MBA2039 Can You Grow Your Business With No Paid Ads?

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The past 180 days ready to save on new tech it's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals foreign. Welcome to the hundred dollar NBA Show Business Truths to deliver to your ears 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 Weaponry Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 20 and in today's episode you will learn. Can you grow your business with no paid ads? Traditionally people think you need to spend money on traditional ads like Facebook ads and Google print media, Instagram and more. But can you grow your business without shelling out dollars to these big corporations and media outlets? Is there a way to be known and to be desired as a brand? Are there any examples that I can share? Well that's what today's lesson's all about. If you've had it with trying to run ads on social media. Or maybe your business doesn't see an actual return on investment on these ads and you want to know if there's another way, a better way then you're going to love today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activ fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro.

Get that More for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile, just.

Bring your number $30 first month at $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.

Before we get into if it's possible to grow your business without paid ads, let's explore what exactly is paid ads? When you put up a Facebook ad or Instagram ad, or advertise on Quora or what happening here? Well, basically you are borrowing the audience of that platform. You're saying to Facebook, hey, I want to get in front of the people that you have access to and that platform. Facebook, in this example, dictates how much you're going to pay to get in front every audience. Every market is different and the prices don't stay the same because you are not bidding alone. You're bidding against other businesses trying to get in front of the same audience. So a conversion might cost one price today and another tomorrow. Often it goes up in price. But the big problem here is that you're just borrowing the audience. You don't own the audience. Once you stop paying them, you can't have access to the audience anymore. Unlike, for example, if you acquired somebody's email address, you can email market, you can market to them over and over until they become a customer. So paid advertising in a lot of ways is limited when it comes to your ability to always reach that audience. You got to pay to play and you got to play by their rules. For example, Jason Fried, who is the CEO and co founder of Basecamp, is really staunchly against this system. They don't do a lot of paid advertising. They're one of my examples today. But they actually have to advertise on Google because if you've ever been on Google recently, the first listing that you see on your search result is not the actual number one result, it's an ad. In fact, sometimes the first four results are an ad and then you see the number one spot. So if you search, for example, in Jason's example, Basecamp, you'll see four of their competitors as ads before you actually see Basecamp as the number one organic listing or ranking on that page. Jason thinks this is extortion and ridiculous. Somebody searching for Basecamp, they should see Basecamp at top. So beta ads do have their challenges. And this is not to say that paid ads don't work. A lot of businesses grow and do very well with paid ads, but many businesses don't. Whether their cost per acquisition is way too high, meaning it costs them too much money. In ads to acquire a customer. And it doesn't make any sense for them to run ads. Or they're a small independent business that doesn't have a huge marketing budget to just dump on ads every month. So in today's lesson, I'm going to share with you some businesses that have done it without ads. Some of these businesses are huge, some of these not so huge. But the one thing in common is that all of them do some marketing. It may not be paid advertising, but they definitely invest in their marketing, meaning they invest time and money in different forms of marketing outside of traditional advertising. And I'll explain right now. So the biggest company that is out there that does zero paid advertising is one of the most wealthiest and profitable businesses out there, and that's Tesla. Tesla doesn't run any advertising, but they do other forms of marketing. Elon Musk being all over Twitter is a form of marketing. Social media marketing. Their events and their launches that they stream online is a form of marketing. They had a very robust referral system where if you referred somebody with your link, if you bought a Tesla, you would get some charging credits. And so they, this is referral marketing. So they do other kinds of marketing. They just don't do adverts and super bowl ads and things like that. This is because Elon Musk just firmly believes that his product speaks for itself and that if you love a Tesla, you're going to tell other people. And he doesn't really need to. The funny thing is, is that during the last super bowl, there were a few other car manufacturers that were doing ads on their electric vehicles. And purely by the other manufacturers doing ads on electric vehicles, Tesla's sales went up. It just got people thinking about electric vehicles. So they basically advertised for them. But it's not just Tesla Spanx, a very popular undergarment and accessory for women. The company is worth over $1 billion. Zero advertising. Krispy Kreme Donuts does zero advertising. Instead, they decide to invest in strategic locations like airports and sports and music stadiums. Zara, the clothing line. No advertising. But what they do instead is they do influencer marketing. They try to get celebrities and tastemakers to wear their outfits, their clothing, their styles at event. Sriracha, the hot sauce. Zero advertising. But it's one of the most popular hot sauces on all restaurant tables. Now, Sriracha is making enough of a profit margin to stay relevant and alive, meaning that they make a pretty good profit on every bottle and they focus on creating a really good hot sauce. So they played the long game and said, hey, we're gonna just create a great hot sauce and be around for as long as possible and people are gonna talk about it. And even Lululemon, the very famous and popular sportswear retailer, did not do any paid advertising until just very recently where they just launched their first paid ad. So can you do this in your small business? The answer is 100% yes. In my own businesses, I have not really relied on paid advertising. We've experimented with it, we've done paid advertising on and off. But our business will still grow and was still prosperous without paid advertising. Now that doesn't mean we didn't do any marketing. You still have to be well known. You still have to get out there. You still have to build relationships with your potential customer. This could be with content, this could be with affiliate marketing, this could be with partnerships. This could be speaking on stage. This could be all different kinds of things that can get you out there. And all in all, I would say those activities actually are more of an investment for the long term than paid advertising. Traditionally like on Facebook and Instagram. Now this does not work if your product is not solid. Your product has to be absolutely solid for all these other marketing activities to work. The reason why paid advertising is so expensive and so busy and crowded is because people with mediocre products are able to kind of thrive by just dumping enough money into paid marketing, convincing enough people to buy things. They're not actually that great. This is where you can outlast them and outwork them and out sell them by having a superior product that sells itself.

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number. $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available if with Metro T Mobile in the past 180 days.

Now if you're going to decide not to go paid ads, you got to get serious about your marketing. You got to have some channels that work. You got to find things that actually will convert customers a proven path to a sale. Meaning if you know when you run a webinar with a partner with an affiliate and you get a hundred people on that Webinar. You convert at 10%, you get 10 customers every single time. Your profit is X. You know the formula. You can repeat the formula. That is what you need to do. You need to make sure you have a proven way to make a sale. Once you do that, you can just repeat that over and over and expand that and double down on it and then you can find your next path to a sale. That could be a YouTube channel, that could be a podcast, that could be a referral program, it could be an opt in like you're giving away your best selling book, something like that. But your job is to find one that works, that gets you sales consistently double down, triple down, have it move and work like a well oil machine and then from there you find the next thing. So you can double or triple your sales by having multiple channels, but just focus on one and make sure it works in the beginning. By the way, this is what people do anyway with paid ads. They have basically a funnel where the ad leads to and it's got to convert to a customer. Otherwise the ads not working, the ads not worth it. They dumped hundreds, even thousands of dollars on an ad that's just not converting. The difference for you is that you're going to be dumping time and energy. This is why it's important to really find that path to a sale and repeat it over and over, over. Don't lift your foot off the gas. A lot of people do that where they stop doing what works to try something new. Keep that going while you try something new. Well, there you have it, guys. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. Let us know what your biggest takeaway was from today's episode or an episode you heard recently. And if you're not subscribed yet, don't forget, do that right now. By hitting subscribe, you get access to over 2,000 business lessons in our archives. So smash the subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast app. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. You're going to spend money, time, energy on marketing your business. You just got to pick your poison. Which one do you feel more comfortable with? Personally, as a person that's been teaching all my life, I've been a teacher professionally. I teach my content in my business. I like content marketing. I feel like this is my strength and I know that I can do this and enjoy the process and feel like I have a bit of control over the results. This is why I'm not super bullish on paid ads. There's a lot of factors out of your control, so choose something that you're comfortable with, something that you feel like is your strength, and of course, that you enjoy so that the work is not a pain and that you can make progress without feeling horrible. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

Gas, snacks, tolls this trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What'?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data detour to Metro.

Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile just.

Bring your number $30 first month at $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days.