Facebook & Instagram
Facebook and Instagram ads for small business.
Nobody opens Instagram to buy a caravan, a deck, or a haircut. The ad still has to earn a stop on a scroll, on a budget that actually makes sense for a small business rather than a national brand.
What it actually is
Facebook and Instagram ads are interruption, not search. Nobody typed anything; they were reading a friend’s post and your ad appeared between two of them. That means the creative carries almost the entire cost of the click: a specific item, a real price where you can show one, and a reason it matters to somebody in their exact situation, not a description of your business.
How it runs
The ad is the targeting
Meta’s system now does most of the audience-finding itself from the creative and the result you tell it to aim for. The lever that is actually still yours to pull is what the ad says and shows, and that is where the real work sits.
Enough versions to learn something
One ad tells you nothing. Three or four, each differing in one thing, tell you what your buyers actually respond to, and that knowledge is worth more than the campaign it came from.
Measured in conversations, not clicks
On this market the useful action is usually a message, not a form fill. A conversation started is counted and costed on its own, separately from a click that went nowhere.
Turning things off
The habit most accounts are missing. Money keeps going into something that stopped working weeks ago because nobody was checking, and checking is the actual job.
What it costs
Facebook and Instagram are set up and managed as part of the Start Advertising package: $999 + GST to set up, then $499 + GST a month to run it. Ad spend itself is paid by you, direct to Meta, and is never handled by C.E.A Smith. Full detail on the pricing page.
What happens first
Every conversation starts with the free Acquisition Review, which looks at whether Facebook and Instagram are actually the right channel for what you sell before anything is proposed.
Who this is not for
If nobody can answer the messages it produces quickly, the ads work and the enquiries still get lost. That is a follow-up problem to fix first.
If people already search for exactly what you sell by name, Google Ads is usually the cheaper way to reach them, because they are already looking rather than being interrupted.
Questions
Before you ask.
- Do I need an Instagram account, or is Facebook enough?
- Facebook is enough to start. Instagram runs from the same ad account and the same creative, so it gets added at no extra setup cost once there is something worth showing there.
- What do you need from me to write the ads?
- Real photos of the actual business, stock or work, wherever possible, and honest answers to a short set of questions about who buys and why. Stock imagery and invented claims are the two things that make an ad look like every other ad in the feed.
- What if my Facebook or Instagram page doesn't really exist yet?
- That gets set up properly first: name, category and details matching what your Google Business Profile and website say, so a new customer sees the same business everywhere they check.
- Do you reply to the messages the ads generate?
- No, and this is worth being direct about: that is where most of the value of a conversation either lands or is lost, and it is covered on the leads and follow-up page, not here.
Want to see the whole chain working first?
Watch one customer go from an ad to a booking on the home page.