75. The Pressure to Pay

Stephanie Royer (00:00)

We often hear people talking about how the money spent on a tool or ad campaign was a total game changer for their business. Should you do the same? Let's talk about it.

Welcome back to the podcast. We are in the final week of No Pressure November, where we talk about common pressures we experience in the marketing world, especially this time of year.

But if you've been around for a while, you know that the last Saturday of the month is reserved for the Let's Pay Less series. This is when we typically look at popular expenses in the online marketing world and discuss the pros and cons.

Instead of talking about a specific tool this month, I decided that this episode would take a more general approach to fit into our No Pressure November. The pressure we're going to talk about today is actually the inspiration for the entire Pay Less for Traffic podcast. We're going to talk about the overarching pressure to pay in order to see better or faster results for your business.

As we've done all month, we'll talk a little bit about where this pressure is coming from, and then we'll talk about what you can do about it.

First, let's talk about where this pressure is coming from. I'd say there are three main sources of pressure that make us feel like we need to open up our wallets in order to succeed in business.

The first would be the platforms and tools themselves. Obviously, they want you to feel like you need to give them some cash in order to keep up. That's how they stay in business. Just before recording this podcast, I looked it up and found out that in the 2023 fiscal year, Meta made $134.9 billion in revenue. And the amount of that money that came from advertising, 99%. From big corporations to solopreneurs, Meta makes it possible for businesses to get in front of the eyeballs of their scrolling audience. But that comes at a price.

We know how Meta uses their algorithms to gatekeep organic reach on their platforms. So it just makes sense to pay to get in front of your target audience instead of hoping that the algorithm just looks favorably on you, right? The second source of pressure would be the world of online business. We're all in Facebook groups for teacher business owners, where we share tips about what's working for us and what's not.

In these groups, often hear the phrases, invest in your business and spend money to make money. like spending money on tools, paid ads and fancy marketing is the only way to look professional and take your business seriously.

You are building a business after all, right? in order to have a successful business. Trying to get a business up and running is a lot of work. Blogging and pinning is tough. It's totally normal to look at a paid tool and wonder if this will be the missing piece to the puzzle that makes your strategy more effective or at the very least a little bit easier.

But that might not necessarily be the case. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that I'm a former couponer and I love to save a buck. So it should come as no surprise that the main podcasts that I listen to in my free time are finance related. I love to hear the different approaches to debt payoff, investing, and more.

Even though all these hosts have wildly different opinions about these topics, they all agree on one thing. Bankruptcy can be a necessary part of someone's financial journey, but only if the person is willing to change their spending behavior. Otherwise, they'll likely continue down the same path of debt, but this time with a bankruptcy on their credit history.

I know that's kind of a random side note, but this came to my mind as I was preparing for this episode. Spending money on your business is not going to have the impact you think it is, if you don't already have your strategy in order first.

Money magnifies what is already happening in your business. So if your business is successful and making money, paying for additional tools or ad campaigns can accelerate that success.

On the other hand, if your business isn't making money, the spending won't fix your strategy. It will just make your strategy more expensive.

If your posts and products aren't optimized, they won't convert to sales. A paid Pinterest scheduler can make it easy to fill up a queue with lots of pins, but if those pins and descriptions aren't optimized for current best practices, that filled queue won't do a whole lot of good. Fancy digital software and automations won't give you more time to blog if the root of the issue is just time management. An ad campaign or a paid tool should fit into an existing successful strategy, not the other way around.

So what do we do about this pressure to pull out our wallets? Deciding whether to spend or not to spend is pressure enough.

When you hear about a new tool or ad strategy that's working for everyone and you start to feel FOMO, just take a moment to Ask yourself these four questions. First, do I have a clear picture of what I want this tool or ad campaign to accomplish? With a goal in mind, it's much easier to analyze the ROI. So it's important to start with that

The second question is, do I have an effective workflow in place that could be simply sped up by this investment? Remember, an ineffective strategy won't be fixed by a purchase. It will just be more expensive. The third question is, can I do the same thing manually for now?

There was a tool that I came across that did one specific thing in regards to Pinterest keyword research.This tool relied on publicly available information. It just compiled it in a more convenient way. So I decided that I would try gathering that information myself manually and deciding if that was even very helpful for my strategy before shelling out money for this tool. So I learned how to gather that information. I started doing that and I discovered that yes, this information was very helpful to my overall Pinterest strategy.

But it was not worth my time to gather that information

So ultimately, I did decide to pay for that tool, but only after experimenting with it manually to see if it would actually save me time in my business and if the information it gave me was even helpful to my overall strategy.

And finally, the fourth question to ask yourself is, would spending this money relieve stress or just add more to my plate? This is the thing that comes to my mind a lot when I think about running ads on Facebook. The ads arbitrage people are fascinating to hear someone say that for every $1 they spend on ads, they make $1.50 or $2.

But then I think about the additional pressure of monitoring ad spend, adjusting targets, and everything that goes into creating an effective campaign. I just have these fears of waking up and having $10,000 of ad spend randomly added to my credit card because I messed up on the ad setup.

And so for me, I am not interested in adding that stressor to my plate. But for other people, that wouldn't be a stressor. They have a great handle on setting up ad campaigns, expense makes sense for their business.

The other thing you can do to relieve some of this pressure is to come back to your own strategy. So let's head back to my financial podcast for a second. One piece of advice that Dave Ramsey gives to people that are in tough financial situations is to cover their four walls first.

Basically, before worrying about other bills and collections agencies, be sure that you pay for the roof over your head first. So I want you to think about the four walls of your blogging strategy. The first wall would be the customer experience in your TPT store. Do you have eye-catching thumbnails? Do you have previews for your products? Are your listings optimized for search?

You want to have that in place before you start worrying too much about writing blog content that points to your TPT store.

But then the second wall would be your blog. Do you have solid content pillars for your business? Are you able to write optimized blog posts on topics that highlight your products and that people are actually searching for? Are you consistently creating fresh blog posts?

The third wall would be your Pinterest account. Do you have an optimized profile with strong boards? Do you have a good handle on current best practices on Pinterest? Do you regularly create fresh pins?

The fourth wall would be email marketing. It's essential to grow an email list as part of your blogging efforts, but you need to do something with that list.

And so when you're focused on these four essentials of your marketing strategy with your blog, it can become much easier to prioritize spending when you start to hear about fancy new tools or the latest and greatest subscription.

Once you have those four walls in place and you feel like you're in a good rhythm of product and content creation, you can decide if it's time to bring in some tools to make it go even faster or invest in additional traffic sources.

Remember, your business will grow because of your strategy, not your subscriptions.

I hope that this month has given you at least one permission slip to feel less pressure when it comes to marketing your teacher business. I'd love to hear about your biggest takeaway from No Pressure November. My DMs are always open on Instagram. You can find me at StephanieRoyerSolutions.