REELS
Why Reels Are the Best Marketing Investment a Local Business Can Make
Short answer
A reel is an asset and an ad is a bill. Paid reach ends the moment the budget does, because you are renting metered placement. A reel stays on your profile, stays searchable, and can still be recommended to people who do not follow you years after posting. One I filmed for a Huntington Park venue in 2023 did 743,000 views and still brings them work.
I filmed a reel for The Fern, a small event space in Huntington Park, that opens with a whisper and a walk down Santa Fe Avenue. Shhhh, I am going to show you a new hidden gem event space. It did 743,000 views, 38,000 likes and 165 shares. I filmed it back in 2023 and people are still booking off it.
Nobody paid to keep that reel running. It has been sitting on that profile ever since, doing nothing but existing, and it is still the thing that introduces the venue to somebody who has never heard of it. That is the part most business owners have never had explained to them.
That is the part most business owners have never had explained to them, and it is the difference between the two things you can spend money on. One of them stops the day you stop paying. The other one does not.
What actually happens when you stop paying for ads?
The delivery stops. That is not a criticism of ads, it is just how the mechanism works. You are renting placement, and the placement is metered. The moment the budget runs out, the impressions end, and whatever awareness you built starts decaying because nothing is left behind to keep working.
So an ad is a bill. It is a line item that recurs, and the day you pause it you are back to where you started. Plenty of businesses should still run them. Ads buy speed, and speed is worth paying for when you need bookings this month. But you are not building anything you own.
A reel is the opposite trade. It is slower to pay off and it does not switch off. Once it is up it stays on the profile, it stays attached to your name, and it can be served to somebody who has never heard of you long after you posted it. That is why I frame it as content that behaves like an asset rather than an advertising cost.
| Paid ads | Reels | |
|---|---|---|
| What you are buying | Placement, metered by spend | A piece of content you keep |
| When it stops | The day the budget stops | It does not stop |
| Who sees it | Whoever you targeted and paid for | Followers, plus people the platform recommends it to |
| Six months later | Gone unless you paid again | Still on the profile, still searchable, still able to resurface |
| What you own at the end | Nothing | Every reel, plus the footage |
| Best used for | Speed. Filling a specific week | Compounding. Being the name people already know |
Why does a reel keep getting found months later?
Because the platform never stops deciding whether to show it to somebody. A reel is not published once and then filed away. It sits in a system that keeps evaluating it against whoever is scrolling right now.
Connected reach and unconnected reach
Instagram separates the people who already follow you from the people who do not. Adam Mosseri has been public about the signals that drive this, naming watch time, likes measured against reach, and sends measured against reach as the ones that matter most. Sends carry the most weight for getting in front of people who do not follow you.
That second bucket is the whole argument. Reaching your own followers is nice and it is also a closed room. Getting recommended to a stranger in Huntington Park who has never heard of your venue is the thing that turns into a booking. And a reel stays eligible for that long after the week you posted it.
It also means a small account is not locked out. A post gets shown to a small group first, and if the response is good the reach widens from there. Follower count is not the gate. That is why a venue with a modest following can out-perform a much bigger account, and why I keep telling people the number of reels matters more than the size of the audience when you are starting.
The Fern has reels from 2023 that still bring in work
This is the clearest example I have, and it is the reason I explain the asset idea the way I do. The Fern is a small space in Huntington Park that hosts private gatherings, workshops and community events. I have been filming for them since 2023.
What happens is not that one reel goes up and does its job and dies. It is that the pile keeps working. An older reel keeps surfacing for somebody new, then a more recent one takes over as the main driver, and the older one is still down there getting found. Nothing was re-paid for. Nothing was re-shot.
The owner's own estimate is that around 90 percent of their business now arrives through Instagram and TikTok. I want to be straight that this is their number and not mine. I do not have access to their booking system and I have not audited it. But it matches what I see, which is a venue that gets found on a phone rather than through a search for venues.
Three reels, three different rooms
The reels I have filmed for them are not variations on one idea. There is a street festival, a Halloween event at Salt Lake Park, and a Yelp LA collaboration. Each one puts the space in front of a different crowd, and each one is still up. You can see more of what that looks like on the Huntington Park page.
Does Google see reels at all?
On the platform, yes, that is where most of the discovery happens. But there is a second surface people forget about, and it is your own website.
Google can discover and index video that is embedded on a page using standard elements like an iframe, and it publishes requirements for making that video eligible to be indexed, including using a single stable thumbnail for each one. Search Console even has a separate video indexing report showing which videos on a site are eligible for video features in Search.
So a reel embedded on your own site is not decoration. It is a second copy of the same asset living somewhere you control, on a page that can rank. The social post and the embed both work, and they work in different places.
Are Instagram reels worth it for a small business?
More than you want to hear, and that is the honest answer. One reel is a lottery ticket. Twenty reels is a body of work. The reason volume matters is not that any single one is likely to take off. It is that each one is another line in the water, and you only need one of them to be the reel somebody finds.
The compounding is the whole point
I have filmed more than 1,000 reels for local businesses at this point, with more than 10 million total views across the accounts I run. One of those reels did 46,000 views and 1,556 shares organically inside about 30 days, with nothing paid behind it. I could not have told you in advance which one it would be. Nobody can.
That is why the pricing is built around a weekly cadence instead of one-off shoots. The work is not the individual reel, it is the pile. If you want the actual numbers on that, they are on the pricing page.
What a reel cannot do
It cannot make a bad business look good for long. If the space is a mess or the service is poor, all a good reel does is get more people to find that out faster. The content has to be true or it works against you.
It also cannot be rushed. If you need bookings for next week, run an ad, because that is the tool that buys speed. Reels are the thing you start now so that in a year you are not renting attention every single month.
And no reel is guaranteed to be the one. I do not know which of them will get found. What I know is that the businesses with a hundred reels out there get found more often than the ones with three, and that the ones I filmed for The Fern in 2023 are still doing work nobody is paying for anymore.
Common questions
Should I stop running ads then?
No. Ads and reels do different jobs. An ad buys speed, which is exactly what you want if you need bookings for a specific weekend. Reels build something you keep. If you can afford both, run both. If you can only afford one and you are not in a hurry, I would build the asset.
How long before reels start bringing in work?
Longer than an ad and shorter than a website. The first month is mostly banking content with little to show. Things usually start moving somewhere around month two or three, once there is enough up for the platform to have something to recommend and enough for a stranger to scroll through.
Do old reels really get shown to new people?
Yes, and it is by design rather than luck. Instagram separates reach to your followers from reach to people who do not follow you, and that second bucket is driven by how content performs rather than by how old it is. A reel that people watch and send stays eligible to be recommended long after the week you posted it.
What happens to my reels if I stop working with you?
They stay yours. The reels, the raw clips and the captions are yours once payment for that billing cycle clears, and they stay on your profile whether or not we are still working together. That is the part that makes it an asset instead of a rental.
Is this better than having a good website?
They are not competing. A website is where somebody lands once they are already looking for you. Reels are how they find out you exist in the first place. The strongest setup is reels doing discovery and the site doing the closing, with the reels embedded on the site so both surfaces are working.
Do I need a reel to go viral for this to be worth it?
No, and chasing that is usually what makes the content worse. The goal is volume of decent reels rather than one big swing. A reel that quietly gets found by forty of the right people in your city is worth more to a local business than one that entertains fifty thousand strangers who will never walk in.
Can I use these reels somewhere other than Instagram?
Yes. They go out across the platforms you are on, and they can be embedded on your own website too. Google publishes requirements for indexing video embedded on a page, so an embed is a second copy of the same asset living somewhere you control rather than somewhere you rent.
What if my business is not visual?
Most people who tell me that are wrong about their own business, but not all of them. Trades, venues, gyms and shops all have something happening that is worth filming. If yours genuinely does not, I will tell you on the call rather than take the money and find out later.
Related on this site
- Short form video what the weekly filming actually covers, with pricing attached
- Social media for event venues the industry page for spaces like The Fern
- Huntington Park more of the work filmed in the same city, including two Fern reels
- Pricing the weekly cadence this whole argument depends on
- Why I film on an iPhone how these reels get shot in the first place
Sources
- Google Search Central: Video SEO best practices and indexing requirements
- Google Search Console Help: the video indexing report explained
- Buffer: How the Instagram algorithm works, covering Mosseri's stated ranking signals
- Sprinklr: Instagram Reels ranking and the connected versus unconnected reach split
- Hootsuite: Instagram algorithm guidance including Trial Reels for cold audiences
I film reels for local businesses in LA and Orange County
On site filming, same day editing, posted across four platforms. If you want to talk through what that would look like for your business, call me.