4. Let’s Pay Less: Do I Need to Pay to Play in 2024?

Stephanie 0:00

More subscribers, more followers, more traffic. . . You know for the right price, it can all be yours. But are ad campaigns the only option for growth in 2024? Do you really need to pay to play? Let's talk about it.

Stephanie 0:18

Welcome to the fourth and final launch episode of the podcast. In Episode One, I talked about the Let's Pay Less series. And that that would be on the last Saturday of the month. Well, planning out the launch episodes, I wanted to make sure that you had a taste of this series right away. So that's why the first installment is bumped up just a little bit. I'm really excited for this series, because I'm hopeful that it will give you food for thought when you're making decisions about where to spend your marketing dollars. And so in this episode, we're just going to talk in general about the pressure to pay to play in 2024.

Stephanie 1:11

And by that I mean ad campaigns, because there are so many people who talk about all of the results that they're getting from things like Facebook ads, promoted pins, and most recently, the meta verified status, it can honestly start to feel like all of your competitors are paying for the prime position in front of your audience. And now there's no room for you, unless you want to pay for ads as well. And I can totally get that feeling. I I understand where that comes from. But let's look at it a different way for just a minute. So if you follow me on Instagram, you know that analogies are just they're one of my love languages. I just can't help myself.

Stephanie 1:56

So when I was thinking about paid traffic, I thought about Disneyland. It's been about six years, since the last time I went to Disneyland. So I'm not an expert on this by any means. But I've heard that they have converted their free Fastpass program to now it's a paid feature to have access to a lightning lane for their most popular rides. And so if you've never been to Disneyland, basically, they have the really long queue, where there's a lot of switchbacks and, you know, you just you wait in line for a long time. But with the lightning lane, or what used to be the Fast Pass, you can go into a separate lane and it bypasses all of those switchbacks. And it's just a more direct route to the front of the line. Now I remember, sometimes it would be pretty disheartening, when you're standing in this long line in the heat. And then you watch the Fastpass, people go past you and you think, oh, okay, now there's six more people in front of me until I can ride the ride. And you just watch these people bypass you in the queue. But what's interesting, when you really stopped to think about this experience, this Lightning Lane experience when you're the person who did not pay for the perk, when you think about those six people here, the five people there, in the grand scheme of that ride, and the wait, it really does not impact your wait that much. Because when you get closer to the front of the line, you notice how quickly they're turning over those rides, the line is moving pretty swiftly. And then the other thing that you'll notice is that there comes a point where those two lanes, they merge into one line, that there's a final wait, before you actually load onto the ride, or again, at least it was six years ago. And so everybody has to wait at least a little bit to get on that ride. And then the third thing is that everybody rides, no matter whether you paid for the perk of bypassing most of the queue, or you decided to wait in the full line and not pay. Everybody still gets to ride the ride, they just have a slightly different experience.

Stephanie 4:13

So you can probably see why this reminds me of paid traffic. Because when you pay for ads, it's like buying that Lightning Lane perk, you are bypassing a lot of the wait, you are cutting through a lot of the noise and you're paying for that privilege. But at the end of the day, you still have to wait for it to work. People still have to click on your ad and take the action that you were targeting. And if you choose not to pay for an ad campaign, you will ultimately still see similar results. It just might take you a little bit longer. And then I wanted to address one more thing with this analogy and then I promise I'll move on. If you look into the Lightning Lane they have a set window of time that you can redeem that Lightning Lane, like that's when you're supposed to come to the ride and get in line. And they only give a set number of people that time slot for that ride. Because if it was just open ended, and you could just use your lightning lanes whenever you want. And there's an unlimited amount of people who can choose, you're basically just creating a second line.

Stephanie 5:27

But what's interesting is that this actually happens when it comes to sponsored content. And the home feed. I haven't seen evidence of this directly on Facebook. But I can only imagine it's similar to Pinterest. And I read a Pinterest engineers report a few years ago, it was around the time all the idea pins were coming out. And they actually listed literal percentages of the home feed, have the types of content that are in the home feed. And they had you know, this percentage is going to be video pin, we've reserved a certain percentage for static pins, and then a certain percentage for promoted pins. And it was just an eye opener to me of Wow. So the algorithms have set percentages that they are grabbing for each of those things. And that means there is always room for organic content. They can't just show ad after ad after ad, because then user experience would suffer and people would stop using the platform. But they have to make a set amount of money. So they are always experimenting with how much can we get away with when it comes to showing ads. And so it's this balance that they have to keep. And I just feel like, it's important to remember that when you're thinking about having to pay to play that even though a lot of people are in the game, you don't have to be that there is still space reserved for you if you stick with organic traffic sources, but ultimately, the decision of whether or not you decide to pay to play is up to you.

Stephanie 7:09

So let's let's analyze some pros and cons of that decision. We'll start with the positives, I would say Pro Number one is that when you pay for sponsored content, it helps you connect with your audience more easily. Now, this is especially helpful when you're in a more saturated market. So I know in the teacher business space, there are certain grade levels that are really competitive, because there are a lot of people that make resources for that particular grade level or content area. And so sponsored content can help you stand out from the crowd, when it would be a little bit more difficult to do that. The next pro is that paying for traffic can just help you do more in less time. If you need to get something done quickly, then an ad campaign might be a better choice than organic marketing. Let's think about someone who's launching a course. And they want to have a larger list to launch that course to when it's ready. So while they're doing the finishing touches on their course, they might run a list building ad campaign. So by the time they're ready to launch, they have a fresh list of active subscribers who have been through the welcome sequence and are ready to go. Now without an ad campaign. building an email list is going to take a bit more time. And sometimes this can be okay. But other times if you're on a time crunch, and you just really want to boost your list quickly, an ad campaign might be a better choice. And I know I keep talking about building an email list. But there are many other ways that you can see results quickly with an ad campaign. You know, if you want to grow your followers on social media, if you want to get more website traffic if you want to get traffic to a certain product, like a promoted pin is really helpful to generate some buzz and reviews for a brand new product. And that will boost its performance on TPT. So that's another way to just get some traction on a new product or a new blog post. There are a lot of ways that paid traffic can just help you do more in less time. Finally, and probably most importantly, people pay for traffic because it has a strong track record for increasing revenue. And so sometimes the path to increased revenue is very direct. Like I ran this ad people bought this product. Other times you are increasing your revenue a little more indirectly. So you increase your email subscribers or your website traffic or you run a campaign to increase your social media followers. No matter what. The short term goal of an ad campaign. The end result is the same. You get more revenue for your business.

Stephanie 9:56

Now, paid traffic really is a great way to grow your business in a shorter amount of time, but it's not all it's cracked up to be. Let's talk about the cons of paying for traffic, we'll start with the most obvious one right out of the gate, ad campaigns can be expensive. Now, we've all heard the philosophy that you have to spend money to make money. And I recently read an email from a blogger, very established in the space has no problem throwing money at different ad campaigns just as an experiment. And so this blogger emailed us, and said that they were really excited about an ad campaign that they just experimented with. It cost them $100, in, you know, just a short period of time. But it brought in $200, in that same period of time, for a net gain of $100. Now, when I read that email, I thought, well, yeah, that's great, you've doubled your money. But then I thought, How hard would it have been to just make the $100 in an organic way? I don't know, because I don't know the details of his ad campaign, but it just kind of, it kind of got my gears turning. And then my other thought was that for most people, it's hard to turn $100 into $200. When you don't have that $100 to begin with. And the more targeted your ad campaign, the more expensive it's going to be. Now, look at it from the flip side, the less expensive your ad campaign, the less targeted it's going to be. And you could easily compromise the success of your ads by trying to keep the budget lower. And ultimately, you could literally be throwing money away by trying to save money on your ad campaigns. So that's just some food for thought about the cost of ad campaigns. The next con is that it's super easy to waste money on ad campaigns if you don't have the infrastructure setup to support it in your business. Because it's all well and good to run a campaign that builds your email list. But if you don't have the welcome series, to nurture those new subscribers, it's unlikely that they're going to buy from you when the time comes to share your offer with them. Ultimately, in this case, you would be paying to add to your list, and then paying to maintain that larger email list without ever seeing a return on that investment. And so you definitely need your business to be set up for the success of an ad campaign. Before you ever open your wallet. And getting all of that setup, it takes a lot of effort and time. And speaking of effort, that's actually the last con that I'm going to share in this episode today. Ad campaigns, they just add another level of complexity to your marketing strategy. Because ads are definitely not a set it and forget it kind of thing. I mean, I guess, unless you have an unlimited ad budget, because you need to be constantly monitoring the returns you're seeing from your campaigns, you need to make adjustments to the audience filtering, you need to try A B testing, there are just a lot of moving parts to truly successful ad campaigns. It's definitely not the easy button that it might seem on the surface. And I can't help it, we're gonna go back to my analogy for a second. It reminds me of the lightning letting users at Disneyland, they have these set complicated schedules that they have to keep in order to make the most of this perk that they've paid for. And this often means that they're bouncing around the park and maybe a less than efficient way. And sometimes it pays to just stand in the line and one ride and then walk from that attraction to the one next door and work your way around the park that way. Because in the effort to save time with an ad campaign, you could very well be making more work for yourself without seeing the return.

Stephanie: 14:15

Now it's time to answer the question Do I need to pay to play in 2024? That is a question that only you can answer. But I thought I would give you just a few criteria to think about that.

Stephanie: 14:29

I don't think someone is quite ready for paid traffic until they probably meet these four criteria. Number one, your business is generating the revenue that you need in order to support an effective campaign. So we're not talking through a couple of dollars here and hope that something sticks that you are able to do a highly targeted effective ad campaign without going into debt. Number two, you have strong funnels in place that your business infrastructure is ready for this influx of traffic from an ad campaign. Number three, you have the bandwidth to regularly monitor your ad campaigns or you have the budget to hire an ad manager. Number four, you have a crystal clear purpose and goal for your ad campaign.

Stephanie: 15:22

Now, those are kind of four benchmarks that you can use to gauge whether you're ready for an ad campaign. But that doesn't necessarily mean when you hit those four things, it's time to turn on the ads. Instead, I thought we could go back to those four goals or benchmarks and look at them from an organic standpoint. So number one, when your business is generating a good amount of revenue, you could invest it back into your business rather than paying for ads. And that could bring you results in growth for your business. Number two, when you have strong funnels in place, and a really strong infrastructure, you're able to make the most of your organic traffic that's coming from Google and Pinterest. Number three, when you have the budget to hire out for an ad manager, maybe instead, you could bring on help for some other needle moving or revenue generating task in your business. And number four, when you are crystal clear on your goals, and the purpose of an ad campaign, you can use that crystal clear purpose for your organic marketing efforts. And you can make those way more effective as well.

Stephanie: 16:39

Your business can succeed in 2024 without paying to play. But ultimately that decision is going to be yours. You could choose to incorporate ad campaigns into your business or you can stay the course with organic marketing. But I just wanted you to know that you have a choice. You shouldn't feel pressured to pay for something just because it feels like that's the way it's done. That's what all the other TPT sellers do. So that's what I should do. That right there is at the heart of the Let's Pay Less series, we are making informed decisions about how we spend our marketing dollars in a way that makes sense for our own businesses. And so if you are as excited about these discussions as I am, be sure that you're subscribed to the podcast, you can make sure that you don't miss any of the upcoming episodes of this series.