What Is Paid Social? A Plain English Guide for Hull Businesses

Paid social gets talked about a lot and explained very little. If someone has told you your business needs it, they mean paying Facebook, Instagram or a similar app to show your adverts to local people. That is most of it.

The detail is where businesses win booked work or quietly waste money. This guide is for tradespeople, clinic owners and anyone else running a local business around Hull who would rather be working than learning marketing words.

What paid social actually is

Paid social is social media advertising. You pay a platform to show your adverts in people’s feeds, stories and reels, and you choose who sees them.

The choosing is what makes it useful locally. You set the area by town, postcode or a radius around your premises, so a kitchen fitter could show adverts in Cottingham, Kirk Ella and Willerby, or across the whole of Hull, without paying to reach anyone in Leeds. Age and other details can narrow it further, but we find the area and the advert matter more than clever targeting.

Organic social is the free version: posts on your own page, which tend to reach people who already follow you. It is worth doing, because people often check your page before they book, but it is slow at reaching anyone new. Paid social reaches the people who have never heard of you.

Why boosting a post is different

If you have a business page, you have probably seen the Boost button under your posts. You pick an audience, a budget and how long it runs, and Meta shows the post to more people.

A boost is a proper campaign with many of the controls taken away, and usually a weaker goal. In our experience, boosted posts tend to chase likes, comments or profile visits, so Meta finds people who like and comment. Those are not always the people who book.

A campaign built in Meta Ads Manager starts from what you want, such as enquiries. You can test several versions of an advert, keep the best, and tell Meta to find people likely to enquire rather than people likely to tap like.

Boosting is fine for getting a post seen. For booked work, it is the wrong tool.

How it differs from Google ads

Google ads appear when someone types a search, such as “emergency electrician Hull” or “dentist near me”. They already know what they want, so your job is to be there and look like a safe pair of hands.

Social media ads work the other way round. Nobody opens Instagram looking for a heat pump. Your advert has to give people a reason to stop scrolling. A homeowner in Beverley might have meant to look into solar panels for a year without ever searching. A clear offer can be what gets them to put their name down.

So on social, the offer and the creative do the work, and a vague advert gets scrolled past however well the campaign is built.

The two do different jobs. Plenty of businesses run both, and which to start with depends on whether people already search for what you sell.

Which platforms count

Any platform that sells adverts in its feed counts. Most of the time that means Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, where one campaign can run across both apps.

LinkedIn and TikTok sell adverts too. LinkedIn tends to suit firms selling to other businesses, and TikTok, in our view, suits brands that can keep making short videos for it.

In our experience, Meta is usually the place to start for local service businesses in Hull and East Yorkshire, whether you work around Hedon or travel out to Bridlington. Our page on Facebook and Instagram ads in Hull covers the local side in more detail.

What a campaign needs to work

Running ads is the easy part. A campaign that brings in work needs five things:

• A clear offer, not just a list of services
• Real photos and video of your own work and team
• A landing page or form that is quick to fill in on a phone
• Tracking with the Meta Pixel and the Conversions API
• Someone ready to reply to every enquiry fast

The offer matters most, because nobody was looking for you. “Quality work at fair prices” is not an offer. A free survey, a consultation or a fixed price for a set job gives people a reason to put their hand up.

For the creative, phone footage of a real job usually beats stock photos, because people can tell the difference.

Meta’s instant forms open inside Facebook or Instagram and take a few taps. A landing page takes longer but lets you ask better questions. From what we see, the first brings more enquiries and the second brings more serious ones.

Tracking is the part people skip. The Meta Pixel is a small piece of code on your website that tells Meta when someone enquires. The Conversions API sends the same information from your server or CRM, so less goes missing when browsers and ad blockers interfere. Meta’s own guidance suggests running both. The API can also report which enquiries became booked jobs, so Meta can look for more people like your real customers.

Then there is follow up. Someone who enquires on a Tuesday evening wants an answer, and in our experience has often asked other firms too. If nobody rings until Thursday, the advert did its job and the business did not. Our free missed leads calculator shows what missed calls and slow replies cost you each year.

How to tell if it is working

Likes, comments and reach are easy to count but tell you very little. A post can get plenty of likes and no bookings. Judge it on these instead:

• Cost per enquiry: what you spent, divided by the enquiries it brought in
• Cost per booked job: what you spent, divided by the jobs those enquiries turned into
• Return on ad spend: the value of that work, divided by what you spent

Working these out means knowing where each enquiry came from and which ones became jobs. Tag the links in your ads, emails and posts with our free UTM link builder, then mark each enquiry in your CRM when it turns into work.

Take Yates Electrical Solutions, an East Yorkshire electrical contractor. Their Meta campaign across Facebook and Instagram brought in 40 new leads in the first 28 days, at an average of £8.67 per lead from £346.86 of ad spend, and over £8,000 of new work was confirmed. That is a return of over 23x. Results will vary with your trade, offer and area, but those are the numbers to watch.

Try your own figures in the free Facebook ads ROAS calculator. It shows the leads, jobs and revenue your ads could bring back, and the return on every £1.

On budget, agree a figure upfront, treat the first few weeks as a test, then move the money towards whatever brings in booked work. Anyone promising results before that test has run is guessing.

If you would rather hand it over, we are a paid social agency in Hull, based at Bridgehead Business Park in Hessle. One team handles the strategy, ads, creative, landing page, CRM and follow up for service businesses across East Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and the rest of the UK. Get in touch and we can talk through whether it suits your business.