Organic vs. paid marketing — What’s your winning strategy?
In this episode of Influence By Design, Samantha Riley and Tim Hyde examine the timeless debate of organic vs. paid marketing. They share their unique perspectives, real-world examples, and actionable advice to help you decide which strategy best suits your business.
Deciding between organic and paid marketing doesn’t have to be intimidating. This conversation offers a wealth of information to help you evaluate your current position and plan your next steps.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- Organic vs. paid marketing overview (01:03)
- Why marketing strategies often fail (02:28)
- What constitutes organic marketing (04:22)
- Costs of organic marketing (05:51)
- The importance of community building and fostering trust and authenticity in your marketing (07:20)
- Why you must build the organic content muscle (10:34)
- The importance of personal branding and leveraging personal networks (12:27)
- Why it’s crucial to engage with those who interact with your content (14:19)
- Various forms of paid marketing (16:21)
- Advantages of paid marketing (17:10)
- How paid marketing allows for precise targeting and scalable campaigns (19:36)
- Understanding cost per click and the importance of tracking marketing expenses (20:45)
- Why your messaging must be on point for effective paid advertising (22:48)
- The pros and cons of hiring experts to manage paid campaigns (26:02)
- How to choose the right strategy based on your business needs and current opportunities (29:29)
QUOTES
“One of the biggest challenges for businesses of any size, whether you’re just getting started or you’re well into your six or seven figures, even the eight figures in some cases — we have a lot of these ideas that are only half implemented. Not that any of these individual strategies from a sales and marketing perspective don’t work. They don’t work because we haven’t implemented them properly to completion.” – Tim Hyde
“In organic marketing, you’re building an audience of followers. In paid, you’re leveraging somebody else’s audience. And you’re paying for the privilege of doing so.” – Tim Hyde
“If you’re not entirely certain on who your ideal customer is and you’re unable to clearly articulate their fears, their frustrations and their desires in a way that they understand, paid marketing becomes a very high cost rather than an investment. Your messaging needs to be on point.” – Samantha Riley
“If you’re not getting interest from an organic strategy, turning on paid ads may mean that you’re just going to get a whole lot more of nothing.” – Samantha Riley
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE INFLUENCE BY DESIGN PODCAST
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Influence By Design podcast. If the information in any of our conversations and interviews has helped you in your business journey, please head over to Apple Podcasts, click the 3 dots in the top right corner of your smartphone screen, follow the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver valuable content but will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you!
BOOK A BUSINESS ACCELERATOR CALL
If you want to be known as the leader in your industry, book a quick 15-minute call and we’ll work together to identify:
Your current situation and immediate opportunities for growth
Uncover the #1 thing holding you back from not being booked as an industry leader
Develop a 3-step implementation plan to increase your visibility
Click Here to book your no-charge Business Accelerator Call.
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
Facebook: Samantha Riley
Instagram: @thesamriley
LinkedIn: Samantha Riley
Twitter: @thesamriley
WHERE TO FIND TIM HYDE
- Website: https://winmoreclients.com.au/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-hyde-crm/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/winmoreclients
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/winmoreclients
- Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/more-clients-less-effort/id1697804814
- Spotify podcasts: https://open.spotify.com/show/2NMKdtEWYM2aeLneZ6EITo
- YoutTube podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoiSOp1CegUwWNQg-9elpNFvW2e16LS55
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley 0:03
Welcome to today’s episode of Influence By Design. I’m your co-host for today, Samantha Riley. And back with my much awaited co-host, Tim Hyde. It’s been a while, Tim.
Tim Hyde 0:14
I think it’s been a month and a half, Sam. It feels like forever. It was way back before you did your summit.
Samantha Riley
Oh, my goodness.
Tim Hyde 0:27
That was March. March, was it? No.
Samantha Riley 0:29
Oh, yeah. It was.
Tim Hyde 0:30
It hasn’t been that long, surely.
Samantha Riley 0:33
No, I think we must have done some episodes after that. I knew it had been a while. But holy moly, like this year is flying.
Tim Hyde 0:42
Yeah, like I know, that was before I started my kitchen and laundry and bathroom and other bathroom renovations, which are nearing completion. Wow. Yeah, no, it was, it’s been a while. So it’s good to be, it’s good to be back. It’s good to see you again. I know we do talk regularly as well. But it’s great to be back on the show again.
Samantha Riley 1:03
Great to be doing the podcast, we’re both so busy. It’s been hard to coordinate our schedules. But here we are. And today we’re going to talk about the pros and cons of organic versus paid marketing, and really helping you to understand which strategy is right for your business. And this is something that I get asked almost every day, I’m sure it’s something that you talk about with your clients all the time. And I think it’s really, today, I want to go into the pros and cons of both so that people can understand. Which do I delve into more right now? Do I need both? Is one better than the other? And to really understand which strategy is right for them right now.
Tim Hyde 1:43
Yeah, yeah, I think it’s, it’s one of those things that certainly nice, I see. And I obviously kind of like work a lot more intensively on the sales and marketing side, than you do, Sam. But one of the biggest challenges, I think, for businesses of any size, whether you’re just getting started or, you know, you’re well into your sort of six or seven figures, even the eight figures in some cases, is that we have a lot of these ideas that are kind of really only half implemented. Not that any of these individual strategies from a sales and marketing perspective don’t work. They don’t work because we haven’t implemented them properly to completion.
Samantha Riley 2:28
I did see someone do a post today, and I can’t remember who it was off the top of my head, but basically saying all of the strategies work. It’s usually the human error that makes them not work, that there’s something that, exactly like you say, we’re not implementing it properly. We’re not finishing it. We’re not seeing it all the way through. There’s some sort of mistake in there, whatever it is, all of these strategies work for different people for different reasons. For whatever they’re doing, but they actually all work when they’re implemented correctly.
Tim Hyde 3:05
Yeah. Presuming you’re talking to the right audience in the right space. Okay.
Samantha Riley 3:08
Well, that’s implementing correctly. Right?
Tim Hyde 3:12
Really got to kindergarten unless we’re selling toys. Or no child. If selling isn’t a business consulting or legal advice, we’re in real trouble if we’re going to get kindergarten. I heard this described the other day with the acronym PEBCAC. Well, if you’ve ever come across.
Samantha Riley 3:30
I can’t believe you’ve even remembered that. Tell me what it is.
Tim Hyde 3:34
PEBCAC, I’d say. Problem Exists Between Chair and Computer. Yeah, it’s terrible. Sorry.
Unknown Speaker 3:48
So well, let’s …
Tim Hyde 3:52
Yeah, it’s not in the tools. And we’ve, I know, we’ve spoken about this before we say CRM implementations and all sorts of different stuff like that. But it’s not the tool that is at fault. It’s the human use and implementation of their tool that becomes a problem. And these strategies and systems that we’re going to talk about today are just tools. If you don’t use them properly, they don’t get the result. If you do use them properly, they will.
Samantha Riley 4:22
Yeah, totally. Well, let’s start off with organic marketing and really defining what it is. So this is your social media, like your content marketing. It’s the engagement. It’s your email list, email marketing, SEO would fall under organic marketing. Is there anything else that you can think of Tim?
Tim Hyde 4:45
Skywriting. I usually put things like your sandwich board outside your shop is organic marketing. It’s kind of just sitting there and done. Sign writing, I think, on building, it’d be the, you know, the logo on your T shirt. If you’re wearing T shirts, or have those in the business. I know what she’s in a shared office space, and bought branded T shirts for the entire team, branded uniforms for the entire team and actually picked up a client from someone in the kitchen and other business in that same server, shared office space, because they got off, you do that? I need that. Totally.
Samantha Riley 5:32
Leon’s actually a gun at this. He wears his branded t-shirt everywhere. And we’ve picked up quite a few clients from him doing that. Steve said, Oh, you’re a podcast concierge. Tell me more about that. What is that? What do you do there? And he’s picked up quite a few, quite a few clients, even one up at the markets actually.
Tim Hyde 5:51
Well, yeah, so all of those things become the organic stuff. And organic is usually defined by effort rather than dollars.
Samantha Riley 6:00
Yeah, so let’s just say that there is a cost to everything. It’s whether you either want to spend your time or spend your money. So your organic marketing is definitely the cost is time. But there’s not a direct monetary cost normally, apart from, you know, your scheduling tools, rather little incidentals. There’s not a direct cost.
Tim Hyde 6:27
Yeah, I usually break, when I talk with my clients, I have a framework, we call it OPEN methodology, right. And so that stands for Organic Paid Expert and your Network. I don’t usually put networking as part of an organic strategy. I don’t put expert as podcasts and TV shows, and, you know, that stuff as part of an ionic strategy that sort of sits in the experts and is leveraging someone else’s audience. This right now that you guys listening to, right? This for me sits in the expert bucket. It’s positioning power authority through a platform leveraging each other’s networks, right. So organic is the stuff that literally you kind of do once and just sits there. Long term. Right, again, typified by human endeavour and effort.
Samantha Riley 7:20
Love it. So organic marketing. Let’s talk about why one of the pros of organic marketers talked about it not having costs involved. But I think that it is a great way to build trust. It’s a great way to build community, help people to get to know who we authentically are, which I think is huge in today’s time where there is so much noise, and the trust is definitely not where it used to be in the marketplace. So I think that organic marketing is a really great way to build that and engage your audience.
Tim Hyde 8:01
Yeah, AI has changed that paradigm a little bit. It’s actually made your identity less trustworthy, and totally suddenly sound different than what you normally do because you’ve had Chat GPT write it. And you know, you haven’t gone, edited the stuff that you’re putting out there, you know, you’re going to appear disingenuous and unauthentic, which is not right, and we want our marketing at intimacy, not create disengagement. So I think you make some really good points there, Sam. It’s and it’s easy to do, right? If you’ve got time on your hands, you can very easily create organic content. Influencers, if you’ve ever followed an influencer, or looked at an influencer anywhere. And most of us have at some point, we can’t help ourselves, right? We just have to turn on the internet. So all of that is just organic content. And someone says they’ve got a million followers. In fact, I just started watching Wrexham on Netflix, with Ryan Reynolds and McElhenney. I can’t remember this guy’s name, who bought the Wrexham Football Club in Wales. They’ve done a documentary on their purchase of this football club and the trials and tribulations of the team. Now I’m only six episodes in so I can’t, I don’t know what’s gonna, what’s gonna happen. I don’t want to know what’s going on. So please don’t write about that. But they were talking about how they built, you know, how they built their social media following. Right? Now, Ryan Reynolds has got like 45 million followers on Instagram. Right? And that’s just from doing organic content constantly, playing around and being his goofy self, right, talking about what it is he’s doing, because he’s got time and conveniently he’s got a camera man walking around with him full time to capture him doing whatever stuff that he can do. Right? But it requires time and effort to do that.
Samantha Riley 9:59
But let’s also bring in light, of course is, he’s a Hollywood superstar. But I think that what makes Ryan Reynolds, I was gonna say magical, but like that thing that really connects is that he is authentic. He’s very funny. And he’s very quirky. There’s no one like Ryan Reynolds. And it’s that authenticity that people are drawn to. He’s different. They sit there having some sort of different interaction or different feelings to other people, when, you know, when you interact with Ryan Reynolds’ social media.
Tim Hyde 10:34
Yeah, yeah. But I’m sure he’s super busy. So he’s …
Samantha Riley
I would think, so.
Tim Hyde
He doesn’t edit his own social media posts. Someone does that for him.
Samantha Riley
Exactly.
Tim Hyde
It’s part of his busy schedule. And I think that’s both a pro and a con. It’s super easy to do. Everyone’s walking around. And for those of us watching us on YouTube, right now, everyone’s walking around with one of these phones, you know, cameras in our pocket, we can easily just literally record us doing whatever the hell we’re doing. Right now. Like I could get this out and say, Hey, here’s me on a podcast right now. And that would be a bit of organic content to create engagement and interest in what my audiences, with the audience that follows me to go Oh, Tim, what are you talking about today? We’re talking about this. But we’ve got to get into, gotta get into the habit of doing it. That’s probably …
Samantha Riley 11:24
There needs to be a rhythm. Yeah. And I think that, but in saying that one of the pros is that sustainable traffic and that engagement you know what, we were just talking about that so that’s a pro but then the con is that it is time consuming not all of us have a cameraman following us around like Ryan Reynolds does. So it does require not just effort and patience but the habit muscle to remember to pull your phone out and to create the content. And you know, it’s sometimes, it can be tricky to do that. You and I have both talked about that before it’s like oh, we could have created content when we’re doing XYZ and we just straight out forgot to pull out our phone.
Tim Hyde 12:12
Well, the amount of … Even this this podcast, you know, we often talk for an hour before or afterwards. That would have been really great content that week. Yeah.
Samantha Riley 12:20
Why did we not press record on the outtakes or the sensations in the greenroom?
Tim Hyde 12:27
You’re absolutely right. The muscle to do it is something that you need to train yourself into doing. And the other thing that we probably want to be cognizant of is depending on your business that you may not necessarily want the personal brand attached. And this is a very personal decision. Right? You know, Sam, you named your business Samantha Riley dot global because you are the brand of your business. I named my business Win More Clients because I did not want to be the brand of my business and I was more interested in being a reclusive billionaire. Great. I made the first two steps, at least I’m not sure. But you got to consider, you know, do you want to be the person on camera all the time? Or do you want to be the kind of person that’s always posting the stuff? Alright, so you know, that’s probably a consideration about whether using organic content and how you use organic content in your business as well.
Samantha Riley 13:34
I’m a big believer in personal brand, because even if you’ve got a business with a label or a sign above the door, people still do business with the person and you can take your personal brand with you. Someone that has done this really well is Brittney Saunders from the fashion label Fayt. The way that she’s built her TikTok account is that she’s got her Fayt the Label account, and she’s got her Brittney Saunders account, and she cross pollinates across the two. Oh, man, she’s done it really well. It’s a definite masterclass in marketing to see how she’s done that. So she’s actually used the two strategies, hand in hand. Very clever.
Tim Hyde 14:19
Yeah. Yeah. What are the other downsides to you from a sort of organic perspective?
Samantha Riley 14:25
I think that it can, this is something that holds a lot of people back when they’re starting their social media accounts, that it can take a lot of time to get traction. You get slower results at the beginning, it takes time to build the momentum. It takes time to see that engagement build. And a lot of people are like, oh, you know, it hasn’t worked in two seconds flat. I’m just going to quit, but it requires this consistent work. It’s like, you know, it’s building a muscle if we, you know, if we want to go on stage in a bodybuilding competition, it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s something that we need to do the reps, you know, do that, do the work day in day out to get there. And your organic marketing is like that.
Tim Hyde 15:13
It can also be very time consuming as well, because you do have just because you’ve got the kind of the content going out. I think the bit that I see people miss a lot is we forget to engage with the people that are engaging with us.
Samantha Riley 15:27
Oh, my goodness, I’m so glad you brought this up. Ignoring the people that have invested their time in your content. Oh, I, yeah, I cannot speak to this more. Like if someone’s invested their time, like we’re all busy, right? And if someone’s invested their time in engaging with your content, please don’t ignore it. Please show gratitude for them and engage back with them for engaging with your content.
Tim Hyde 15:56
Yeah, look, I know, it’s something that, again, we work with a lot from a strategy perspective that just because you’ve created this awareness with the content you’re creating, you know, we want to turn more of these connections into clients. And that only happens through that connection. Something we do a lot with our clients with, I’m actually my son has just started working with me as of today to do some of that stuff. But you know, for me as well.
Samantha Riley 16:21
That’s so good. So cool. So cool that you can bring him into business. It will be fine. It will be good. Since you’re organic marketing, let’s jump into paid marketing. So this is like your pay per click, which I actually don’t know very much about so I’m not going to speak to that. Your social media ads like your Meta, your Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok. It’s sponsored content. What else do we got in paid ads?
Tim Hyde 16:52
Oh, look, radio, TV, newspaper, magazine publishing. There’s a whole bunch of things that you can do in terms of paid advertising. To an extent sponsorship of events comes into the ice, as well.
Samantha Riley 17:08
I love sponsorships by the way.
Tim Hyde 17:10
There’s a ton of stuff. And effectively what we’re doing with paid is that we’re trying to leverage somebody else’s audience. Yeah, right. We’re renting. Rather than build obviously, probably the key thing for organic right? In organic space, we’re building our own audience of followers. In paid, what we’re doing is leveraging somebody else’s audience. And we’re paying for the privilege of doing so. Now a couple other things that benefits from this particular strategy is that immediately you are going to get a much bigger audience and reach than you could otherwise get.
Samantha Riley 17:45
Absolutely. You’re paying for visibility instantly.
Tim Hyde 17:50
Yeah. So you know, we know for example, Facebook, back in the day, it was probably early nineties, not early nineties, silly internet startups are really pushing their advertising platform, had an ad that ran and said, look, there are a billion people on Facebook, and all of them to be your customer. Now, if you had enough money, yes, you could create an ad that reach all a billion of those people.
Samantha Riley 18:20
But unless you’re Amazon, I don’t actually think it would work for you.
Tim Hyde 18:24
You probably need a really universal products like yeah, oxygen.
Samantha Riley 18:31
Water.
Tim Hyde 18:35
If you had an exclusive monopoly and oxygen, you’re probably going to do all right for yourself. I think the, but, you know, we don’t necessarily need that many people but those platforms, and they’re very typified by being publishers, in a sense, right? Apple is another sort of publisher, they’ve got a network of people. They are publishers, right, they’re going to want you to build their audience so they can sell more stuff, or they want you to rent their audience. And so whatever town you happen to be in or other societies 100,000 people in your particular sort of city or catchment area of people you want to sell to, chances are things like your local newspaper, or your radio station or a Facebook or an Instagram or a Tik Tok of that network of people already. And what you’re doing with any of these pay strategies effectively paying to rent some of that audience. Right, and giving you that massive reach straightaway.
Samantha Riley 19:36
Absolutely. What I love about it is that targeting that you’re talking about there, when you know who your people only know where they are, it helps you to be able to get to them very, very quickly. The other thing with paid ads is they are scalable. You’re able to adjust your budget, you’re able to adjust who sees your ads, you’re able to adjust the, you know, the ideal client, where they’re seeing them, where they, you know, physically are, it’s very easy to do that. Where organic, not so much. It’s like just whoever kind of falls on your page, on your news feed, whatever it is. With paid, it’s going right to where you want, and you’re able to change that up really quickly.
Tim Hyde 20:26
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Sam, that’s the thing. There’s still, there’s still considerations here, right, we still got to make sure that our messaging is really on point, you know, we’re still going to speak to a pain point or a pleasure point that our customer really wants, or they’re not going to sort of respond to it. One of the things, one of the great things I love about paid advertising particularly digital paid advertising compared to others, is that we can get really granular and understanding what our cost of acquisition is. What is that cost per click, that’s paid per click, you’ve mentioned before, that’s typically the sort of, say, Google, you’re paying for the privilege of getting a click to go to some form of web page or landing site or something, website or landing page even, with the hope of then converting that traffic into an email address or a transaction, an E-commerce or something like that. We can get really, really granular and understanding what our margins are for customer acquisition. And this is an area that I find businesses don’t really understand very well. And, Sam I know you would agree with this statement. You do not know what your customer costs you to get. Right? You do not know how much money you’re making. Now the top line, but you probably don’t know how much ever and this is the product, yes, this is a problem just to sit, go back to organic, often, we don’t track what it costs us to get a customer. So we just go, I did some content, it’s all good. And I signed a client this week, and I made 1000 bucks.
Samantha Riley 22:06
And it didn’t cost me anything.
Tim Hyde 22:09
It didn’t cost me anything. But you’ve literally spent 10 hours creating content for that week. And well, you know, well, in that case, if you’re 100 bucks an hour, and that’s what you’d like to pay yourself, you actually made no money whatsoever. And so again, it can quite often get lost in not understanding what it costs us to do. Whereas the paid side of stuff, we’re really, really aware of what does it cost us to both get that click to whatever landing page we want to send people to, and then off the back of them how much money we spend in converting those clients.
Samantha Riley 22:48
Totally. I want to talk about another con here and you kind of touched on it but didn’t really get right into it. And that is one of the cons of paid marketing is if you’re not entirely certain on who your ideal customer is, and you’re unable to clearly articulate that, you know, their fears, their frustrations, their desires, in a way that they understand, paid marketing instead of being an investment becomes a very high cost. Your messaging needs to be on point.
Tim Hyde 23:22
Yeah, you’re absolutely, you’re absolutely true. I was talking to someone recently, was actually referral for a deli in Melbourne. Ironically, when they moved from this small venue to a larger venue, they made more money and they were like take note. What should I do now? Should I invest in pay that so I’ve gone well, that’s up to you, right, you’re either going to create the only way to grow your business from it from new customer perspective is either to, you know, create a market or take some of the market that is already there. From probably, from other people and the only way, you know, there’s a couple of ways to do that. But if we were doing paid marketing, we will look at well if I need to take some of the market that’s really there I need to get in front of them and that’s going to cost us some cash. I suggested, these guys, it might cost them somewhere between say, 2,000 and 5,000 a month and I go, well. Is it too much at all if you know, would absolutely be too much if A, the market wasn’t there and B, put a message in front of them that didn’t convert. You’d be putting five grand a month in ad spend. But you know, we look at a Coca Cola. Coca Cola have a $14 billion budget, advertising budget a year. Everyone knows who Coca Cola is. Absolutely. Probably because they’ve got a $14 billion budget.
Samantha Riley 24:50
Yeah, exactly.
Tim Hyde 24:52
You gotta think about that context. Right. They know exactly what it is that when they spend money what happens at the, you know, at the till about how much it costs them to sell that dollar can of Coke or $2 can of Coke, or whatever it, whatever a can of Coke is worth, I don’t know.
Samantha Riley 25:08
I don’t know. I don’t drink Coke. No idea.
Tim Hyde 25:18
But as we’ve got to think, you know, in our smaller scale businesses than Coca Cola, we need to be thinking about the same way, if we don’t use this headset, we don’t know who our customer is, that money is just going to be thrown at the wall and not worked out. If we haven’t got our funnel off the back of that. And by funnel, we just mean what’s your conversion process, I told him, we’re going to spend more money than we need to. But once he got it, the difference between putting $1,000 a month into an ad and $10,000 a month into an ad is literally just a zero, doesn’t actually require huge amount or infrastructure to manage, in order to scale it, you know, 10x 20x, in terms of customer acquisition.
Samantha Riley 26:02
Totally. There needs to be some level of understanding and education around being able to run these marketing campaigns or paid marketing campaigns. Because it’s not as simple as I’m going to put up an ad and just let it do its thing. So I guess that is one of the cons. Either, you need to spend some time learning that platform, or you need to hire someone who can manage it for you, someone that’s got a, you know, more expertise so that they can, you know, optimise it or run it or keep their eyes on it, or whatever it is.
Tim Hyde 26:41
Yeah, and I would, if you’re doing that, I would just throw a word of caution there. You know, hiring someone at 150 bucks, well, you get 150 bucks worth of value, right? Hiring someone at $2,000 a month to do it. They’re gonna have better people doing it for you.
Samantha Riley 26:58
Something that I’ve learned, and this could be just true for me, but I’m gonna throw it out there. I have learned that when I hire someone, I want to have some sort of understanding about it. Whenever I’ve hired someone with zero understanding of what’s happening, that’s when things have always gone not well, whether they’ve pulled the wool over my eyes, or whether I haven’t asked correctly for what it is I’m looking for, or because I haven’t understood the context of what they’re asking for, hasn’t been quite right. Personally, I like to have some sort of understanding, even if I’m going to hire someone of what it is that I’m hiring for. That’s just me. I don’t know how that sits with you, Tim.
Tim Hyde 27:48
Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. And I guess we’re always coming in from this remember hiring kind of external skills. In an area of expertise that we don’t possess, we kind of almost in some ways have to sort of take someone’s word for it. You said, You said you’re good at this. Okay. There wouldn’t be a person listening to this podcast right now, who hasn’t been burned by a marketer somewhere .
Samantha Riley 28:16
But in saying that, there’s some really good ones out there.
Tim Hyde 28:18
There are some fantastic ones, right? The fantastic ones are not cheap. Yet, straightaway, right. So the fantastic ones are not not cheap. You’ve got to think it’s, you put yourself in context of if you were an expert in your space, right. You know, how much would you charge per hour to do this thing? And is it reasonable to assume that someone could do the same thing in the same amount of time? Right. So if you’re buying, you know, your SEO for $200 a month, right? That’s literally getting you maybe two hours, including margin of time on your account. That’s not a lot of time to do anything. And give it any kind of personal attention now, if an hour of that time is meeting with you once a month. Right. So let’s break it down like that and say, Well, how much work you’re actually doing, you know, to grow my SEO or to, you know, work on my ads or customise these or whatever that needs to be done?
Samantha Riley 29:29
Let’s talk about how to choose what’s the right strategy. So for anyone that’s listening going, okay, well, I’ve heard the pros and cons of organic marketing. I’ve heard the pros and cons of paid marketing. How do I know what to do? I would probably start off with, from the messaging perspective. If you’re not certain on your messaging, I wouldn’t even consider paid marketing just yet. I think that using organic to get clarity on your messaging is really great if you pay attention to the feedback that you’re getting. You got to pay attention to the feedback or even the attention back to you. Yeah, exactly. Actually take note of, you know, are people confused? Or are you getting conversions? Because if you’re not getting interest from an organic strategy, just turning on paid ads might mean that you’re just gonna get a whole lot more of nothing.
Yeah, so I think that you’re right at the beginning, really pay attention to your organic, but I personally think that blending the two is the best strategy. It’s something that I actually noticed. Or when I say I mean, my business partner, right back in the day in the 90s, that if we did just paid on its own, it was okay. If we did just organic on its own, it was okay. But whenever we were rolling out a campaign, if we did both at the same time, it always grew it not just by two, but a lot, lot more and exponentially grew. And it’s something that I’ve still noticed to this day, that the two strategies together work beautifully.
Tim Hyde 31:47
Yeah, absolutely dialled in. And that’s why I call open was by excellent call, open up the opportunities, as opposed to just oh. You’re absolutely right. You know, there is a synergistic effect on each but make sure, my advice would be to make sure that dial one in first, not half assed each.
Samantha Riley 32:13
Absolutely. So definitely have a think about where you’re at on the scale. Are you really clear on your messaging? Are you at a point where you’ve run out of time to ramp up your organic? Is it time to switch some paid marketing on, but just, you know, take some time out and evaluate where you are right now, and where are your current opportunities so that you can ramp up your either organic or paid or both, so that you can get more viewers, audience, subscribers, clients. Anything you want to add, Tim?
Tim Hyde 32:52
Ah, man, do it. Just do it.
Samantha Riley 32:58
Just be like Nike and do it. Yeah. Love it. Love it.
Thanks so much for hanging out with me here again for another week. It’s been great to have you back in the host seat with me. And thank you for listening.
Tim Hyde 33:13
Just to take her own advice. It sounds like you’re gonna snap a quick photo and just send it on Instagram. Back in the hot seat. There we go, Sam. spin that around. There we go. There we go.
Samantha Riley 33:34
Absolutely. Thanks so much for hanging out with me here today, Tim. And thank you for listening if you’ve got some. Let me try that again. We would love to hear where you’re at, what you’ve got from this episode, and we would also love you to share it with other people in your world to help them decide where they’re at so that they can grow their business. Thanks so much. We’ll catch you next week on another episode of Influence By Design.
Leave a Reply