Do Brands Need A Big Budget To Succeed On Meta Ads?

Meta (Facebook and Instagram) advertising has a reputation for scale.

All it takes is one scroll through LinkedIn to be overwhelmed with case studies, stats, job titles, and more, all focused around scaling businesses through Meta.

How much of this is actually true… I’ll leave to your own judgement, but from my own experience, working in media buying for a decade and a half, and from running a Meta ads agency, of all the ad platforms, Meta ads is best suited for advertisers of all sizes and budgets.

It’s true that big players pour massive sums into campaigns and the proof is in the pudding with Meta’s earnings: In Q2 2025 alone they generated £36.5 billion in advertising revenue. This serves to highlight the sheer volume of spend brands collectively commit to its platforms.

With the ‘go big’ rhetoric shared online, many smaller advertisers will wonder if they can realistically compete. They may ask themselves if they need a big budget to see results on Meta’s platforms? Or are there opportunities to drive results with smaller budgets?

For clarification and throughout this post, I’ll a small budgets will refer to one of less than £1,000 per month. This is very much a sliding scale as the Meta ecosystem can equally suit a local bakery as it can a multinational retail brand.

The Myth of Big Budget in Meta Advertising

Meta reports having over 10 million active advertisers across Facebook and Instagram, and the majority of them are small or medium sized businesses.

This may come as a surprise, but a study from Hootsuite backed this up, showing that the average advertiser isn’t spending millions. The average monthly Facebook ad spend is ~$1,691.

In a late 2024 global survey, Facebook was ranked as the highest ROI social media platform by 28% of marketers (with Instagram second at 22%).

Furthermore, roughly 40% of businesses even say Facebook is their most profitable ad platform overall, a stat that really is eye opening with the domination of Google in the digital advertising space.

Product/Service Fit First

When it comes to driving performance on Meta, the product/service fit and audience you are targeting are the two most important factors.

A niche brand with a great product market fit can achieve results with a modest budget by focusing tightly on the right audience, whereas a multinational retailer could spend enormous amounts targeting broad audiences without any real return on investment.

Think about it this way: a broad campaign might get clicks for around £0.20, reaching 10 million people and converting 1% of those clicks. A tightly targeted campaign could cost £1 per click, reach 50,000 highly relevant people, and convert 5% of those clicks. Despite the higher CPC, the second approach can deliver a lower cost per conversion because fewer impressions and clicks are wasted on people unlikely to buy.

Understanding your audience and context is critical. A small local business doesn’t need a massive spend to reach its community, it needs the right message to the right audience.

When your product or service truly fits a market need, even a limited ad budget can produce a steady stream of results, whether this is leads, sales, store visits, and more.

Why Context Matters

Digital marketing media is full of sweeping statements.

This kind of thing: “Change this one setting and 100x your ROI”.

In reality, and in the context of Meta ads, finding success really is contextual and the budget required to invest sits aside to this and can (and will) change based on several factors.

Let’s use an example:

Business A – Multimillion pound chain of dental clinics across the entire UK.
Business B – Two small dental clinics located in Greater Manchester.

Business A has a considerable budget and targets broad audiences within the UK within a consolidated campaign structure, looking to drive leads and phone calls to an audience of ~30 million with a handful of brand assets.

Business B has a small budget and run a localised campaign structure, creating various campaigns to target areas of Greater Manchester using localisation within their assets (images of the practice, testimonials, distance from the targeted location and transport routes, etc), advertising to a handful of cities and towns with audiences ranging from a few thousand up to ~300,000.

Both of these strategies are logical and designed to achieve a set of specific objectives, however, one has the capacity to spend a seemingly endless amount of budget whereas the other has defined audiences, many of which will have limits on how much can be invested (accounting for frequency, saturation, etc).

This illustrates the central point: budget is not a measure of potential success on Meta. It’s a function of your market, objectives, and creative execution.

Which, alongside product fit and audience, is incredibly important.

Creative Quality

A brand can have the deepest pockets, but if the creative is poor, results will suffer.

Conversely, a smaller advertiser that invests time in testing, iteration, and fresh ideas can achieve strong performance with a fraction of the spend.

It doesn’t have to be a never ending drawn out testing plan too, start with key elements and ensure you have reporting set up to help determine success, and if you need external assistance, there’s a wealth of paid social agencies who can help facilitate the process.

Creative is a critical factor in driving ad performance, alongside audience and placement, because it directly influences engagement and conversion likelihood.

The auction model rewards engaging creative.

Strong ads earn higher relevancy scores and better estimated action rates, which in turn lower CPMs and CPCs.

This means a brand producing standout creative can reach more of its audience for less.

A £500 per day campaign with high-quality, thumb-stopping creative could drive a stronger return than a £5,000 per day spend behind uninspiring assets, and speaking from experience, it can happen.

The budget amplifies distribution, but it is creative quality that determines whether that distribution generates results.

The Bottom Line

Meta’s ad platform is built for everyone, from global brands to local businesses, because success isn’t defined by how much you spend, but by how smartly you spend it..

Consider the data: 40 percent of businesses say that Facebook is their most profitable advertising channel, 28 percent of marketers rank Facebook as the top platform for ROI, and over 200 million businesses use Meta’s apps each month, most of them small businesses.

These figures confirm that high performance on Meta is not exclusive to large advertisers with big budgets.

The three areas to focus on (whatever the budget) are: