Every account, regardless of tier, gets:

• The audience layer plus your enquiry campaigns (DMs, lead forms, or contact-form submits), built and optimised day to day
• Targeted audience research, testing, and rebuilds as the data comes in
• Creative testing and simple edits using your existing posts and reels
• Tracking that tells Meta what a real enquiry is worth, where your enquiry flow lets us feed it back
• A watch on what Meta switches on across ad accounts without telling you, with your account checked and you told first
• Short-burst pushes for guest spots, conventions, and flash days
• Monthly designed PDF report covering performance, creative, and next steps
• Direct line to Tom

Full breakdown on the artists page and studios page. The method itself, start to finish, is on the tattoo marketing services page.

No, ad spend is separate and it goes to Meta, not to us. Our management fee starts at $549 NZD/month for solo artists. That covers everything we do, the campaign build, creative direction, monthly reports, optimisation, all of it. Ad spend is paid separately by you, directly to Meta from your own ad account. We never touch your money for ads.

Between $300 and $600 NZD a month in ad spend, depending on the campaign type, and there's a real mechanical reason for the range. Enquiry campaigns (DMs or lead forms) need at least $600 NZD a month. Below that they never get enough weekly results to exit Meta's learning phase, so you'd be paying full price for a half-trained algorithm. Pure audience-growth campaigns can run from $300 a month, because the clicks and views they optimise for come in fast enough that the learning phase is over almost before it starts.

Most solo artists land around $450 to $600 a month, usually audience-weighted with a lighter enquiry layer, stepping up as the audience builds. Some of our clients spend more for tighter targeting or to push specific campaigns like guest spots. We'll tell you which setup your budget actually supports before you spend a dollar.

Studios usually run $800 to $2,000 or more depending on whether they're marketing the studio brand alone or also running individual campaigns for each artist on the floor. Full guide with examples.

The studio package ($749/month for small studios, $949/month per location for studios of 4+ artists) covers marketing the studio brand. Your studio's Instagram and Facebook accounts, your floor as a unit, walk-ins, guest spots, conventions. Audience growth, brand presence, enquiries to the studio's DMs.

Individual artists are not automatically marketed under the studio package. If an artist on your floor wants their own campaign (separate audience, separate creative, separate ad spend, all aiming at their personal IG account), we run that on top at $549 NZD a month, treating them as a solo client. Each artist's campaign has its own ad spend paid directly to Meta from their account.

Solo plan ($549 NZD/month). We market you as the artist, your Instagram, your style, your bookings. Studio plans only apply if you've got other artists working under your brand who you want marketed alongside the studio account.

Common case in NZ and AU: one-chair private studios, single-artist rooms, room-rentals at a guest space. You're a Solo client every time.

Enquiry volume often lifts by weeks 3 and 4, and the real picture lands by month two. Many artists see a first signal inside the two-week trial. Some don't, and we say so. That's why we suggest three months, and why there's still no contract.

Almost nothing. You don't have to send us anything. We build the ads from what you already post. Send us something only if you want a specific ad run: a guest spot, a convention, a piece you want more of. Your side is approving the odd bit of copy and answering your own DMs.

We cap how many artists we take in the same style and city. If we already run campaigns for artists in your style within your area, we'll either pass on the application or talk you through whether the geo can be split or shifted. We don't want our own clients bidding against each other in Meta's auction. The cap is also what keeps one founder able to run every account properly: fewer clients per style and city means your account gets watched, not queued.

Not the same way. Meta's privacy rules across the UK and EU remove the optimisation that makes DM campaigns work there. So in those markets we run lead forms and audience campaigns instead. You still get enquiries, they just come through lead forms and profile visits rather than one-tap DMs. Audience building, creative, and targeting all work the same. We've run this model for artists across the UK, Ireland, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands.

Because Meta needs around 50 of the thing you optimise for, per ad set, per week, to learn who to show the ad to, and tattoo bookings never get there. A leads-only campaign learns to find the cheapest form fill, not the person who books. Lead forms are still a good lane, especially in the UK and EU where DM campaigns don't optimise, but they run on top of an audience. The full reasoning is in the leads problem above.

It's not just you. Organic reach on Instagram has shrunk, walk-ins and word of mouth have gone quiet, and more artists are chasing the same clients. That's a reach problem, and reach is fixable. What to do in a slow season, with or without ads, is in the slow-season guide on our blog.

Yes, and we use it. Advantage+ delivery, AI audience expansion, automated placements. It's the best delivery machinery ever built, and any agency telling you to switch it off is costing you money.

Here's what it can't do. It optimises toward what it can see, and in tattoo, what it can see is a click or a DM, never the deposit taken three weeks later. Left to run itself on flashy creative, it gets very good at finding people who click and never book, then keeps rebuilding your audience out of them. It also doesn't know your style, doesn't know healed beats fresh, will happily run your competitor's ads against yours with the same enthusiasm, and quietly switches new settings on across ad accounts without asking. Our job is feeding it the right creative, the right signal, and watching what it just turned on. The machine does delivery. We do judgement.

We build the audience, the campaigns, the calls to action, the ad copy, and the signals Meta needs to see. Then we optimise every piece of it day to day.

Testing what works on your own account usually means burning a lot of money to learn what we already know. We've run this across 100+ artists, every day it changes, so you get the version that's already been proven, not the version you had to pay to discover.

You're not buying a set of ads. You're buying everything around them.

Audience building sits underneath everything. Nobody books a sleeve or a backpiece off a DM they sent while doom-scrolling. They book after seeing your work, in their style, from someone local, again and again, until they're ready. The audience is the long-term customer base every other campaign draws from.

DM ads are the fastest route to a conversation and the strongest lane in NZ, Australia and the US. Their weakness is a cold audience: the objective finds the cheapest conversation, and that's where the tyre-kickers come from. If you've run DM ads yourself and got an inbox full of them, that's what you saw. Run into a warmed audience with a qualifying opener, it's a different inbox.

Lead forms are fewer, higher intent and trackable. They cost more per result, they need a reply within the hour, and they're the lane for the UK and EU, where DM campaigns don't optimise properly.

Meta's newer DM automation, one automated greeting or qualifying question inside the thread, filters time-wasters and saves you hours. It says it's automated, and every reply after it is you. It never answers as you.

None of it is set in stone. Every account runs the audience layer first, because it warms the audience and locks down the targeting. What goes on top depends on your location, your style and the local competition, and we change it when the numbers say so.

Because the way tattoo work gets booked is unlike almost every other industry. Someone booking a Japanese sleeve isn't clicking a random ad and booking that day. They're researching Japanese artists in their region for months. Lurking, liking, saving, comparing, sometimes for over a year before they reach out.

A regular marketing agency would write that person off as a "non-buyer." But that long-research, slow-trigger behaviour is exactly what your highest-value clients look like. Our strategies are built around capturing those people. Read the full breakdown.

Yes. The more specific your style, the better our model works. We don't want to build you an audience of "people in Australia who like tattoos." We want to build you an audience of Neo-Japanese fans in Melbourne, or black and grey realism collectors in LA, or fineline first-timers in Auckland.

Niche audiences are smaller, but they're warmer, cheaper to reach, and convert into the kind of bookings you actually want. Not walk-in $150 names on a wrist.

Honest answer: harder, not impossible. We'll have a conversation during the application about which 1 to 3 styles to lead with. The campaign is then built around those. You can still tattoo whatever you want. We're just narrowing what the ads push to attract a specific audience type.

Yes, when they're set up properly. The trick isn't reach, it's behaviour-based audience targeting on people who actually book your specific style. Generic "tattoo enthusiast" ads burn money. Style-matched, location-aware campaigns built around a real audience profile convert, whether the campaign is set up for DMs, lead forms, or contact-form submits. Boosting a post is not the same thing, and it is usually why ads "didn't work" last time.

You can run them yourself, and some artists do well at it. Boosting a post is not running ads, it buys likes, not enquiries. But Meta's auction, audience signals, and creative testing change every quarter. If you want to spend 10 hours a week reading Meta blogs and rebuilding campaigns, go for it. If you'd rather tattoo, we run them for less than the cost of two days of work. How much a tattoo artist should spend on ads is on the blog.

Usually one of four things: targeting left to guesswork, creative too polished (real work consistently outperforms produced ads), no clear objective on the campaign, or budget under the learning threshold. Ran ads yourself? Run the 60-second check on your own account.

Even better. We'll look at what you've got, kill what's wasting spend, and rebuild around what's working. No need to start from zero.

It happens, tattoos sometimes trigger Meta's review systems for "violent imagery" even when there's nothing violent about them. We've seen every flavour of rejection across 100+ artists. We handle the appeal, rewrite if needed, and resubmit. You don't have to deal with Meta support.

No. We connect to your ad account through Meta Business Suite as a partner. You stay in control of your IG and FB pages and your ad account. We never need your password.

PMU, yes. It's tattooing, same model. Laser removal and tattoo-adjacent brands we take case by case. Ask.