Ads that bring orders, not followers
Boosting a post gets you likes from people three countries away. Running proper local campaigns gets your Saturday celebration cakes in front of three thousand people who live within four kilometres of your counter, at the moment they are thinking about next weekend.
- Contents
- Local paid campaigns on Instagram and Facebook, using your own footage
- Includes
- Radius awareness · occasion campaigns · custom-cake lead generation · retargeting · creative direction
- Lead time
- Days, not months. Judge it at week four.
- Spend
- You pay Meta directly from your own account. Our fee is flat, never a percentage.
- Runs last
- Not until the site and WhatsApp can take what the ads send.
We will not run ads for you on day one
Paid social is the last thing we switch on, and we are stubborn about it. Here is why.
An ad buys attention for a few seconds. What happens next is entirely down to where it lands. If the click goes to a slow page with no prices and no way to order, you have paid for a visitor who leaves — and you will conclude, reasonably, that ads do not work for bakeries.
Fix the destination first. Once the site converts and WhatsApp catches the enquiries, the same ad budget produces several times as many orders. That is not a sales technique, it is arithmetic.
What we would rather do with your first £500. Spend it on photography and your Google listing. The photos then make every future ad cheaper, and the listing brings in free traffic forever. Ads are for when you want to turn the tap on top of that.
Four campaigns that work for bakeries
Local awareness, tight radius
Three to five kilometres around your door, to people who have never heard of you. Your best photography, almost no text, and the job is purely to exist in their head before they next need a cake.
Measured on reach and cost per thousand, not clicks
Occasion campaigns
Mother's Day, Eid, Christmas, exam season, graduation. Launched six weeks out, with ordering deadlines in the creative. These are the campaigns that pay for the year.
Measured on orders against deadline
Custom cake lead generation
Straight to your enquiry form or into a WhatsApp conversation, aimed at people with a birthday or a wedding in the next sixty days. Highest value per order you will run.
Measured on cost per qualified enquiry
Retargeting
The people who visited the custom cake page and did not enquire. Cheapest audience you will ever buy and the one most bakeries never set up.
Measured on return on ad spend
Your bakes are the ad
We are not going to design you a graphic with a starburst on it.
What performs for bakeries, consistently, is a short clip of the thing being made or cut. Icing going on. A knife through a layer cake. Dough being folded. Shot on a phone, vertical, no music needed.
We will tell you exactly what to shoot — a shot list of ten clips you can capture across one normal week — and then handle the editing, the variations and the testing. You keep the footage and it feeds your organic Instagram for months.
Where you have a photography library already, we use it and tell you what is missing. Where you do not, we would rather brief a half-day shoot than run weak creative, because weak creative makes every click more expensive.
What you should expect to spend
Below roughly £500 a month in ad spend, local campaigns do not gather enough data to optimise and you are mostly buying noise. We will say so rather than take a management fee on top of a budget too small to work.
Between £500 and £2,000 a month is where most single-site bakeries live, and it is enough to run an always-on local campaign plus an occasion push. Above that, the constraint usually becomes how many custom orders you can physically produce.
Our fee is separate from your ad spend and does not scale with it, because a percentage-of-spend model gives an agency a reason to recommend spending more. We would rather be able to tell you to spend less.
About paid social
How soon do ads produce orders?
Faster than anything else we do — days, not months. The first two weeks are learning, so judge it at week four rather than week one. The trade-off is that it stops the day you stop paying, which is why we treat it as the accelerator rather than the engine.
Can you use my existing Instagram content?
Usually yes, and it is a good place to start — your best-performing organic posts are a reliable signal of what will perform paid. We will go through your last six months and pick.
Who owns the ad account?
You do. We work inside your Business Manager with our own access. If we part ways, your account, your pixel data, your audiences and your creative all stay with you. Agencies that keep the account hostage are a known problem in this industry and we are not one of them.
What about TikTok?
Great for reach if you enjoy making the content, and genuinely strong for bakeries in Melbourne and London. It is not where we would put a first paid budget for a local business, because the audience is less local and the intent is lower. Happy to talk about it once the basics are earning.