@skyybluegirl I mean that's not necessarily true. Ads can be quite good for building awareness and can be really effective, especially if your company is small and unknown in the sector and if you're in e-commerce as people can easily click over and make a purchase.
I wouldn't discount them entirely. You just need to work the costs into your margin.
Think of them basically as an automated salesperson that costs you a certain margin for each sale. That's the basic logic behind calculating your CPA (cost per acquisition) for each sale.
Say Google, or Insta or whatever ends up charging you $45 dollars for a sale, but the total for the sale was $150 and your margin is 50%, you would net $30 in profit for basically doing nothing.
And the interesting thing is that because you're already producing your own content on your socials, you can basically just reuse the most engaging content and repurpose them as ads. You'll just have to figure out what demo you want to target (which you should have a good idea of anyways) and then pay to show them the ads.