Between Facebook and Instagram, you can reach every human with a wallet on the planet, practically on demand.
I’m going to sound like a shill for Zuck here, but this platform almost single handedly drove the DTC avalanche of the 2010s. Everyone is on it, and the ads are inescapable. Sure, you don’t check your Facebook as much as you used to, no one does; you have time limits on your Instagram. It doesn’t matter. MAU counts don’t lie. Added bonus that you don’t have nearly the depth of ad fraud issues here that plague the open web. Sure, people scroll fast, but the probability a bot is scrolling someone's feed is low, and there’s no such thing as an ad serving below the fold.
Meta will deliver lift.
Depending on what kind of brand you are and how much money you spend, your reps will be happy to help you set up a controlled experiment to measure lift. In my experience, they won’t pull punches with the results - as in If your campaign did not generate lift, they will be upfront about it. Even if it takes a couple of tries (again this is a platform with access to every human on the planet, working iteratively is acceptable), you should be able to tweak your campaigns to generate lift. Things to keep in mind:
Target as broadly as possible
Keep your frequency under control
Adjust your offer until you get there
I juiced spend on sale campaigns by 30-40x to find the sweet spot for incremental revenue.
When I commandeered social media budgets at the airline from the brand marketing team, we were spending $5K a couple times a month to promote our fare sales. These were 2-3 day campaigns every 2-3 weeks. The money we were spending had no discernable impact on any metric whatsoever. We started measuring lift and juicing budgets until we got up to $150 - $200K per sale. We’d get positive lift 75% of the time, averaging $800K - $1.2M incremental revenue per sale. Website traffic would spike dramatically when we set our campaigns live (we broke the site a couple times to the dismay of our friends in IT).
Other platforms are hit or miss.
Snap, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit, TikTok are specialist tools that don’t have the universal reach of Meta. Each of these platforms come with their own bias because of who the user base is (Youths *said is Schmidt*, Moms, aggressively online weirdos, even more aggressively online weirdos, multinational brain rot conglomerates). This can be useful, but depends on your situation! Some of them will work with you to test incrementality, but unless you want to reach the more specialized audience native to the platform, don’t waste your time or money.