Social media marketing agency in Chicago

That is why they cost what they cost and why they work. The difference between an account that makes money and one that burns it is almost entirely in the setup: tight keyword targeting so you are not paying for people researching rather than buying, negative keywords stripping out the job seekers and the DIY crowd, ad copy that matches what the person typed, and a landing page that continues the same promise rather than dumping them on a homepage.

We start small deliberately. The first few weeks are learning which searches produce calls and which produce tyre-kickers, and it is cheaper to learn that on a modest budget. Once something pays for itself we scale it. Anything that does not, we kill quickly rather than defending it.

Nobody on Instagram is looking for a roofer, so you are not catching demand — you are creating it, and that means the creative carries the campaign. A mediocre ad with perfect targeting loses to a great ad with rough targeting almost every time.

Which is why we shoot the creative rather than boosting whatever exists. Targeting is geographic first: people close enough to actually turn up. Then interest and behaviour on top. For restaurants we use it surgically — a slow Monday, a new menu, a private dining room sitting empty — rather than running always-on and wondering where the money went.

Your profile is now a storefront. People check it before they book, and a page whose last post was eight months ago tells them something you do not want it to say.

We handle the posting schedule, the captions, the replies and the messages. Consistency beats brilliance here: a business posting twice a week for a year outperforms one that posts ten times in a fortnight and then disappears. We also keep an eye on the comments and messages, because an unanswered enquiry in a DM is a lost customer nobody ever counted.

Retargeting puts you back in front of them afterwards — the same people, already interested, at a fraction of what it cost to reach them the first time.

It is usually the cheapest conversion source in an account and the one most local businesses have never set up. We install the tracking, build the audiences, and cap the frequency so it stays useful rather than becoming the ad that follows somebody around until they resent you.

Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the most common and most expensive mistake in local advertising, because a homepage has to serve everybody and therefore convinces nobody.

We build a page for the campaign: the same promise as the ad, the proof underneath it, one obvious action, and nothing else competing for attention. Then we test the headline and the offer, because small changes to a landing page usually beat large changes to targeting.

That is how budget gets wasted for months on something that looks busy and produces nothing.

We set up conversion tracking on calls and form fills, connect it back to the campaign and keyword that produced them, and report on cost per enquiry rather than cost per click. Clicks are what you buy. Enquiries are what you actually want.