This YouTube guide (Areeb Mirza) explains why service businesses should diversify marketing beyond referrals and Google Ads by creating content and running ads together. Referrals are high-quality but fragile; Google Ads are pay-to-play and stop delivering when you stop paying. Creating short-form content builds an audience/brand (organic reach, profile visits, website traffic) while ads accelerate sales immediately and feed users back into the content funnel—producing a stacked, waterfall effect of recurring leads. The video outlines mechanics (content improves trust and SEO; ads drive profile visits and followers) and recommends maintaining referrals while adding content+ads to make marketing more resilient.
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So this is your extensive guide for content for Dummies. By extensive I mean it's the most basic thing you will ever see that is going to help you. Because if you're still relying on referrals or Google leads, this bit is exactly for you. So let's say this is you over here. This is you. You provide a service and then you get referrals. This is pretty much a lot of people's business model, a lot of service business models. This is a lot of people I speak to who, who are doing this at the moment. This is you provided with service. This person's happy. As you can see over here, this person is very happy. And if they're not happy, of course this doesn't happen. So the fact that they're happy, you get referrals and then that's this pretty much your business model. And this is a lot of other people too. So for example, this is you, you may run some like pay per click ads, Google Ads. So this is a lot of people's marketing as well. If you're doing both, then at least you have another source of marketing because let's say one of them stops. You still have this to rely on. But there's another, there's another source that people are still ignoring for some reason, especially in 2025. You really need to be focusing on this thing right over here. And I'm going to explain to you why it's better than this one and this thing like the referrals, like just keep this going. This is like the best quality leads. This is something you will want every single time. So this isn't like to replace referrals. That doesn't make any sense. You're going to keep making sure that you're getting referrals. So very, very important as well. Because the reason and the whole purpose of this video is because what happens like when this stops coming? So what happens? Like I don't know, for some reason service isn't as good. Like you just have like off days or just like even the, even if the service is good, people are just not referring you more work for some reason. Like what do you do? Like just like the business stops coming or like what, what is plan B? And let's say Google's not coring either or you just don't have the budget to keep giving money to Google because that's what Google is. It's pretty much like pay to play. So now let's talk about this source over here. So let's say this is you and you start creating some content and then you also start running some ads. Once you start creating some content, you immediately reach more people. This could be for any other industry or any industry you're in service based, even product. But let's just stick to service based. Once you create content, you're immediately reaching people. Let's say you're creating content about like, I don't know, like let's say you're a law firm, you're creating about law content in your area. And let's say, in our case, let's say you're creating like Houston content, you're reaching like Houston people. You can make sure that you keep mentioning Houston in your videos and then the algorithm's like automatically going to show the content to Houston people. Now of course the goal over here is sale. You want more. In lawyer cases, you want more sale. If you're a pressure washer, you want more like appointments, whatever your business is, this is always the goal. Sale over here. Watch how this works. You just keep creating content, you keep reaching more people and then you want more sales. But this takes time over here content to reach more people organically. This takes time. We want sales tomorrow, we want sales right now, we want sales next week even. We want it fast. So what do we do? We run ads. Now the reason I've like have all these arrows is because they're all linked together. Because arrow you run ads, you get the sale. It looks very simple. Let me explain the complications in it. But when the complications make sense to you, this will be very easy for you to understand as well. So once you run ads, because ads is its own thing, it's a funnel by itself. Because ads is something like you want to make sure that you like put a person through here and they're going to come down to this funnel and they're going to become a sale. Now part of this funnel is also content and this is why I've linked it over here. Because some people, let's say you're running ads, some people, what they will do is they will immediately go watch your content. Like is this person trustworthy? Because anybody buying or anybody like you want to use your service, they immediately have this first question, like is this person like trustworthy? Like what did they have done for other people? Or why should I even listen to this person in the first place? So they might follow you, they might watch your content over time and then they become, they become one of these and then they become a sale. So it doesn't happen right away, but it might happen. Later on. But the beautiful thing is, like, you might need to do this over and over again. So you have this waterfall effect where you're making sales every month, but you've stacked it from the previous month. So it makes more sense. Now, the thing about ads is that you can immediately start this process right away. You create content, you make ads, and then you immediately start this machine. So that is the primary reason why it's linked. Now, one of the more beautiful things about this and one of the main reasons I like is let's say you just stopped running ads, which you shouldn't do ever. So especially in meta cases like this is like Facebook ads. Let's just say you stop running ads, but in most cases you're not supposed to do that. But let's say you're like, you know what, we're going to stop running ads for a bit. And like, this side of thing is gone. By the way, you're still posting content, because posting content doesn't require you cost. Unless you have like a videographer or you hire an agency. Sure. But posting content, it shouldn't be an expense. It's always an investment within your own brand. That's what I think. So let's compare this with Google Ads over here. So when you stop, like paying Google, like, Google just like come dig the like, okay, we're not paying me. I'm not going to show your. You're on like the bottom of the list. We're not going to show you in the top one. Because that's how Google works. Like, as soon as you open a page, like literally do this experiment yourself. Let's say you're like a again law firm. You go to Google and the first four links that are going to pop up are all going to be sponsored. So you have to pay. So let's say they directly look up your law firm. They're looking up your law firm. They're still going to see the four sponsored law firms before they see yours. I've done this. I've made a video on this. Like, this is how Google is operating nowadays. Pay attention to this. But over here, once you stop paying, you're still building a brand. Like, you're still collecting people. Like, these are people that are following your page. Where are you posting? Are you posting on TikTok? Are you posting on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn? Like, you're actively creating a brand. Like, this is something that's going to grow over time as well. And ads supplement this as well. Because you're running ads and people Actually click on the follow button and the Facebook page like button and this actively grows. So let's say you are active on Google Ads as well. Let's say you're activating on both sources. This, this part over here, in this part over also helps this because let's say one of your TikTok videos gets like 40,000 views. Your Instagram video gets like 500,000 views. This helps SEO. This actively communicates with Google that, hey, like, this person has good backlinks. Like, this person has good traffic going on to his sites. Let's say within your content feed, your actual content feed, you have. And this is your profile over here, there's a Follow Chrome, you have your website link over here. This is your website link. And of course you have your post over here. Once people like visit your profile. Let's say you were getting like 400,000 views on your Instagram profile because you're running ads. Let's say you're spending like $100 a day. You're getting a lot of profile visits onto your feed. A lot of people would click your link over here as well. So this is like daily traffic onto your website. So this is another reason why content is like super powerful. And using this whole system for content, I know I've kind of like made a mess now, but this is exactly why content by itself is super powerful. Because it's not just one source, is because, like, you can take ads away, you still have content, you can stop running ads, you're still building brand.
And that also, like ads have like a waterfall effect, like I mentioned. Like, it also has, it also supplements Google as well. So very, very powerful. So if you're still only relying on this, and if you're looking to scale just relying on this, like, it won't be good. Because right now what you're doing as well is you have a stool. Imagine this is a stool and that that stool has one leg. So that's your business. That's, that's, that's referrals only. Because as soon as this gets removed, what happens, it falls. So you need to make sure you're adding more stools to it. So for, of course, content, I would say is a much stronger stool. But referrals is something, of course, that's going to keep coming. You do good work, referral is going to come and then you can add like a Google stool if you want, and then you can add more resources towards this, the more you scale. And this is how you protect this tool as well. So very, very important we understand this concept. So that's all for today's video. If you enjoyed this type of content, just make sure to hit the subscribe button. We'll try to post weekly content and also hit the like button because that helps the algorithm. And I'll see you next week.
