Why a paid social agency has to make creative now
Five years ago, paid social was a targeting job. You built interest stacks and lookalikes, split them into ad sets and moved budget between them. That job has mostly been automated. Meta's ad delivery system now matches ads to people largely from the creative itself, and Meta dropped its old advice to cap the number of ads in an ad set. TikTok's Smart+ campaigns work in a similar direction.
The practical result: your ads are your targeting. A video of a 55-year-old gardener talking about knee pain finds a different buyer than a 24-year-old doing a gym routine, even with identical settings. If an agency only manages the account and waits for you to send creative, it controls the smaller lever.
That is why our paid social work sits inside full campaign management. The people reading the numbers on Monday are the ones briefing new hooks on Tuesday.
Paid social platforms compared: formats, minimums and fit
| Platform | Main ad formats | Budget floor | Usually fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| TikTok | In-feed video, Spark Ads (boosting your own or a creator's organic post), Smart+ campaigns | $50 a day per campaign, $20 a day per ad group | Products that demo well in 15 seconds, impulse buys, apps |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | Reels, Stories and feed video or images, carousels, partnership ads with creators | No high floor, so the real minimum is what a fair test needs | Most DTC and consumer brands, retargeting, catalogs |
| YouTube | Shorts and in-stream ads through Demand Gen and video campaigns, creator partnerships boost | Set by test size | Considered purchases, people who research before buying |
| Single image, video, document and thought leader ads | $10 a day, $100 lifetime minimum for a new campaign | B2B, founder-led brands, high-ticket services | |
| Image, video and carousel ads | Set by test size | Home, fashion, food and gifting, where people plan purchases ahead |
Minimums are from the TikTok and LinkedIn help centers as of 2026. They are floors, not recommendations. Platform guides: TikTok, Meta, LinkedIn.
How we run paid social, from audit to weekly tests
Fix tracking first
We check the Meta pixel and Conversions API, the TikTok pixel and Events API, and that browser and server events share an event ID so Meta can deduplicate them. Bad data trains the algorithm to find the wrong people.
Simplify the structure
Fewer, broader campaigns with more creative inside them. One campaign per goal (prospecting, retargeting, catalog) is usually enough. Splitting a modest budget into ten ad sets starves all of them.
Launch a creative pack, not a single ad
Several distinct angles, each with two or three hooks, cut in 9:16 and 4:5. Distinct means different people, settings, formats and arguments, not one video in three colors.
Judge on the right number
We read cost per purchase, sign-up or install against the target set in your plan. Click-through rate and thumb-stop rate help diagnose a problem. They don't decide what wins.
Run a weekly test cycle
Every week: pause what is clearly losing, make new versions of the winners (new hook, new opener, new length), and add one new angle. When frequency climbs and results slide, the creative has worn out and gets replaced.
What Lumiflo costs
Campaign launch
from $5,000
- Strategy, big idea and hooks
- Short-form video, UGC and static ads made for each platform
- Ads set up and a campaign landing page built
- Launch, first round of fixes and a results report
Always-on campaigns
from $3,500 a month
- Fresh creative every month
- Paid social managed and tested every week
- Organic posting on your main platforms
- Weekly numbers, in plain English
Revenue share
% of salesplus a lower fee
- Organic growth, funnel and sales built as one system
- A lower upfront fee
- A share of the revenue we help create, tracked at checkout
- For creators and brands we believe in
Ad spend is paid by you, straight to the platforms. Creator and influencer fees are billed at cost.
What a paid social budget actually pays for
Brands often compare agency quotes without separating the four costs inside them. Here they are.
Agency fee
Strategy, ad management, testing and reporting. At Lumiflo it also covers creative and the landing page: from $5,000 for a launch or $3,500 a month always-on.
Ad spend
Paid by you directly to TikTok, Meta and the rest, so you see every dollar in your own account. Never bundled into our fee.
Creator fees
If ads use creators, their fee and paid-usage rights are separate. See our UGC work for how those are scoped.
Whitelisting access
Running ads from a creator's handle through Spark Ads or partnership ads usually costs extra on top of the creator's base rate. We plan it with influencer campaigns.
Paid social mistakes that burn budget
- Optimizing for link clicks or landing page views when you want purchases
- Sending ad traffic to a homepage instead of a page built for the campaign
- Running the same three ads for two months and blaming the algorithm when costs rise
- Testing two ads that differ only in button color, so the result teaches you nothing
- Turning ads off after two days because the first sales came slowly
- Running separate agencies for creative and media, so nobody connects a bad week to a tired hook
- Letting a pixel double-count purchases, which makes return on ad spend look better than it is