.
3. Optimize for the thing you actually want
This is where most accounts quietly bleed money.
If you optimize for link clicks, Meta will find you people who click links. There is a whole population of people who click every link and buy nothing, and the algorithm will locate them with genuine enthusiasm. Your click volume will look superb.
Optimize for leads and you get leads. Optimize for booked appointments — which requires actually sending that event back — and you get appointments. The algorithm is extremely good at finding you more of whatever you tell it you want. The problem is almost never the algorithm. It's that nobody told it the right thing.
4. Ship new creative before performance drops
Creative is a consumable. It gets used up.
Your audience is finite — in a local market, genuinely finite. Everyone likely to respond sees the ad early, so what's left by week six is people who have now seen it nine times and already decided. Watch frequency: past roughly 3 to 4 in a local audience with click-through drifting down, the targeting isn't broken. They've all just seen it.
The fix is new creative on a schedule, before the numbers fall, not in a panic afterwards. Not the same ad with a reworded headline — a genuinely different execution.
What that looks like in practice
One campaign. Service area targeting. Optimized for the event that actually represents money. Fresh creative going in on a schedule.
That's the strategy. There is no fifth thing being withheld.
What separates accounts that work from accounts that don't is almost never strategy — it's whether anyone is doing the boring parts consistently. Checking that the pixel still fires after the site changed. Shipping creative in a slow week. Killing the ad you're personally fond of because the data says it's finished.
Nobody has ever lost to a competitor with a better framework. They lose to the one who shipped four new ads a month for two years.
The part that isn't strategy at all
Two things move cost per booked job more than anything above, and neither is a marketing decision.
How fast you call back. A lead sitting in an inbox for four hours has already phoned two competitors. We have seen more campaigns rescued by "call within five minutes" than by any targeting change ever made.
What happens on the phone. If the person answering treats inquiries as an interruption, no amount of budget fixes that. Ads are a volume knob. They make what already happens happen more.
If you'd rather work out whether the numbers support any of this before spending anything, the arithmetic is in what a lead should actually cost you. It takes about ten minutes and it is willing to tell you no.