Ads for small businesses

Most small businesses do not have a marketing problem. They have an evidence problem wearing a marketing costume. You are spending on ads without knowing whether the thing you are saying is the thing anyone wants to hear, so every result is ambiguous and every month you try something else.

What you do instead

Describe the business out loud — who has the problem, what they do about it today, what that costs them. Microphone turns that into a problem statement and several ad angles, then runs them against one narrow audience for a fixed window. You decide before launch what each outcome will mean, so reading the result is a decision rather than a mood.

Why the small test comes first

A broad campaign produces mediocre numbers, and mediocre numbers cannot be acted on. Narrow until you could name three real customers who fit. The full method is in how much a small business should spend on ads, and the diagnosis for when spend is not the problem is in why no one is buying your product.

Then keep the channel warm

When a claim survives, the work becomes showing up where that audience already talks — consistently, for months. That is what social media subagents are for, and the practical version is how to automate social media for a small business.

Start with your first test, or see pricing.

Frequently asked questions

How much do I need to spend to learn anything?
Enough for a few hundred people in one narrow audience to see one claim — usually a few hundred dollars across several days, not a monthly retainer. Below that the numbers move too much to read.
I already tried Facebook ads and they did not work. What is different here?
Most ads that fail were never testing anything. They boosted a post to a broad audience with no stated claim and no decision attached to the outcome. A test names one audience, one problem, and what each result will make you do next.
Does this replace my agency?
It replaces the part before an agency is worth hiring. Once you know which claim and which audience work, handing that to someone who buys media well is a good trade. Paying for scale before you know the claim is not.
I run a local business. Do ads still make sense?
Yes, and the geography helps. A tight radius around one town is exactly the narrow audience that produces readable results, and it costs less to saturate than a national campaign costs to sample.