This is the subject that I've seen lots of business owners put into question. I'm here to help you understand the impact, process, and conclusion of the best course of action that you should take for your small business.
Don't Get Pressured Into Doing A Bad Business
Do you know what hurts your business the most? Lack of knowledge, and I'm here to give you that, but you have to read because there are no short answers, so let's start.
If you're a small business owner who started less than two years ago, you most likely need help to find customers, and SEO is a subject you want to look into.
Even if you are somewhat of a successful business in your local area, you may be thinking, How do I upscale my business? You may be thinking about paying for ads but take your time with it; let me give you some perspective.
Before we go into what's better, if SEO or ADS, we need to talk about something essential, we need to identify the right approach depending on your business situation. I'll give you a couple of comments and questions below.
What's my business budget?
This topic is essential because you may have a limited budget as a new entrepreneur, so spending on ads will significantly burden your progress, especially if you need to learn how to do them.
Even if you hire a person to manage your ads, you will have to pay for your ads and a separate fee to the firm to handle your ads. These companies usually charge at least $1k to manage your ads.
You will have to spend a budget of at least $2,000 for data optimization and then spend some more and see if your ads will actually scale.
Again, you may do it yourself, but you will waste your money in a black hole if you don't know how to optimize ads.
Then wasting money away will create a false sense of reality that your business doesn't work. This will also clearly hurt your motivation and business engagement.
Sure enough, I'll tell you that any business is scalable if you do it correctly.
What's Your Initial Goal? I'll Say Engagement, Not Sales
Before you roll your eyes and say I'm crazy, let me ask you a few things.
Would you spend your hard-earned money on a company you've never heard of?
Would you trust a company you didn't search for, doesn't have reviews, or hasn't even been creating content consistently, and yet is trying to sell you something?
Most likely not, because just like when you see a single photo on a Facebook page or any other social media, to your customers, you look fake. Your job is to change their perspective.
How Much Time Before You Pull The Plug?
Sounds Horrible, but this is to get you centered on taking the appropriate action on your business. As a small business owner, you're in a race.
The race against time, money, motivation, and focus. Creating a business is not for the faint of heart. Right now, your objective is to understand how you can scale your business as fast as possible without investing too much.
But I'm telling you, that's not your purpose right now; your objective is to understand the process you will need to go through; that way, you have a clear expectation of what will happen.
Creating clear expectations with the flexibility of understanding how things can go opposite and how to counteract them is a recipe that will set up for success.
Why? Because knowledge is power; it's taking control of your destiny. And knowing how to take action for your business is what you are learning to do.
Let's Finally Talk About ADS
Let me tell you this: Don't focus on ads on any platform if you have just started your business.
We already talked about why you wouldn't spend a dime on a company you don't know.
Online ads seem easy to set up. Usually, you see a simple button to "boost" your post, and you think that's it; what happens happens.
But this is not only not true, but it's also legally misleading, to be honest. There's a whole world of knowledge about setting up an ad, and even worse for you, there's usually a trial and error process that experts generally go through until the ad is perfectly crafted.
To put it short, even if you were an expert, a complete master of setting an ad campaign, you would still burn at least $1,000-$3,000 on ads until you understand what's actually working.
How Do Ads Work? How Do They Scale?
When you go beyond the simple "boost" or "start my campaign" button, there's a whole internal technical process to craft your ads to reach their full potential. Two main things stand out when creating an ad, optimization & research for execution.
When you decide to pay an expert to create your Ad, one of the first things you will hear from them is the following.
• Keywords
• SEO
• Optimization
• Lead Generation
• Market Reach
Keeps these words in mind because they will help you decide which strategy you need to approach first
No company can give an exact blueprint of what will be good for your business. They will start testing different parameters, keywords, demographics, competitors, content, and many other things to craft a more targeted ad.
The problem with this? To get these results, they have to burn your money away until the ad starts to work, but it's pointless in the end, and I'll tell you why.
You Haven't Optimized Your Business To Grow Organic Traffic With SEO
The biggest problem with SEO is that most entrepreneurs need to understand what SEO brings to the table. I'll try to give you a metaphor and hope it works out.
Imagine if SEO was sustainable energy and an ad was the equivalent of an energy drink, don't forget that.
If you create a website and do good SEO, your page will become visible organically on search engines. That means that you will reach people that care about your business.
You will target people most likely to engage with your business. Even if you only have 100 users visiting your website, they bring more rewards than random user visits.
What's the point of targeting 1,000 people that don't care about your business? With SEO, you minimize that problem.
This means that good SEO targets your preferred audience and brings potential paying customers or returning users that will increase your organic reach, therefore, your impressions and more visits.
Sustainable energy, remember that? That's what it means to have a website that grows by providing good content, but it takes time.
Search engines will NOT trust your judgment that you provide quality content or that you are an actual business, not a scammer.
Remember that the search engines like Google have a job to bring valuable & trusting information to their users. You're just starting out, and they need to learn you're trustworthy.
SEO is the easy free & fast way to scale a sustainable business, but now let's talk about ads.
The Ad you Think You Need To Scale Your Business
Now about your energy drink, I hope you remember the metaphor.
If you recently registered your business & created a website, the next step for you, mostly obvious by market reasons, is to pay for an ad.
You will see thousands of people giving tips, saying they are making a profit on their website with ads, promising to make you successful, but please take the buff out and hear me out.
Paying for an ad for a startup that hasn't optimized its website to scale organically will waste money and throw time away.
Your AD campaign doesn't grow your business organically. It's a pay-to-play game; once you stop paying for it, your business won't move.
The reason? Because it needs to be optimized with SEO.
In short, your startup will never grow the way you want it to if you focus on paid ads before concentrating on optimizing your content on SEO for a few months.
Want to know something else? The only way your Ad campaign works is by executing SEO practices when structuring the ad content.
If you have a limited budget, SEO is the core of your success, and whether you like it or not, it takes time.
When Is An Ad Campaign Good For My Business?
Your first step is optimizing your SEO, but I'm not saying that paying for Ads is necessarily bad.
The problem is the timing; it's not wise to spend money on Ads when you're starting because nobody knows your brand.
Your first step is to increase your following, people that engage with your business. Earn their trust through content; I promise your business will grow to where you want to be.
Where Do You Start? How To Improve Your SEO?
You have two options, but if you are already considering spending on ads, the first option I would suggest is to visit my digital marketing services. I will work on your SEO and offer a working structure.
Not only will you save months or even years by hiring a professional, but you can focus your energy on finding local customers while I handle the online structure of your business.
The second option would be to learn everything about SEO. The pro about this is that you won't spend a dime, but the con is that you're going to spend months, if not years, mumbling on a subject that you may be doing wrong if you don't get the proper education or experience.
So, you have to put your time into balance, what's more important for you.
Reach me if you need any help. You can schedule a call on my contact page.