Areeb Mirza says service businesses waste money on targeting when they should spend 95% of effort on ad creative itself. Make your message crystal-clear, use video, and let ads run for 14 days to learn. Simple location radius for local work, open targeting for broader services.
If you're still playing around with custom audiences and lookalike audiences in 2025, you are literally throwing money away. Today I'm going to save you thousands of dollars in ad spend by showing you what actually works. And if you don't know who I am and you're new to the channel. My name is Areem Mirza. We have a agency called Focus. We have a local studio in Houston, Texas, but we help brands pretty much across the nation. Here in the United States, we help service based businesses scale. So this is pretty much our niche. So when it comes to ads, here's what most people waste time on. Building custom audiences, creating lookalike audiences, adding specific zip codes, selecting random interests, and just playing with demographics. Every single day I'll just see people toying around with interest, toying around with demographics, and this just does not work. They think they're being smart with the targeting, but in reality that just stopped working like two years ago. So think about this. Meta's algorithm is more advanced than anything you could set up manually. Yet here you are trying to outsmart it by adding interest in coffee shop to small business owners. Because here's what really happens. You'll spend hours on targeting, then your ad still doesn't perform and then you blame the targeting again and then just the cycle continues. This is something I've seen over and over again. I spend thousands every month on ad also for my clients. Want to know what we actually focus on and gives like that 2 to 4x roas. You're looking for the ad itself. That's it. 95% of it is the ad itself. 95% of our effort goes into creating an ad that speaks directly to our ideal customer. The algorithm itself itself is smart enough to find the right people. Your job is to create an ad that is good enough for your ideal customers to stop scrolling. That's it. I can literally end the video over here. You can click off, create a good ad, work on that for like a week, publish that, and then you will see that your well crafted ad with the most pristine captions, it'll just instantly do better if you give it like at least 14 days. So start creating an ad that speaks directly to your idle customers and make your message crystal, crystal, crystal crystal clear to show the real value or results because this is what actually works. Like if you put all of your effort into making a good ad and use video whenever you can because it just grabs attention way better compared to an image one. Now you can make an image work, but you just need to Be super precise on what you're actually showing. Because an image is very forgettable, so you need to make sure you're including elements in there which are less easy to forget. Compared to a video where people sit and watch for like 15 to 30 seconds, it's more recognizable and, and people can easily get back to the video. So even in the video, let's say you have 15 to 30 seconds, this could go on to like a minute and two minutes, depending on what you're going for. Make sure your messaging is specific to your ideal customers. Don't say anything extra, just make sure what's needed, say it in there. Make sure it's structured properly to the point where you're just talking about what are you selling, why should they get from you? All these type of things is going to be included within your video. And if you're running local ads, just focus on like basic location settings. So for example, I'm in Houston. If you're running ads in Houston, just like add like a Houston radius. If you're running ads in like California, Los Angeles, add like a Los Angeles radius. Of course, when it comes to businesses who are geographically locked, you have to add in some sort of demographics because if you don't, then you'll be targeting people in New York and you're all the way in la. And it just doesn't work like that. So you have to make sure when it comes to demographics, you have to have some sort of radius within that ad. But most of the time, if your services can be served everywhere, just leave it wide open. Because remember, you could have the most pristine targeting on the planet. You could have the best interest, you could have the best zip codes on there, you could have the best locations on there. But if the ad is bad, like it just does not matter, people are still going to scroll past it. Do this exercise with yourself too. Like when was the last time you stopped and looked at an ad because it was well targeted? You could, you yourself could be the ideal customer of a lot of other businesses, but if their ad was bad, you don't even remember it. You're like, I can't even think of a circumstance. Exactly. If you can think of a circumstance and that ad was specifically targeted towards you, you didn't click on it. That's exactly what you need to work on because there's no such thing in 2025 as well targeted. There's only a good ad which learns by itself and targets the right people. Now this is just me talking about the ad portion. There's a lot of things. There's like a whole process that goes after the ad and make sure that you're actually getting qualified leads. Which I'm not going to go into this video. I already have tons of videos talking about that. There's a video I talked about Facebook forms, you can watch that one. I have two videos just like that on my feed. But that is after you've created the right ad. Make sure that's step one and then step two you can do the qualifying one. Now if you do want help creating ads that actually convert, there's a calendarly link in the description below and just book a call with me and we'll show you how to exactly create ads that convert without wasting time on any type of targeting. Because remember in 2025 your ad quality matters way more than your targeting. Alright, so that is all for today's video. And if you did find value from this video, just hit the subscribe button because there's gonna be a lot of videos coming out on every single week and every single video I make. My goal is to either save you cash or make you more cash. So if you want to do either of those, just hit the subscribe button and then also make sure to leave a like on this video as well because it just helps the algorithm. Everything has an algorithm nowadays and you know, numbers is something that of course helps us motivated. So yeah, just do that for me as well and then we'll take it from there all and I'll see you next week.
