The problem with your advertising is not the advertising

Ask an owner whether their advertising works and you usually get a feeling rather than a figure. It was busy in April. Someone mentioned seeing it. Hard to say, really.

That is the actual problem. Not the budget, not the picture, not the platform. If you cannot see what an advert produced, you cannot stop the ones that produce nothing — so the money spreads evenly across things that work and things that do not, forever.

Fix where they land first

Before spending anything, look at where the advert sends people. If that page is slow on a phone, does not show a price, or makes booking a three-step errand, then the advertising is working and the page is losing what it brought. Paying to send more people to a page that loses them is the most expensive mistake in this whole subject.

Count bookings, not attention

Views, likes and reach are not the business. The only number that matters is how many appointments or orders came out the other end, and what each one cost. Once you can see that, most advertising decisions make themselves — you stop the thing costing ₪90 a booking and put it into the thing costing ₪14.

Promote the thing worth promoting

The instinct is to advertise the cheapest service to get people through the door. It usually brings people who only ever want the cheapest service. Advertising the work you actually want more of costs the same and fills the diary with it instead.

And advertise to the people you already know

The cheapest audience in any business is its own past customers. Before paying a platform to find strangers, send a message to the people who already came — the cost of that is nothing, and it converts several times better than anything you can buy.

What changes

A smaller budget doing more, because the half that was wasted is now visible. You do not need to spend more on advertising. You need to be able to see it.