I was on a call with a guy and he wanted to jump right into paid ads. I asked him a few questions and advised him that the timing was not right for him to run paid ads, yet. Today I want to share a few principles that will help you answer this question for yourself.
1) It will ruin you financially if you don’t make a ROI
If you have to scrape money together for a monthly budget and now the money you spend has to make money for your company — it’s not the right time.
Paid ads works well as a supplementary client acquisition pathway.
Use the money you make from organic marketing to feed your paid ads budget.
2) You don’t have another working client acquisition source
With most companies I’ve worked with, organic marketing is the main revenue driver, and paid ads supplements the main revenue driver.
When this is the case, you also have more insight into your offer that:
- The offer is validated with your current market and is selling at the right economic level (aka price)
- Your sales process is validated
- Your sales team is ready for the potential sharp increase in lead volume
3) You’re desperate to get business
Being desperate for sales likely comes from a place of financial pressure to perform. Here’s the thing, getting paid ads right is not an overnight thing.
It will require that you:
- Test new angles
- Come up with new creatives to hook in your audience
- Write good enough sales copy
- Have the ability to connect with a cold audience (people who do not know you)
If you in are desperate situation, you’ll most likely won’t allow the process of running successful ads to run a good course.
You’ll be too attached to the money that’s being spent and not bringing in a ROI that you’ll stop the process.
I’ve personally been there so many times. It takes time to get right, there’s a lot of iteration that happens in the background. (See the list above)
4) You say, “I’m too busy to work on marketing and sales…”
This comes from a place of being so busy with client delivery that everything else takes a back seat.
The problem with this is that it puts you in a nasty cycle.
The cycle looks like this:
- You do prospecting
- You stop marketing and sales to work with the client
- Work finishes
- Now you have to get back into marketing and sales
- Cycle repeats
The problem with this cycle is that you have inconsistent sales months. One good month, several bad months that follow.
The path forward is to start learning the difference between working inside the business versus working on the business.
Part of that is learning how to prioritize and be productive when it matters.
Saying you “don’t have enough time” is a poor excuse to mitigate responsibility.
I hope this was helpful to you.
If you’d like to work with me and my firm, you are welcome to use the following application link to see if you’re a good fit for us or not:
Justin Booysen