Facebook and Instagram ads for drywall companies: the three offers that work
Why popcorn ceilings, flat-rate repair bundles and basement finishing sell on Meta while "we do drywall" does not, plus budgets, creative, retargeting and follow-up.
Nobody opens Instagram wanting to hire a drywall contractor. That is the first thing to accept about Meta ads for this trade, and it is why the generic "quality drywall work, call today" ad gets 40 clicks from people in another state and no calls. Facebook and Instagram are interruption channels. The ad has to show a homeowner a problem they forgot they had and a price that makes fixing it feel easy. Drywall has three offers that do that well.
Offer one: popcorn ceiling removal
This is the best Meta ad in the trade. A fifteen-second video of a scraper pulling popcorn off a ceiling in one long strip, then a cut to the same room smooth and painted, stops the scroll. The homeowner in a 1985 house has hated that ceiling for years and never priced it.
Copy that works: "Popcorn ceiling removal in [county]. Most living rooms $1,200 to $2,800 including skim and prime. Text a photo for a quote in an hour." The price range is the ad. Without it, the comments fill with "how much" and nobody clicks.
Target homeowners, 35 to 65, within your service radius. Meta no longer lets you target by home age, so let the creative do the filtering: a person without a popcorn ceiling scrolls past.
Offer two: the repair bundle
Repairs are hard to advertise one at a time because the ticket is small. Bundle them: "Three drywall patches, any size up to 2 feet, textured and ready for paint, $450 flat. [City] and [county]." Every house has three holes somewhere: the door knob dent, the old TV mount, the water stain in the laundry room. The flat price removes the fear of a surprise bill.
Creative for this one is a single photo, split before and after, with the price in large text on the image. It costs nothing to make and outperforms the polished version.
Offer three: basement finishing with a number
Basement drywall is the largest ticket most drywall companies sell direct, and the homeowner thinking about it has no idea what it costs. Give them a number: "Hang, tape and finish for an 800 square foot basement, typically $4,500 to $7,500. Framing and electrical by your trades or ours. Financing available." Lead with a photo of a bare framed basement and a finished one side by side.
This one is a lead form ad, not a call ad. Nobody calls about a basement from the feed at 9 p.m. They fill in a name and phone and expect a text the next morning.
What a lead costs
Across these three offers, a lead, meaning a form fill or a message, runs $10 to $40 in most markets. Popcorn is usually the cheapest because the creative is so strong. Basement leads are the most expensive and the most valuable. Expect a third of leads to go nowhere, a third to want a quote they will sit on for months, and a third to book within two weeks. At those rates a $600 month that produces 25 leads and three booked jobs is a good month for a small shop.
Budget and structure
Start at $15 to $25 a day, one campaign, one ad set per offer, two or three creatives per ad set. Let Meta's Advantage+ placements run; fighting it costs more than it saves. Set the objective to leads for basement and messages or calls for popcorn and repair. Geography: your actual service radius, usually 20 to 30 miles, not a city name, because the city targeting bleeds into suburbs you do not drive to.
After two weeks, turn off whichever creative has the worst cost per lead and add a new one. Creative wears out in four to six weeks on a small radius; the same people see it ten times. Keep a folder of job photos on your phone and shoot one fifteen-second clip per week. That is the whole content plan.
Retargeting, which is where the money is
Everyone who watches half your popcorn video, visits your website or opens the lead form without finishing is a warm audience. Build a retargeting ad set from those, $5 a day, with a softer ad: a review screenshot, a "still thinking about the ceiling?" photo, a note that you have openings next week. These are the cheapest leads you will buy, often under $10, because the person has already decided they like the work.
Install the Meta pixel on your site and connect your Business Profile so the audiences build on their own. If you have no site, which is the case for 49.4% of drywall companies, the video view audience still works, but the website guide is the next thing to read.
Follow-up in five minutes or do not run the ads
Meta leads are soft. The homeowner was scrolling, saw a ceiling, tapped a button. If the reply comes tomorrow, they have forgotten. Set an automatic text that fires the moment the form arrives: "Hi [name], thanks for asking about popcorn ceiling removal. Can you text me a photo of the room and a rough size? I'll send a range within the hour." Then actually send the range within the hour. The owners who treat Meta leads like Google calls, answered now, are the ones who say Meta works.
Frequently asked
Can I just boost a post from my page? Boosting reaches people who already like the page and their friends, with almost no targeting. Use Ads Manager, pick the leads or messages objective, and set the radius. It takes twenty more minutes to learn and costs half as much per lead.
Do I need a video, or will photos do? Photos work for the repair bundle. Popcorn removal wants a video because the scraping is satisfying to watch. Shoot it on a phone, vertical, no music needed; Meta's captions and a price in text on the first frame do the rest.
Should I run Meta or Google first? Google first, if the phone is answered during the day, because that homeowner is searching with a problem right now. Meta second, when you want to fill the calendar two or three weeks out with popcorn and basement work. Both together is what a shop with two crews ends up running.
Meta ads, the three offers, the pixel and the five-minute follow-up text are one of the services in the free 14-day trial, no card, no contract.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, drywall companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor