Getting Your Content Seen in the Low-Engagement Era:
How to maximize a tiny budget and small team… with paid social ads.
The golden age of social media has come and gone. Organic reach is not what it used to be. People are too burned out to hit the like button, and every guru is telling us to compete by churning out more and more posts.
It’s called “enshittification:” the downward spiral that happens when a social platform lets its profit motives drive a worse and worse user experience.
And it’s why many of the marketing leaders I talk to wonder, “Should we just give in and pay them for reach? Can we even afford to run ads?”
So in today’s issue, I’m getting into:
- What’s actually worth paying for in a pay-to-play world
- The cost-effective framework for staying visible
- How to know when ads aren’t worth running
- What B2B brands get wrong about LinkedIn
Not to be a hipster about it, but I’ve been buying Facebook Ads since way before they blew up.
I still remember buying my first one. It was 2007. I was a junior in art school, making beer money as a $6-an-hour student assistant at the Study Abroad Center on campus (Ziegenbock was $1, so the math mathed).
Facebook had just launched their self-serve ads platform a day or two before, and my boss asked me to look into it. One of our upcoming professor-led four-week trips desperately needed more students. I did the research, created the image, wrote the copy, and placed the ad.
It cost about $25 to run for a few days.
There were no feed ads yet — this was a sidebar ad, the lowliest of Facebook inventory today — but still.
This felt magical to me — that for such a low price and low barrier to entry, we could control what others saw online. I was hooked.
For years after, I would tinker with Facebook Ads to promote my artwork and original art prints. $15 here, $20 there to see who I could reach and what I could learn. It was my unconventional entry point to social media marketing.
Fast forward nearly 20 years, and a lot has changed.
- Costs can vary wildly. It’s an auction, so clicks and impressions can be relatively expensive, or cheap, depending on your strategy and your competition.
- More know-how is required. Ads Manager has grown so sophisticated, it can feel like it takes a special degree to navigate it (which makes the “boost” button appealing).
- Users have “ad fatigue.” They won’t just click or watch anything — ads need to be more sophisticated in their targeting and creative than ever.
So when my clients with tiny budgets and complex sales cycles hesitate to run ads on social, I get it.
And yet…
I believe most brands should be doing some amount of paid social advertising anyway. Here’s why.
For teams forced to do a lot with a little, it’s usually cheaper to amplify your best work than try to compete with professional creators on volume.
You’d probably have to hire another full-time team member to generate daily posts up to standard — or else put your brand credibility at risk. Whereas when you pour a little gas on the fire, you can get away with posting much less often.
Plus, when so much time, heart, and creativity goes into producing genuine content, you don’t want to let it wither and die on the vine.
Before you go wild with the boost button though, let’s talk about what it actually takes to get results.
How to make paid social worth it
(Even on a small budget)
A lot of smaller orgs make the mistake of treating ads like a short-term investment.
They run something for two weeks hoping for magic, then pull the plug when they see the receipts. But just like a high-yield savings account or investment portfolio, results compound when you stay in the game.
It takes time for Meta’s algorithm to gather data about who’s engaging and why. If you turn your ads off too soon, they never get the chance to optimize — so you end up paying more per result.
That’s why you don’t need a massive ad budget, but you do need to spend consistently.
I’ve seen some fairly small budgets, like $1k per month, be very effective at keeping a brand’s content visible and their audience engaged. Less can work too, if you’re patient.
I usually recommend that my clients:
- Plan for an always-on approach. Set up one or more long-term campaigns with different objectives — Awareness, Consideration, Conversion — and keep them running continuously. Make sure they connect to your overall strategy.
- Wait a few weeks to assess ROI. Your cost per result may look high at first, especially when in “Learning” mode. That’s normal. Once Meta learns who’s responding, your cost per result drops — often dramatically.
- Avoid constant tinkering. You can swap out the Ad Set and Creative within your Campaign every so often, but that will send it back into “Learning” mode, possibly for weeks depending on your budget.
- Skip the boost button. Boosting gives you fewer controls and creates a whole new campaign just for one post, meaning Meta has to start all over with learning who to serve your ads to. So instead, pull your top-performing organic posts into Ads Manager as part of your always-on Awareness campaign.
When shouldn’t you run ads?
- If you can’t define what you want ads to accomplish or how they fit into your overall strategy, you’ll struggle to choose the right objective when setting up your campaign. Make sure you know exactly how you’ll define success.
- If your creative or messaging isn’t strong, paid will only amplify the problem. Weak content just reaches more people faster — and gets trolled harder. That means more work for your team moderating comments. Paid media is a multiplier, not a miracle.
- If you don’t have bandwidth to follow up on leads, inquiries, or sales — wait until you do.
- If growth isn’t your current focus, or your budget’s better spent on building or repairing critical foundations (team, systems, strategy), ads can wait.
What about LinkedIn & B2B?
If my audience was on LinkedIn and I only had budget for either content creation or paid media, I’d choose the former and focus on individual thought leadership (through personal profiles, not the company page). Done well, content from real people builds trust in a way branded ads never will.
When you’re ready to invest in more reach, you’ll need a strategic mix of organic and paid. You may even want to consider Facebook and Instagram ads too, because guess what? B2B audiences are scrolling there as well. The results are often cheaper than LinkedIn ads, though the leads can be lower quality, depending on the precision of your campaign.
It’s worth testing both, then doubling down on what works. Every brand is different.
The new normal of attention
The refrain that “ads are ruining the platforms” takes up a lot of airtime. And it is true that ads are part of the “enshittification” problem.
But at the same time, they’ve become much more effective.
Every single day, people see paid social content that earns their attention, clicks, and hard-earned money — ads so sophisticated in their targeting and smart in their creative, they feel natural in the right person’s feed.
The magic of 2007 might be gone, but the opportunity to connect with the right people isn’t.
Until next time,
