Boosting a post gives more visibility to a single piece of content you’ve already published. A campaign is a plan built around a specific goal, with a chosen audience, ads designed for it and measured results. To tell whether it’s working, views and likes aren’t enough: what counts is the contacts, requests and bookings you get compared with what you spend.
Boosting a post: what it really does.
On Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, under a post you’ve already published, there’s a button to boost or promote it: you roughly choose who sees it, how much to spend and for how many days, and within minutes the post reaches more people. It’s convenient, but the options are limited, and you’re starting from content made for people who already follow you, not for people who don’t know you yet.
It works for a quick push on something specific, such as an event this week. Used now and then without a plan, it tends to bring in more views and likes than customers.
A campaign: a plan with a goal.
A campaign is set up in the platforms’ advertising tools, such as Meta Ads Manager for Instagram and Facebook or TikTok Ads Manager, and it starts with one question: what do you want to happen?
- The goal: getting known in your area, bringing visits to your website, receiving messages, collecting contacts, getting bookings. One per campaign.
- The audience: who your best customers are, where they live, how old they are, what they’re interested in. For a local business, location matters most.
- The ads: copy, photos and videos made for people who don’t know you, in several versions to test.
- Budget and duration: decided in advance, with a clear spending cap.
- The number to watch: the one tied to your goal, not another one.
How much to spend, and how to set a ceiling, is explained in our guide “How much it costs to promote on Instagram and Facebook”.
How to tell if it’s working.
Every goal has its own number. If you want to get known, look at how many different people see the ad and how often. If you want website visits, look at the clicks and what people do once they land. If you want contacts or bookings, count them and divide what you spent by that number: that’s your cost per result, and the platforms show it in their reports.
Always compare the numbers with what actually happens: phone calls, messages, customers telling you “I saw you on Instagram”. That’s where you see whether advertising is working for you.
The most common mistakes.
- No goal: you spend money “to get noticed” and in the end you don’t know what worked.
- An audience that’s too broad, such as the whole of Italy for a neighbourhood café.
- A single ad, with no alternatives tested.
- Changing everything after a few days, before the campaign has gathered enough data.
- A neglected profile: people who see an ad often open your profile before contacting you, and if it looks empty, that’s where they stop.
- Watching only the likes, instead of contacts and requests.
Campaigns with Aleryc.
With Aleryc’s social media advertising, we think in campaigns, not single boosted posts: every ad has a role and a number to keep an eye on. You decide the budget and it stays yours: it’s separate from our fee, and you add it directly to your own ad account, following our step-by-step instructions. We never handle your money, you can see at any time how much you’re spending, and we adapt the strategy to the budget you have, not the other way around.
In the report, we walk you through the results with real numbers and plain words, and we decide together how to proceed. If your profile needs work, we can look after it alongside the campaigns with our social media management service, so the ads and the profile tell the story of the same business.