Most creators who say ads did not work for them made the same mistake. They uploaded a product, wrote a caption asking people to buy, put money behind it, and waited. Nothing happened, so they concluded that ads are a scam or that Meta simply collected their money.

The ads were probably fine. The problem was that there was nothing underneath them.

At our recent webinar on running Meta ads as a creator, marketing specialist Temi Ajao put it in a way that stuck with us. Your content is your foundation, and running ads without it is like trying to practise medicine without going to medical school. You can want the outcome very badly, but the process still has steps you cannot skip.

Ads amplify, so they do not create demand where none exists. If you put money behind a message that nobody was responding to for free, you will simply reach more people who ignore it, and you will pay for the privilege.

Your followers are not automatically your audience

This is the part that catches people off guard. As Temi pointed out, a large share of your current followers are friends, former colleagues, secondary school classmates, and family members. They like your posts because they know you, not because they need what you sell.

Your actual audience is made up of people who have the problem your product solves. Some of them do not follow you yet, and some of them do not even know your name. That is exactly why you run ads, to reach beyond the people who already know you. But you can only do that convincingly if the content they land on gives them a reason to stay.

So before you open Ads Manager, ask yourself a harder question than “do people like my content?” Ask whether a complete stranger, scrolling past with no context and no relationship with you, would want what you are offering.

Post content that builds appetite, not content that asks for the sale

If you are selling a social media marketing course, do not post “my social media marketing training is now open, come and buy.” Nobody was waiting for that announcement.

Post the tips instead. Show people how to audit their page so their content gets seen. Break down what you would fix first on an account that is getting reach, but no enquiries. Explain the mistake you see most often in the industry. Give away something genuinely useful, and do it repeatedly.

What this does is build trust and create interest at the same time. By the time you make an offer, you are not a stranger asking for money. You are the person who has already helped them once, and they are curious about what the paid version looks like.

This is also why selling aggressively every single day works against you. If someone posts the same promotional message daily, most people mute the account or scroll past on reflex. If that same person teaches them something useful, they stop and read. One approach costs you attention while the other earns it.

If you have never mapped this out properly, our guide on creating an effective content strategy covers how to plan and distribute content so it works as a system rather than a series of one-off posts.

The signals that tell you the appetite is there

Likes and comments are the metrics creators check most often, and they are the least useful. A like costs nothing and means very little.

Saves and shares are the ones worth watching. When someone saves your post, they are telling you they want to come back to it. When they share it, they are willing to attach their own name to what you said. Both are much stronger signals of intent than a tap on a heart icon.

Your professional dashboard on Instagram is where you find this, along with reach, impressions, and the breakdown of who is actually engaging with you. That last part matters more than most creators realise. The age range and locations that show up in your insights are the ones you should be putting into your ad targeting later, rather than accepting the default of everyone in the country between 18 and 65.

Make a habit of checking it. It tells you two things at once: whether your content is landing, and who exactly it is landing with.

What to do while you are still building

Use this period to confirm that people will actually pay for the thing you are planning to sell.

Ebuka Chidube, performance marketer and founder of Exo Digital, described what he calls the product graveyard. It is the long list of products creators launch without ever checking whether there was demand for them. Because they never validated the idea, nobody bought. Wanting to make something is not the same as someone wanting to buy it, and enthusiasm from friends is not the same as a payment.

Test it with content first. Talk about the topic openly, see which posts get saved and shared, and pay attention to what people ask you about in your DMs and comments. If a specific question keeps coming up, you have found demand. If your posts on the topic land flat when they cost you nothing but time, paid distribution will not rescue them.

This is also the moment to get the product itself ready. Running ads to a product page that does not exist yet, or one with a thin description and no clear call to action, wastes every naira you spend. Our guide on creating and selling digital products walks through getting that foundation right.

Both routes work, but you have to pick one

There is a useful pattern in what we learned from five creators who have made millions selling digital products. Some of them bought attention with ads and spent heavily to do it. One of them spent nothing on ads at all and instead posted five to eight times daily for two years.

Both approaches worked. What none of them did was neither. If you have money, you can test ads and scale what converts. If you do not have money yet, you have time, and that time goes into content. The creators who struggle are usually the ones posting occasionally and boosting occasionally, doing a little of both and not enough of either.

When you are ready, do not skip the setup

Once your content is doing its job and you are ready to spend, make sure the ads can actually learn from what happens next. Amos Feranmi, Product Marketing Lead at Selar, walked webinar attendees through this during the session. It means connecting your Meta Pixel and Conversions API to your Selar store before your first campaign goes live, not after you have already spent money and started wondering where the sales went.

We have a full walkthrough on tracking sales, signups, and conversions on Selar, and Conversions API support is now live so your campaigns receive stronger purchase signals even when browser tracking is blocked.

Start with the foundation

Ads reward creators who have already done the work. If your content is teaching, your saves are climbing, and people are asking you questions you can answer with a paid product, you are in a strong position to spend.

If none of that is happening yet, the ad budget can wait. Post the content first.

Ready to build the product your content has been warming people up for? Get started on Selar for free.