Cash In On Camera LIVE!

I'm a video strategist, and today we're talking about organic versus paid marketing. And I'm going to dive into that in just a few minutes' time. Those of you who are live on the Zoom, welcome, and you have an opportunity to engage with me and interact with me. So excited for that. If you are watching on YouTube, if you're watching on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook, whether the group or the page, welcome. Please leave comments below the video if you have any questions about this topic or any topic related to you building your business. What we really specialize in is helping people to be positioned as authorities, experts, leaders in their niche. And we do that with video, particularly with live streaming, especially with our challenge, which— yay, we're in the March challenge now. And I know some of you are doing the challenge with us. I'm really excited to have, to have you here. But we do a monthly livestream challenge every month. It's 30 days long. And it's called Go Live Challenge. There is no editing involved. It is all live streaming. And so we have, I think, 30 to 31 people who are in. Can you hear me, Liz? It looked like you went— 30 to 31 people who are doing the challenge this month. And so we're really excited about that. A couple of housekeeping notes that I wanted to share with you before we embark on our topic of the day is that we are building out a referral system. Essentially, we really want to grow the livestream challenge, the Go Live Challenge, because we're seeing so much progress. We're seeing people who are previously terrified to go and do live, who are doing their first livestreams. And it's interesting that it's like the 3rd of March right now as we're doing this call. But in the first day and two of the challenge, I saw notes and messages from people who said, I did it. I'm so proud. And not only that, but I'm getting people engaging with me and they're inquiring about how they can join me or know more about me. And I'm like, yeah, that's amazing. That's exactly what you want to do. So if you're watching this and you're interested to join the challenge, reach out to us, DM us, email me, community@sherylplouffe.com. We can hook you up. It is $100 US to join the challenge. With that, you get course material and training and accountability and email prompts and the rest of it. For those of you who are already in the challenge now or in the future, just so you know, we are also going to be doing a 50% referral commission fee for people who do enlist with us as affiliates, essentially. That is really what we feel is going to help to grow this and spread the message out to more people. To start live streaming, get their message out to more people, grow their business, grow their audience. So if any of that's of interest, reach out. We'd be happy to hook you up and set you up with that. The other thing is that I'm a little bit short on time today. I have a call at the bottom of the hour. So I'm going to do a quick lesson on organic versus paid, have a quick conversation about this particular area, and then I'll open it up to questions like I always do and give you an opportunity to ask questions about that. OK, sound fair? Show of hands on the screen if you are cool with that, or give me a reaction in the Zoom meeting. That'd be great. OK, so. OK, here's the thing, I have largely to this, to this level, like to where I am today, built what I have built almost entirely organically. And almost entirely organically. Way back in the day, like, my journey in marketing really began in 2013, is really when it began. I was still broadcasting at that time. I was a full-time broadcaster at The Weather Network. But from 2013 to 2017, I was working full-time, but I was also creating these, um, uh, coaching programs, frankly quite underground. On a little bit more on the down low because I'm not sure that I was really supposed to do that, but I did it because it was what I needed to do. I needed to figure out a proof of concept. I needed to know definitively, can I do this? Is there a market for this? You know, so I took some calculated risks to figure that out. And in 2017 is when I went full-time. Now, prior to that, 2013 to '17, I I was doing it more part-time. And in that period of time, and I can't remember what year it was, I think it might have been 2013, '14, somewhere in there. I ran an ad on Facebook. Now, keep in mind, Facebook has changed radically since then. But I'm just giving you— painting you a picture of my experience with ads so that you can ask me questions. I ran— I recorded a quick little 1-minute video in my office at that different house, and I ran it. I did a whole campaign around it. I think I spent $2,500 at that time on ads, and I generated $25,000 from— of coaching programs when I was still working full-time as a broadcaster, right? So, um, it was a good proof of concept for me because I'm like, oh, okay. Now here's the problem though: the algorithm changes. Everything changes. And so what worked then, it doesn't work today. It doesn't work the same way. So I tell you this because I want you to know that for me, even from that period of time onward, I've, I've run a few little ads like here and there, but not in a wholehearted, like really committed way. So that to this point, I have largely— I can say that definitively— that largely have built everything organically. So what is the advantage of that? Well, advertising can be expensive if you don't know what you're doing. It can be expensive. From what I— and I've trained, like, I've gone to— I, I went to a Nicholas Kuzmich Facebook advertising event in May of— I can't remember, was 2016 or so— spent quite a bit of money. He's not cheap to go and learn from the best. And what I came away from, from that training was some excitement around it and the possibility of what you could do with ads. But the truth is, is that if you're going into the back end of— I'm using Facebook as the example because it's the most common platform. But if you're going into the Facebook Ads Manager and you want to run that yourself, you better make sure you know what you're doing. You really need to make sure you know what you're doing because it's complex, right? So what I want to share with you today from an organic versus paid marketing, um, well, I guess it'd be organic marketing, paid advertising perspective, is that you only want to consider paid when you really firmly, definitively have either a very solid proof of concept, a scalable product or service, and that you're, you know, you already are on to something good, and then you scale it with ads. So the problem I often see is that people who are starting out, or maybe in like an intermediate level, they're still at that stage of like the throwing the spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks stage. Is they go, I gotta run ads because I see everybody else is running ads. I don't recommend that. I think that's the period of time where you have to nail down the organic stuff. You need to be doing lives, speaking about your industry, sharing value, getting out there, being seen, getting known, getting speaking engagements, speaking on other people's stages as much as humanly possible. Show of hands if that resonates with you on the screen. Okay. Yeah, I'm not against ads. I'm not against ads at all. In fact, I'm at a point now where I feel like, especially with regard to the challenge, we have 31 people in it right now who've largely all paid some money to be in it. Like, that is a scalable product. Now we've passed the proof of concept stage. We are at a point where we could scale it. Now, our choice as a company has been to talk about, to build out a referral program first. I'm not even looking at ads yet. I might in the future, but right now I feel like I'm step by step building out a referral system. Does not cost me any money. So this is something for you to think about, right? If you are building something out and you want to scale it, do you need to run ads, or is there something else you can do in the meantime to generate more income and get more results for people, and then think about ads later on. That's what— that's kind of where we're at. And I'm sharing this with you. Um, Jim, can you mute yourself for you? There you go. Um, I'm sharing this with you because— and I have— listen, I'm, I'm the first to admit I have had a tendency not to share these sort of behind-the-scenes things about the business as much in the past because I've been so focused on Marketing and video. But from the work that I've been doing in these calls on Wednesdays, and really with your feedback, you've said you really are interested in online business. So I'm telling you, is this helpful for you to hear? The show of hands on the screen if this is helpful for you to hear some of the real stuff that's kind of going on, some of the decisions that I'm making for myself, because I want to grow too. Don't we all? We all want to grow. We have decisions that we need to make in order to get there. I am, I'm not against ads. I think I may consider ads in the future, maybe even in the near-ish future. But before I do that, I'm taking the next step to say, why don't we build out a referral program first? Let's really see if we can, because my goal, I'd like to have 50 people in the challenge per month. That's my, and again, this is another thing, metrics. I've not been very good with this in the past. But what I am learning through some of the work that I do on myself and some of the coaches that I engage with is metrics. Have some definitive numbers that you want to aim for and reach. So, we are at the 30-ish point right now. I want 50 people per month in the challenge. So, I am going to start with a referral program, pay others to promote this on my behalf, see if we can get up to that 50 mark. And then I might start thinking about ads. Maybe. I don't know yet. But I'll tell you one thing. When I do start thinking about ads, I'm probably not going to go it alone. I'm probably not going to go it alone. I have people, very smart people who are awesome at what they do with ads. And when I'm ready for it and I have like that, that stream of income coming, I might say to him, you know what, let's talk now about the ads because we have the proof of concept. The referral system's working really well. We're hitting our numbers. Now we can scale it because we know that we can help more people with this, with this product. Yeah. Okay, so questions, questions about that?

Liz, I was just going to throw out there that the organic makes sense because when you end up doing the spaghetti against the wall thing, you're ending up— if you're throwing your advertising out there, you're not niched down to where you need to be spending your money wisely, right? It's like, okay, I can spend on a billboard on the corner, but everybody's driving by that. Is that my niche? Are those my people? Well, no. Until you've actually got your proof of concept and you've got it really niched down, where do you want to spend your money? Because that's where, I mean, if you're talking about Facebook ads, I mean, you can import your list and they will create you a copycat list. And then you can advertise to that list, right? You want to niche it down so that you're not wasting your advertising money.

Well, it's a great point, Liz. And the difference is like outbound marketing versus inbound marketing. So outbound marketing is, like you said, like putting that— paying thousands of dollars to have that billboard created, or thinking about my own old world of television, right? You run an ad and you put it on, you pay thousands of— tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to run that ad on television, hoping that somebody somewhere is going to see it and it's going to resonate with them. But inbound marketing, I think, is more intriguing and exciting to my way of thinking because you're attracting people into your world. You're putting that and it doesn't cost you anything to do that necessarily. Right. On social media. Like, what does it cost you? It costs you the time that you invest in putting that content out there. It takes time to create something even live. You know, if you're doing a live stream and it's a 10-minute long live stream, you may have put a little bit of time into really structuring or figuring out like, okay, what's my topic? What do I want to teach? What is it I'm going to share? Okay, but then actually doing the live. So there's really the, the cost is in the time, um, the cost is in the knowledge that you have had to gain in advance of being able to teach that thing. So there's a cost to it, but it's a different kind of thing. You, you put that out there and you're saying things that attract people to want to know more about you. Yeah, so that's a good point, Liz. I think that the more you— I feel like you get— you gain clarity from creating content, is my— in my view. So the more you do it and the more you, you really— it starts to become more clear who is your ideal person. And then yeah, you definitely don't want to be broad. You're not going to— the last thing you want to do is run Facebook ads to just generally people. Like, oh my God, I can't imagine how much that would cost you. It would be insane. Here's the other thing with advertising that I have learned, and I don't— this is something that I have seen and learned from other people. You know, you have to have a budget for it. Yes, you can start running ads and doing campaigns on Facebook, at a low level, like $10 a day would be bare bones minimum. Like, I mean, you know, ideally you want to start at $100 a day because it's about, um, it's a bidding system, so it gets complicated. But you have to have a budget to advertise. And, and that, I guess, from the perspective of money and finances, how appealing is it to know that You can go live anytime you want with your phone, your device, your mobile, your desktop, whatever, and be able to reach people with your message without paying $100 a day. Okay. The only advantage on this, on the ad side, let's say you're paying $100 a day, is the ability to specifically put those ads in front of a certain kind of person based on psychographics, demographics, and all of that. It's the specificity around who you can say, I want them to see this thing. And then there's not to mention the fact that with advertising, you have to have really strong creative, like the ad itself, the image, the video, the whatever. There has to be thought and strategy put into the development of the actual creative. It can be complex and it can be simpler, but it does have to— there has to be some thought and some testing put into that. So you often hear people talk about like A/B testing. Right. That means they're taking a concept for an ad and they're running one creative against another creative. They're testing it to see, OK, we know what the general message is, but is this picture working better than this picture? You know, or is that video working better than that video? Or sometimes you can— and you can A/B test anything in an ad. It can be just testing the headline. It can be testing the link or whatever. So there's lots you can do with it. But it gets complicated, is my point.

Steve. Well, and the other— yeah, I'm on. The other thing too I'm watching is the battle between Apple and Facebook now with them upping their security. Facebook is complaining that it's killing their marketing because of the inability to track. So I think that's going to make marketing either more expensive or more difficult. The pixel is in question now. So I just, yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying. I, I'm a big fan of organic, have for years.

Yeah, me too. I'm a huge fan of organic. I'm not against ads, but I think that you have to have certain things in place before you start to really look at that. Um, and you're right, you know, Steve, you start— there's all kinds of dynamics that are going on in the, the tech world, right? The Apple and the Facebook versus the Twitter, the this, the that, the Instagram. Facebook owns Instagram, and da da da da da. And this is why I feel like if, if and when you get to a point where it's time to think about ads, I would highly suggest that you enlist someone to help, you know, at least from a consultation perspective, if not from a done-for-you perspective, because it's just so much its own field of study. And there's so much that can go— it can cost a lot. I'll give you a quick story. I was in Atlanta I don't know when this was, early 2020. Yes, early, early 2020. It was before the pandemic. That's right. I was in Atlanta and I'd just spoken on stage. I got off stage and of course, people come up and they're like, oh, that was great. And they want to ask you questions and everything. So this person came up and I was talking about how video is speaking. That was the premise of my talk. Video is speaking. So we're talking and she goes on to say, OK, you know, Sheryl, what about this? What about that? I'm running these ads on Facebook and I just spent $10,000 and nothing has happened. From it. Like, I don't know where all the people are, right? And it's like, oh. And I go, okay, so tell me about your organic. And she goes, oh, we're not really doing any organic, right? And it's like, that's a hard one, right? Um, so it, it can't— I'm just telling you that because it's like, that's a real life example. That's somebody who came up to me after a talk and was questioning, how does this whole marketing thing work? I'm running the ads I'm spending the thousands of dollars. Where are all the, where are all the people? And, and it's because— and I didn't dig into it too, too deeply because I had a bunch of people around me, but, um, likely what it is is because they hadn't dialed it in on an organic level first from a messaging perspective, from a proof of concept perspective, from an offer perspective or product perspective, and like really hone that in. Then you scale it. What a lot of people feel— they don't know any better. It's like the one— the thing is you don't know what you don't know. But they'll go out and they'll be like, oh, I see everybody targeting me with ads. I guess that's the thing I should do. So they go and they run these ads. Sometimes they try and do it themselves. They're missing the mark because they don't know the intricacies of it. They end up spending $10,000 and nothing to show for it. That's what I'm trying to help you avoid. I'm not against ads, but but it has to be done at the right time. Any other questions or thoughts? Okay, good. So, um, that's, that's what I— that's my feeling on it. Now, there are, you know, you, you know, definitely cases where you can um, use advertising to do other things, like to do different types of campaigns. There are different types of campaigns on Facebook. There's like conversion campaigns, and then there's just like video views campaigns, like literally campaigns just to build awareness about who you are. So there could be some cases where it might be a good strategy to build out a campaign just to get the awareness about who you are. Now, if you're going to do something like that, you still have to have a budget for that. You know, pay— Facebook is a business, so they're, you know, you're not going to be able to do that for free. Um, but it could be an option to be able to say, hey, I'm gonna run this campaign with this intent. I'm not trying to sell the thing. I'm— it's more about like, I want people to view my content, you know. Um, I've created all this great stuff. I just want to be able to, like, to Liz's point, maybe I'm looking to create a lookalike audience, but I want to You know, again, I, I know something about this, but not— I'm not by any means like an expert at this. I just know, having done a little bit here and there and having trained with some people over the course of time, what some of the pitfalls may be. You know, my point, I guess, is that there's nothing wrong with advertising but don't do advertising without the organic because that's really where you're learning. This is like the— this is the place where you're really learning what to, what to do and what to talk about in your content too.

You kind of build your avatar through, uh, organic advertising or marketing that way too. Yeah, kind of learn the— what they like, what they don't like, their general feelings about whatever your subject is.

Yeah, and it's, and it's interesting because it's like, it's Steve, it's everything that you, everything you learn about them, you know, let's say you, you, you put out a live stream of some sort and you're talking about whatever the topic is and people comment on that. Maybe they're asking some questions or maybe they, you know, you're going to glean so much information from their comments to your live. Take note of that. You should, one good practice when you're first starting out would be to copy and paste that into a spreadsheet. And revisit it every so often and really understand the language that they're using, the questions that they're asking. Like in our, um, in the challenge, uh, what we're doing now is with the Go Live Challenge is we're including a little course in there called Creator Course. And in the Creator Course, we teach a process by which to keep moments of inspiration, like how to do that from your phone and put it right into your computer. But that would be a good example of how you might utilize that. Okay, so I, uh, no more questions? Any last call? Last call for questions? Let me look in the chat. All right, uh, let's see. Oh, Susan, good point. Oh, interesting. Okay, I thought I kicked that person out before. Okay, uh, success builds success. Building on success. Can you talk about hard copy mailers versus online advertising? I can't really, um, Susan, talk about hard copy mailers versus online advertising. I don't have enough experience with that to be able to speak to that.

So I'll never go back again. I used to do it. Did you? Terribly expensive.

Oh yeah, like to, to do—

Facebook is a bargain basement compared with, uh, print mailers.

Yeah, I'll give you an— I know one, one example I can give. I, I worked with a real estate broker years ago who was sending out hard copy mailers to his farm market of 6,000 people, let's say. And then he took a program of mine and started doing more of the organic content and video. And then I think at the end of the day, he ended up saving like $2,000 a month on copy mailer, on mailed copies or mailed hard copy mailers. That's what you're calling them.

Cheryl, can I speak to that as well? Yeah, my husband is a chiropractor in Peterborough, and in the past he did all hard copy mailers. He did direct mail and he relied heavily on the Yellow Pages and virtually stopped all of it, switched over to focusing on his website and online and Facebook. And it's incredible the difference. His business has grown so much more. People look for you, they look for the type of service you offer. By perhaps Googling your location and the title of the profession you're in. And that's really helped him. Plus all the referrals he's been getting. So that, you know, hard copy, no, it's a thing of the past for us.

Yeah, good point. Actually, you know what, Maura, you just actually brought up something interesting too, because you're talking about like your husband being chiropractor and Google Ads. So I want to just, I do want to kind of go back.

Cheryl, I didn't say he's advertising.

Oh, okay. Okay. No. OK, but I do— you know, when I have been speaking about this, I've been speaking mostly from the perspective of Facebook advertising today because it's just the thing I know a little bit more about. I don't know anything really about Google Ads, but there are some professional services people, maybe like chiropractors or dentists and things like that. And that is a good, viable thing to do because it's a very searchable thing, especially locally, where people will advertise like to rank for a certain keyword in a market. Like that. That's a different thing, right? So I am speaking from the lens of Facebook and today.

He's been using Google Business without paying a dime for advertising. He's been doing it organically, exactly what you're talking about.

You can totally do that. So, Heather, no, it is not. Well, listen, it's the 3rd of March, so it's still time to catch up. If you want to join the challenge, reach out to me and then I'm happy to set you up. I thought you had already joined it, but maybe I'm mistaken. Reach out to me, um, on Instagram or Facebook. Send me a message, I'll send you the link, and then what you could do is you could jump in. It's still early enough in the month, you'll get tons of benefit from being in it. So reach out. Cool. All right, um, hope this is helpful. I have to jump off, I have a call at 3:30. Uh, appreciate you all being here. Conversation around organic and paid. I hope that I was able to at least share some anecdotal stories with you that help you paint a picture of what's possible. I'm not against advertising. I think that as you do it smartly, you have help, you know, you have guidance, you have strategy, then it can work. But what I see as a pitfall is people who go out and just start like, oh, I'll just do it myself and I'll start from scratch and I know nothing about advertising. Without the help and without the support, it can go bad pretty quickly. Okay. All right. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I appreciate it. And please reach out if you're in the challenge. Yay! I cannot wait to see your videos in the Facebook group. And for those of you listening now or on a replay and you want to join a future one, just reach out. We'd be happy to hook you up. Okay. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye. Thank you.