How OYM manages social media advertising for UK small businesses
If you've ever boosted a Facebook post and watched the money disappear with nothing to show for it, you're not alone. It's one of the most common mistakes I see UK small businesses make with social media advertising.
Boosting a post is not a strategy. I've spent 18 years running Optimise Your Marketing from Cromford Mills here in Derbyshire, and in that time I've watched hundreds of small businesses spend money on social ads and get very little back. Not because social media advertising doesn't work. It absolutely does. It's because they run it without any real structure behind it. Random posts, occasional boosts, no targeting, no testing, no measurement. That's not advertising, it's guessing with a card machine attached.
This post sets out exactly how we manage social media advertising for our clients across Derbyshire and the East Midlands, so you can see what proper structure looks like and apply the same thinking to your own business.
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Get your free scorecardWe start with the audience, not the platform
The most common mistake in social media advertising is choosing the platform before understanding the audience. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn all have different audiences, different content formats and different cost profiles. The right platform depends entirely on who you're trying to reach, not which one you personally use.
For a farm shop targeting local families, Facebook and Instagram work best. For a B2B engineering firm, LinkedIn does the heavy lifting. For a gymnastics club targeting parents of young children, Instagram and Facebook together cover the ground. We always start by defining the audience precisely, age, location, interests and behaviour, before deciding where to spend a single pound.
This is the same principle that sits behind everything in our social media work for clients across Derbyshire. Platform choice is a consequence of audience research, not a starting point.
We build campaigns with a clear objective
Every campaign we run has a single, measurable objective. Awareness. Leads. Website traffic. Event registrations. App downloads. We never run a campaign without knowing what success looks like before we start, because that decision shapes everything that follows.
This matters because the platforms optimise differently depending on the objective you set. A campaign built to drive awareness behaves completely differently to one built to generate leads, even with the same audience and the same creative. Setting the wrong objective wastes budget chasing the wrong outcome, and it's one of the quickest ways to make lead generation harder than it needs to be.
You don't know what will work until you test it. Testing properly before you scale spend is what separates effective social advertising from wasted budget. — Stuart Baddiley, Optimise Your Marketing
We test creative before we scale
We never put significant budget behind one piece of creative without testing it first. For every campaign, we run multiple ad variations, different headlines, different images or videos, different calls to action, and let the data tell us what works before we scale spend behind the winner.
For Croots Farm Shop, a long-standing Derbyshire client, the monthly storytelling videos consistently outperform static images. For Balance & Beam, video pulled from the archive converted significantly better than fresh photography. Neither result was obvious beforehand. That's exactly the point of testing.
Testing before scaling, not after
This approach is built into the way we run paid social for every retainer client, large or small. If you want to see what disciplined social advertising looks like for your industry, our social media services page covers how we structure it from the ground up.
See our social media servicesWe manage the full funnel
Social media advertising works best when it operates across the full customer journey, not just at the top. We run awareness campaigns to reach new audiences, retargeting campaigns to re-engage people who've already shown interest, and conversion campaigns to drive action from warm audiences.
For most small businesses, retargeting is the most underused and highest-performing part of social advertising. People who've already visited your website or engaged with your content are far more likely to convert than cold audiences, and they're cheaper to reach too. If your CRM and ad accounts aren't talking to each other, this is usually the first gap worth closing.
Why this matters more in 2026
Platform algorithms change constantly, and the businesses that cope best are the ones running a structured funnel rather than relying on any single tactic. A Derbyshire retailer relying purely on organic reach this year is competing with a much smaller slice of their potential audience than they were two or three years ago.
We report on what matters
We don't report on likes and follows. We report on the metrics that connect to business outcomes: cost per lead, cost per click, reach among the target audience, conversion rate, and return on ad spend. Every client gets clear reporting that tells them what their budget actually delivered, not just what the algorithm happened to reward that month.
This ties directly into how we approach test and measure across every channel we run, not just paid social. Data should drive the next decision, not just describe the last one.
What platforms we manage
OYM manages social media advertising across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok for UK small businesses. We also manage Google Ads for clients where paid search is a better fit than paid social, or where both work together as part of a joined-up paid strategy.
How this fits the BIG12 framework
Social media advertising is one piece of a much bigger picture. At OYM, we built the BIG12 framework around the 12 pillars that genuinely move the needle for small business marketing, and paid social only works properly when it's connected to the other 11, your brand, your website, your CRM, your local presence and so on.
If you've never mapped your own marketing against the full framework, it's worth doing before you spend another pound on ads. You can read the full breakdown on our BIG12 framework page.
Not sure how your marketing measures up right now?
See exactly where social advertising sits alongside your other 11 BIG12 pillars, and where the gaps are.
Get your free scorecardThe challenge is never learning. It is doing.
None of this is complicated in theory. Define your audience, set a clear objective, test your creative, manage the full funnel, report on outcomes that matter. Most business owners I speak with already know this in principle.
The gap is almost always in the doing. Running disciplined tests, reviewing data weekly, adjusting budgets and creative on the back of it, that takes time most small business owners in Derbyshire and beyond simply don't have alongside everything else they're running.
That's the gap we close. We've spent 18 years building the systems and the discipline so that social media advertising actually does its job, rather than quietly draining a budget in the background.
Book a free 90-minute audit with Stuart
We will look at your current marketing, benchmark it against the BIG12, and give you a practical set of actions to take. No sales pitch. No fluff. Just 18 years of honest advice applied to your business.
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