Social media marketing

Organic and paid do very different jobs

Here's the part most agencies won't say out loud. If you're a small business posting daily to 400 followers, that isn't marketing. It's a hobby with a content calendar attached. Organic reach on an unpromoted business post is a rounding error now, and posting discipline doesn't fix it.

It still earns its keep in four cases. Hospitality, where a dead grid reads as a closed venue. Retail, where the feed works as a catalogue. Founder led brands, where the audience follows a person. And recruitment, where candidates look you up before applying.

Outside those four, the same hours do more on a better landing page or on search campaigns aimed at people already searching.

Paid social does the opposite job. It buys attention from people who've never heard of you and have no reason to search yet, so it creates demand instead of harvesting it. It needs a real offer behind it, because a good ad pointed at a weak page spends your money faster.

Which platform suits which business

Targeting is automated now, so creative is what's left

Ten years ago you won on audience building. Meta's delivery system now finds the buyers itself, and in nearly every account we take over it does that better than the manual interest stack it replaced. The variable left is creative.

Which changes the maths on production. One hero video isn't a campaign, it's a single guess. Creative fatigues, sometimes inside a fortnight on a decent budget, and your cost per result climbs while nothing else has changed.

So a campaign needs a bank of assets in rotation and new ones monthly. Different hooks in the first two seconds, static as well as video. Founder to camera, customer footage, plain text on colour, offer cards. Some of it will be ugly and beat the polished version.

We work in batches for that reason, and when one concept wins we build variations of it rather than starting over.

Already running ads? Send us the account and we'll tell you whether it's the creative or the offer.

How a campaign runs

1. We work out the offer

   What you're asking people to do, and whether it's worth doing. Targeting can't fix a weak offer.

2. We set the tracking up

   Pixel and Conversions API, with events matched to what counts as a sale. Before spend, not after someone queries the numbers.

3. We launch the first batch

   Several concepts, one clean structure, enough budget to clear the learning phase.

4. We read it and change it

   Weekly checks and monthly reporting, with new creative going in on a schedule rather than when things go quiet.

What iOS privacy changes did to your reporting

When Apple let users opt out of app tracking, most of them did. Browser pixels stopped seeing much of what happens after the click, and reported conversions fell in accounts where nothing had changed.

Conversions API is the fix, and a partial one. Instead of relying on the browser, your server sends the conversion to Meta directly with hashed customer details for matching. That recovers a good share of the lost data, improves the signal the algorithm optimises against, and deduplicates against the pixel so nothing counts twice.

What it can't do is restore perfect attribution. Some conversions are modelled, meaning estimated from patterns rather than observed, and cross device paths stay messy. Someone who sees an ad on their phone and buys on a laptop a week later may never get joined up.

So expect this. The number in Meta Ads Manager and the number in your CRM will never match exactly. Meta credits a conversion inside its own window, dated to the click. Your CRM dates it to when it happened, usually against the last touch. Both are right by their own rules. We report both and judge the account on enquiries and revenue.

What actually gets sent to you

A monthly report opening with spend, leads or sales, cost per result, then what changed and what's next. Creative performance sits under that, because knowing which two ads carry the account is the useful part.

Who this suits

Local service businesses with a catchment. eCommerce brands with margin to work with. B2B firms where one client pays for a year of ads.

It suits you less if you've never advertised and need enquiries tomorrow. Paid search starts faster.

Why clients stay