Facebook and Instagram ads in Newcastle, NSW: reach local people while they scroll.

Search reaches people who typed the thing. This reaches people scrolling past. You have to create the interest as well as capture it, which is why the advertisement itself carries so much of the result.

On a search result your competition is other businesses selling the same thing. In a feed your competition is somebody's friends, their family and whatever they were actually there to look at.

That changes what the advertisement has to do. It has to earn the pause before it can make the offer, which is why the creative decides more of the outcome here than the targeting does.

What this channel suits

• Something people do not search for. A new service, an offer, an event. If nobody is typing it, this is how they find out it exists.
• Something visual. Work you can show. Before and after, a finished job, a room, a face.
• A local audience. A radius around Newcastle is straightforward to set, and a local business is recognisable in a way a national one is not.
• Reaching people again. Somebody who visited your website and did not enquire, shown something again a week later.

The platform will find the right people if the advertisement gives it something to work with. A weak advertisement targeted perfectly does less than a strong one aimed broadly.

Advertisers spend most of their attention on targeting because it has settings and the creative does not. The platform has spent years getting good at finding the right people, and it needs an advertisement worth showing them.

What actually moves it

• The offer. What somebody gets and why now. No amount of design rescues an offer nobody wants.
• The first second. The picture, or the opening frame. It decides whether the scroll stops.
• Whether it looks real. Your own work, your own premises, your own people. Stock photography reads as an advertisement instantly.
• The first line. Said the way a person says it, not the way a brochure does.

This is also the honest reason results vary so much between businesses running the same budget on the same platform. It is rarely the settings.

Somewhere for the enquiry to land, somebody to answer it quickly, and a way of counting what arrived. Paid social produces enquiries fast, and it exposes whatever happens next.

This channel finds people who were not looking, which means they are less committed than somebody who searched. What happens in the hour after they enquire matters more here than anywhere else.

What has to exist first

• A destination that asks for one thing. A page or a form built for the offer in the advertisement, in the same words.
• Somebody to answer. Quickly. An enquiry from a feed goes cold faster than one from a search, because the person was not looking in the first place.
• Counting. What arrived, and from which advertisement. Otherwise the whole thing is judged on a feeling.
• Enough budget to learn. The platform needs a run of results before it can steer. A few dollars a day for a week teaches nobody anything.

Meta sets out what it needs and what it will not allow in its advertising standards, and reading the rules for your industry before writing anything saves a rejected account.

Boosting posts instead of running advertisements, changing everything at once, judging it in the first week, and sending clicks to a home page. All four are common and all four are avoidable.

These are the ones we see most often when a business says social advertising did not work for them.

What goes wrong

• Boosting a post. The button on the post is a simpler product with fewer controls. It is not the same thing as running an advertisement.
• Changing everything at once. New picture, new words, new audience, same week. Nothing is learned and the platform starts over.
• Judging it in the first week. The early days are the platform working out who responds. A verdict then is a verdict on noise.
• Sending clicks to the home page. Somebody who was not looking arrives at a menu and leaves.

Settle the offer, gather real photographs, build the destination, put the counting in, run a small number of clearly different advertisements, then change one thing at a time.

1. Settle the offer

What somebody gets and why now. This decides more than everything else combined, and it is free to change right up until you start.

2. Gather real material

Photographs and video of your own work, your premises and your people. An afternoon with a phone is usually enough.

3. Build the destination

A page or a form for that one offer, in the same words as the advertisement.

4. Put the counting in

What arrived and from which advertisement, before the first dollar is spent.

5. Run a small number of clearly different ads

Different pictures and different opening lines, not three shades of the same one. You are looking for which idea works, not which font.

6. Then change one thing at a time

And give the platform long enough to steer before deciding anything.

Enquiries can arrive on the first day. Knowing whether it works takes weeks, because the platform spends the early period learning who responds.

The order it happens in

• The offer and the material get sorted. Nothing is running yet, and this is the part that decides the result.
• It runs and learns. The early period is the platform finding who responds. Results are uneven and that is normal.
• It settles, then it gets changed one thing at a time. New pictures as the old ones tire, which they do.

Advertisements wear out on this channel in a way search ads do not, because the same people keep seeing them. New material is an ongoing part of the work rather than a one off.

Ask whose advertising account it runs in, who makes the creative, what is being counted, and what the fee is separate from the spend. The account question is the one that decides what you keep.

We do this work in Newcastle, so we are not neutral. These are the questions we would want asked of us.

• Whose ad account does it run in? The business's own, with the agency added to it. An account owned by an agency takes the history and the audiences with it.
• Who makes the creative? It moves the result more than the targeting, so it is worth knowing whether it is being made or recycled.
• What is being counted? Enquiries, and from which advertisement. Reach and engagement describe activity.
• What is the fee, separate from the spend? Two numbers, named separately.
• Am I locked in? Ours runs month to month and always has. Any arrangement you cannot leave at the end of a month is worth a second look.

If people already search for what you sell, search work and search advertising are usually the cheaper starting point. This channel earns its place when you have to create the interest.