The brief I walked into
The owner had built the shop without any marketing — just craftsmanship and word-of-mouth. The product was genuinely loved, but discovery was capped at the people who happened to walk down that street. They had ৳15K a month to spend on ads, which is below the threshold most agencies will even take a meeting for.
Goal: bring more first-time visitors through the door, then let the pastries do the rest.
How I attacked it
I kept it stupidly simple: photos of the actual cakes from a phone (no studio shoot, no overlay graphics), captions in Bangla and English, a 3-km radius targeting around the shop, and a single ad set with three creatives at a time. The objective was always offline visits, not engagement vanity.
Once we had three months of data, I split the audiences: weekday office crowd vs. weekend family visits — same shop, very different ads. The cost per offline visit dropped quickly because we stopped paying for the wrong eyeballs.
What changed for the business
Walk-ins doubled within ~10 weeks. Cost per visit settled at around ৳22, which the owner liked because the average ticket is ~10× that. Repeat orders grew 34% — most of those came from people who tried a custom cake once and came back for birthdays.
No discounts were needed. No "10% off" coupons. Just consistency and clear photos.