MBA1679 Do You Have to Use Paid Ads to Grow?

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Hey. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Daily Business Building goodness every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training online. And in today's lesson you will learn do you need to use paid ads to grow your business? Running paid ads like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn ads can get expensive and some businesses just simply don't have the budget to spend on paid advertising. But does that mean your business is at a disadvantage that it can't grow, that it can't reach new customers and dominate your market? Well, that's what we explore in today's episode. Is it possible? Are there any examples out there of businesses that are successful, that do no paid ads? And if so, how can you market without spending money? We get into all that and more in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When it comes to marketing, when it comes to bringing in new customers into your business, there's really just three ways or three types of marketing that you can utilize. These are the three big ways that can really move the needle in your business. The first one is paid marketing. It's paid advertising. Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, sponsoring an event, being a sponsor on a podcast. The second way is partnerships. When you partner with another person with an audience to get in front of that audience. These are joint webinars. This can be affiliate marketing. This could be somebody emailing their list about your latest product or service and the third way of marketing that can really help grow your business is content marketing. That's building your own content to drive traffic to your site, whether it's your blog, whether it's having a YouTube channel or a podcast, like this one. So again, three big ways. One is paid advertising or paid marketing. Number two is partnerships, and number three is content marketing. The first two, paid advertising and partnership marketing, all revolves around one concept. You are borrowing an audience. You're getting in front of people that you normally don't have access to. You don't own that audience, but you're barring the attention of the audience to hopefully have them come over to you. The third option, content marketing, is when you own the audience, you own the traffic. If I write a blog post today and it generates a thousand visitors to my website every single month, that's traffic I own. That's an audience that comes because I built an asset. I don't really need to pay anybody anything to get that traffic. I made the investment by writing great content. The same thing goes with a podcast episode or a video on YouTube. That's the advantage of content marketing. But the disadvantage is it does take time for you to get that traffic, to build that audience, to get that trust. The first two, paid advertising and partnership marketing, they're quick. You give me $1,000, I will get you people to your website through ads instantly. I don't have to wait for things to index or SEO or the traffic to build or people to share the article. It's not a long term game, it's a short term game. Same thing with partnership marketing. If I partner with an affiliate or partner with somebody in my marketplace or one of my integration partners and say, hey, let's do a webinar together. It's just a matter of time before I get in front of that audience. We run the webinar and that's it. It's pretty quick. But when it comes to marketing, not all efforts are created equal. If you ask me if there was one way to market your business, if you had to choose one to build a successful business on, I would tell you that content marketing is the best. It's like investing and owning your own land. You own the traffic that comes to your site because of the content you build. It's very long term. You can depend on it. And the businesses that don't do paid advertising, businesses like Basecamp, businesses like Fizzle, they heavily invest in content marketing so they can own the long tail, they can own the traffic that comes to them. They have Blogs, they have podcasts, they have YouTube channels. It's not that they are being cheap, it actually is expensive to invest in these things, but they're investments. Meaning that if you write a blog post and it costs you, let's say $2,000 to get somebody to write you an epic post, you're going to get traffic for that blog post because of how powerful that is for SEO, for sharing, for being an authority in your market for eternity, for as long as that business is around. There are people that buy domain names, URLs based on the traffic. Like you have an asset just on the fact that you can bring traffic to a domain name. People can use your domain name if they ever wanted to buy it from you, to generate traffic and start a new site. So in essence, your content marketing is driving great traffic and it's traffic that's consistent and it's for the lifetime of that company, of that domain. So yes, it's $2,000, but it will last a lifetime versus if I dump $2,000 into a Facebook ad, yes, I will get that traffic and I'll probably get customers faster. But as soon as my budget runs out, as soon as my $2,000 runs out, I stop getting traffic. This is because again, I'm borrowing the audience. So does it mean that paid ads are a waste of money? No, it's definitely going to help. It's definitely going to get you customers. Is it a better long term investment? I would also say no. And there's nothing wrong with doing a combination of all three of the type of marketing that I mentioned. But if I had to choose one, it would be content marketing. If I had to choose two, it would be content marketing and partnerships. Partnerships are probably the most underutilized ways of marketing. Getting in front of other audience, that could be guest posting, that could be joint webinars like I mentioned, that could be affiliate marketing, that could be cross newsletter mentions. There are lots of businesses and websites that have audiences already that you can get in front of if the terms of the agreement of the partnership makes sense for both parties. One of the best exercises I did is have a partnership playbook. I learned this from Dan Martell, my coach, as well as our advisor at webinar Ninja. And basically I write down 12 companies every single year that I want to partner with and every month of the year I do a partnership. Now this is still borrowed traffic, but allows me to have consistent traffic every single month from new fresh audiences. Also, when you have somebody coming through a partnership, they're a warm lead. They're a whole lot warmer than an ice cold lead coming from Facebook or from an ad on LinkedIn or YouTube. They don't know anything about you and they're just coming off a click, right? But when you get a warm introduction from a partner, hey, this is Omar and his business. This is what it's all about. I've known him, we've worked with him, we're integration partners. Whatever it is, it's a warm introduction from somebody they trust and therefore you're more likely to close that sale than somebody who's absolutely cold who's never heard of you. Again, I know a lot of businesses. Their whole business is partnership marketing. John Link Dumas of Entrepreneurs on Fire, a big big proponent of partnership marketing, has built a seven figure plus business being one of the best at it. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, very big on partnership marketing, can definitely help you by checking out some of his articles there on smartpassiveincome.com so it's definitely doable to run a business without paid marketing, but it takes time. It takes time to do partnerships. It takes time to build content that will last a lifetime and get you some really good traffic via SEO. I'll give you some examples. I wrote an article on webinar ninjas website webinar.com blog on when is the best time to run a webinar? This article was originally written about three years ago. I've updated it of course with the latest data recently, but that original post took some time. It took about, I would say six to 12 months to really get traction and become one of the top posts for that keyword. One of the biggest drivers of traffic for our website is just that post. Now the reason why it does so well, if you think about it, is because you're solving a problem. You're answering a question that your audience member has. And if you could be a problem solver, you could be a resource of knowledge for your audience. They're going to come to your website via SEO, via search because they're going to find these great useful articles. You're going to be a source of knowledge. You're going to be the place they go to and share with other people when it comes to your topic. This increases the likelihood for them to sign up for your newsletter, to sign up for your opt ins, to join you on a demo or a live webinar, to sign up for a free trial, to become a customer. Traffic is half the battle. If you can get them to your site, you can convert them, but you need to get them to your site. Most people's problem and the reason why they spend so much money on marketing is because they need people to come to their site so they can see what they're all about, see what the product is all about. And if you got people coming to you automatically through SEO, through great articles that you're writing, this is a goldmine. So you really should invest in it, even if you're doing paid marketing. Now invest in content marketing. So this really emphasizes why people create YouTube channels or podcasts. Because people are on these platforms, they're searching for certain things, certain topics, and if you show up, you help them, you answer their questions, you give them great content, they're going to come back, they're going to look you up, they're going to find what you're all about, they're going to see what you can offer. Paid ads can accelerate things, but I've seen people do without them. It just means you need to invest in other types of marketing, like partnership marketing, like content marketing. Invest your time, your effort and your money to build assets, to build something where you can own the traffic.

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Paid ads definitely can help you. They can get people through the door. They can help you promote. They're really good for launches, too. Launching a new product, a new business, a new site. They're also, by the way, great for promoting a new piece of content A new blog post. We do this all the time. But you want to build a business that doesn't rely on paid ads. It can help your business. It can leverage what you have already. But if your business lives or die on paid ads, it might be a little bit of a dangerous place to put yourself in. Because Algorithm changes, Facebook changes its rules, LinkedIn changes its rules. Prices can skyrocket overnight. I've been there, so you need to not be as dependent on it. It can help you promote what you have, pour some gasoline to the fire sometimes when you need it, but always have those tried and true methods like partnership marketing and content marketing to have your businesses back when it comes to bringing people to your website. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 RMBA show. If you loved today's episode, if you got one nugget of wisdom, why don't you share it on social? Tell people about this podcast, Tell people about this episode, grab the link or even screenshot what you're listening to right now, this podcast episode and share it on social, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Let other people know about the gold you just found today. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I think it's healthy for any business to have different phases in their business, different seasons. It's okay for you to go hard on paid ads for a couple months and then kick it back a little bit and stop doing them cold turkey for a few months too. It's important to do that so you can see the effects paid ads actually have on the bottom line of your business. Are they really moving the needle? Are they really making a huge difference? Yes. Okay, we know now. If not, maybe we should make more effort into the other types of marketing. Maybe we should invest our time and effort and money into better content. Thanks so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Hey Fidelity how can I remember to invest every month?

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