Yes, you have to put your hand in your pocket. Shock! Horror! I have to pay money to get my name out there? That’s outrageous, Andy!
There’s lots of talk about how great social media organic content is and, of course, word of mouth. Both are important. But – to a certain extent – they are also out of your hands. As business owners, we want control. We wouldn’t have gone into business otherwise.
With organic content you can’t specifically target who to show it to. You can’t decide who can and who can’t follow your Facebook Page.
With word of mouth, you can’t make your customers recommend you. There are definitely ways to encourage it but is recommending you going to be a priority over everything else that’s going in their lives?
Again, both organic social content and word of mouth are important. But they are there to complement your paid-for ads. The only way to target the people most likely to buy off you with the message you want and stay in front of them is with paid-for ads. If someone seeing an ad does go and check you out on social first, they’ll see nice organic posts and good reviews. Happy days. But it is the paid-for ads doing the grunt work.
Here’s the key point – if you can’t or won’t pay to acquire a new customer, you haven’t got a sustainable and scalable business.
Read that again – if you can’t or won’t pay to acquire a new customer, you haven’t got a sustainable and scalable business.
How much is a new customer worth to you and what are you willing to spend to acquire them? If you don’t know the answer to that, work it out now. Please. Because it dictates your entire marketing strategy, as opposed to running ads as and when. We see that a lot. “Er, I need something promoting quick. Bung a fiver behind a Facebook Ad….”
No.
When Joel and I started out in business back in the 1800s, we didn’t have any money. So we did what lots of other start-ups did. We hustled. We worked 80 hours a week. All cool and, to be honest, good fun. But, like I said, that isn’t sustainable and scalable. We’d have keeled over or gone crazy or both. We certainly wouldn’t have been able to spend as much time as we wanted with our friends and family. If I could go back, I’d have found or borrowed that money from somewhere.
If you need any proof of this, there are lots of marketers out there banging on about how organic content alone can skyrocket your business. And how are they spreading that message? Yup, with paid-for ads! You couldn’t make it up! I saw one yesterday on Instagram and it had 500 people commenting on this irony.
As ever, if you’d like to know more about marketing that sells, apply for a free Discovery Call.
Stay safe, stay hungry.
