The Unexpected Benefits of Paid Ads (It’s More Than Just Leads)

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 353

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place. You might think of paid ads as a necessary evil, something that you are probably against. Maybe I talked you into it at some point, and we've talked about paid ads a lot in this podcast before, and you're just thinking, I just want to get more out than I put into it. Preferably way more than we put into it. And while that's obviously my goal, too, I want to make more than I spend on paid ads, and I do. There's also some unexpected benefits that come from paid ads that most people don't think about. I see this in my own business. We're spending over $30,000 a month right now on ads. And I've also seen this in the clients that we work with, and many of them are spending much smaller budgets, under $1,000 a month. And I want to share those benefits with you in this episode. Now, obviously, ROI is the goal. For any of our clients, we shoot for them to have at least a five-to-one return on ad spend, meaning that for every dollar you put into the ads, you're getting at least $5 back or more. So you put $1,000 in, you get $5,000 back, or more preferably, preferably closer to 10 to one. But some of these benefits are so good that they are worth spending money at a loss in order to get some of these benefits, at least on the short term. So that's what I'm going to dive into in this episode. If this is the first time listening to the show, hello, I'm Brian. This is my podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, hello, I don't know why you're watching on YouTube, but whatever, you like to see my face, it's fine. This podcast is for you. If you're a creative freelancer, you want to make more money from your creative skills and you want to do it without selling your soul, we take all of the elements from other businesses and business models and industries, other people within the creative freelance niche and bring them into one place so we can all learn from each other. So with that being said, let's get into the actual meat of the episode. I've got several things to cover here and they're all over the place, but I want to start with this first one, which is talking about why you might want to run paid ads at a loss temporarily in order to get this unexpected benefit. And that is instant market feedback. Here's what I mean. When you are running paid ads, you can test, rapidly test, different messages, different hooks, different things that you are saying to the person in order to see are they actually interested in this or not. And when you can do that through paid ads, that means you can spend 10 bucks a day. Our testing process is three ads, 10 bucks a day, or let it run for two to three days. Let's look at the data and see what we see. Sometimes it's awful, very low click-through rate, very low lead conversion rate. Very few people get through the end of the funnel. Very bad results, right? But we've learned, that's not the angle, that's not the hook, that's not what people resonate with. And then we have others that you might do two, three, four tests. You've done five, 10, 15 ads in a very short amount of time. And you find that one angle, that one thing that people are like all of a sudden responding to, and it's like magic. It's like flipping a switch, and all of a sudden everything works. That is really only possible through two areas that I know of. One is paid ads, which is wonderful, and this is why I'm talking about it in this. The other is short form organic social media. The reason I don't like this approach with organic short form media is because you can't just spray and pray on there like you can with paid ads. With paid ads, whenever you spend money on a test of just say three ads, it will quickly pick which one it thinks is the best of the bunch and put all the ad spend behind that. You could really test with more than three at a time. You could put five or six or seven in one ad set and put some money behind it, and it'll quickly find the best of the bunch in that. And that still might not be that great, but it allows you to test more rapidly than you can through organic social media, because generally people don't want, on social media, at least short form, don't want to try some of the things they might try when they're doing it with ads where it's just going out to complete strangers. It's just a weird thing where, if you're trying to test angles or hooks or messages, especially for direct response type ads, it could be very challenging to do on short form social media. You can do it, but it's challenging. And here's why this is important. People think they know what their clients want. People think they know how to say what it is, express in the right wording what the client wants. And listen, I consider myself an expert at paid ads. I've been doing this for over a decade at this point. While there are people that have spent way more on ads, even people on my team who have spent way more on ads than me, people who spent millions of dollars in ads, I've still spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid ads profitably in my life. And yet, I am still utterly surprised and perplexed at what actually works with messaging. So if that's my experience, what do you think people that don't have a lot of marketing experience or a lot of experience running paid ads feel when it comes to their messaging? It's the Dunning-Kruger effect. They have this uninformed optimism. They think they know more than they do. And as soon as they actually start testing these things out, testing what they think will actually work messaging-wise with their clients, they start to realize that those hooks, those angles, what you're saying to the people, how you're saying it, doesn't resonate with them whatsoever. They don't care about it. And so all of a sudden, you start realizing how little you know. And so you start falling down into this trough of sorrow, where you realize how much you need to learn in order to do this right. Now, here's the good news is with paid ads, you can find this out relatively cheaply under 500 bucks. You can do it relatively quickly under a month, probably in just a couple of weeks if you're doing it well, you know what you're doing. But in my opinion, it's better than just going through the rest of your life thinking you know something that you don't actually know. So when you're able to run paid ads and rapidly test different messages to your ideal clients, you can quickly start seeing what works and what doesn't, which is a huge added benefit because even if you can't get your ads to be profitable, you still figure out which messages work better than others. And you can deploy those everywhere on your website, in your forms, in any of your content that you might be doing, any landing pages or funnels that you might have. You can take all those learning and put them everywhere. That's why it's worth doing this even at a loss for a short amount of time to take those learning and deploy them in your entire business. Now, there's another benefit with this kind of fast feedback loop that you don't think about. It's not just front-end messaging with ads and hooks and angles and just a lot of assistant marketing speak stuff, but it matters for every freelancer out there because communicating what you do, how you do it, what's the process, maybe the benefits. Who else have you done it for? These are just basic things you have to be able to express to your clients or your potential clients in order to get them to trust you over the other freelancer out there, especially the more button seat you are, where it's a commoditized service. But there's another benefit here that you don't really think about when it comes to rapid instant market feedback, and that is getting on a lot of sales conversations with people. You can rapidly improve your sales process through paid ads because you're getting on lots and lots and lots and lots of sales calls, potentially. And with you getting on lots and lots and lots and lots of sales calls, I think our record from one of our clients is they got on 40, 45 sales calls in a month, some ridiculous number like that. That's what he wanted. I don't think most freelancers want to do that, but he wanted to do this because he wanted to learn. Every single sales call he got on, and he would have one or two a day, he would go through his process, go through his sales outline that we helped him craft. He would figure out what worked, what didn't work. He would revise it, and he would try it again for the next call. And he had all these lined up back to back to back. So how much better do you think his sales process was in his ability to turn strangers into clients after doing 40 sales calls in a row in a month period? Probably a lot better. But not only that, the sales process is more than just the sales call and the sales conversation. A lot of it's in the follow up. And freelancers are notoriously bad about following up with people because they don't want to bother them. And I understand that. You can feel your emotions will tell you, I don't want to look desperate or I don't want to bother them. In reality, they just forgot about you. Or they got other things going on in their lives, especially B2B where you're working with other businesses, business owners, people in departments who have other teams that they're managing. They got a lot of stuff on their mind, a lot of stuff on their plate. When you follow up with them, it's just like, oh yeah, I need to get back to them about that project. It's super simple. But with paid ads, when you were paying for those leads, and those leads are sitting in your inbox or your CRM, and you're looking at them, and you're thinking, I paid for those. I need to follow up with those. The mere fact that you're like, damn it, I paid for those leads. I'm going to get my money's worth out of those leads, makes you follow up more with those leads. So that's another added benefit when it comes to improving your sales process and being able to test different follow up approaches is awesome as well. Because most freelancers, you might get two or three good inquiries a month, maybe four or five, if you're lucky. That doesn't leave much room for testing. That leaves a lot of room for desperation. And one other area you can get instant market feedback, or close to instant, is with all these sales calls that you're doing and improving your sales process, it also allows you to do pricing testing. There's something called price elasticity. And that is, there's an upper limit to how high you can go on your rates in your given market based on your quality of work, whatever other competitors are charging. There is some upper limit in your market. It's somewhere between $1 and $10 billion, right? At a certain point, you're gonna hit this number where nobody's saying yes, or the conversion rate drops off a lot. For your business, it might be, you're charging $5,000 now, and on the next call, you try $6,000, then you try $7,000, you try $8,000. You realize between $7,000 and $8,000 is the point where people are dropping off, getting a lot of excuses or a lot of pushback or a lot of objections, but at $6,000, or maybe at $7,000, I'm not getting those objections. I'm not getting as much pushback. So that's the area that I'm going to stick for now. And when you start getting comfortable selling that price over and over and over again, you try that test again, because many times we're not able to close our clients at the higher price because we don't believe in ourselves that we're worth that much. And the number one hack in sales is just having the most belief that you are the best fit for that client. And that comes with experience, that comes with getting paid that amount. And as you get paid that amount more times, you start to associate yourself with that worth more.