The Freelance Industries Where Ads Are a Waste of Money

Brian: Have you ever thought that maybe paid ads wouldn't work in your industry? If so, In this episode, I'm gonna break down exactly where paid ads actually work for freelancers, where they tend to struggle, sometimes even flop, and why a lot of freelancers are making this decision, honestly, based on gut or feel or vibe or assumptions instead of actual data.

To be clear, what I'm gonna share in this episode is not theory, it is not speculation, it is not my guessing. It is based on actual experience that I've actually seen with my own eyes.

What I've seen work and what I've seen struggle and what I've seen just ultimately fail.

At this point, I've helped hundreds of freelancers test paid ads in dozens of industries, and I've seen both the wins. I've seen the train wrecks. I've seen the excuse of, Hey, this won't work in my industry. Hold back so many freelancers from one of the most powerful tools they could ever use for client acquisitionand that's paid ads because paid ads, when you get it right is a faucet you can turn on and turn off as needed.

when things get slow, you can turn it on and ramp it up.

When things get busy for you, you can turn it off and ramp it back down and compare to word of mouth. It is incredible. It, it's a tool worth learning because you're not dependent on someone else. You're not dependent ona hopeful referral or somebody that you just think of you magically one day when they have a million other things going on in their lives.

I love word of mouth, but it's not dependable.

We've grown this team to 13 people, not because I rely on the hope marketing aspects. It's because I've put real actual marketing systems into this business, and I want the same for you. If you're new here. Hi, I'm Brian Hood. This is the six Figure Creative podcast. It is a podcast for creative freelancers who want to earn more money without selling their souls.

I take my influence from lots of different industries, lots of different businesses that I've been a part of, industries that I look up to and learn from. I.

I distill those things down and bring 'em to you. The freelance or the creative freelance or the solopreneur or the person who doesn't really wanna learn those things. But I'm gonna force, I'm gonna shove it down your throat till you accept this. And I'm not just talking about paid ads, I'm talking about a lot of different things from a lot of different perspectives.

So if you like having the idea of somebody out there learning from many different industries about what works people with big brains, they get paid a lot more than we do to figure out best practices that I can go back to you, if that sounds good.

This is the right podcast for you. We are at episode 399. We're one away from 400 at this point. My God. Next episode, I'm gonna actually do a big update for Six Figure Creative as a whole and what our plans are for 2026, as well as like what's the future of this podcast? That'll be next week, hopefully.

Hopefully.So let's dive into this. This episode is,basically going to help those of you who have that objection or that doubt that paid ads could even work for you in the industry. And what I've seen is that this is rarely true from most of the freelancers that I hear this excuse from. There are a few industries where paid ads just simply won't work.

I'll talk about those today, but I wanna rephrase this kind of objection or this. Doubt that freelancers have, I'm gonna rephrase this for you. it's less of paid. Ads won't work. In my industry, it's more of I'm scared. Paid ads won't work in my industry, so I won't try them. I've actually never heard someone say this excuse who's actually tried paid ads and.

Even if they had, if you've ever tried paid ads and you have this excuse and you said, this won't work in my industry 'cause it didn't work for me. Literally go back to last week's episode, episode 3 98, where I talked about why paid ads aren't working for you. I give you seven fixes for creative freelancers.

You probably made one or more of those mistakes that I talked about last week, if you've even tried them before, so hopefully you're at least open to the idea of discussing this. Will this work for you or not?

If you're one of the industries I'm gonna cover first, which is the ones I've seen them struggle, then maybe you have a valid excuse. otherwise, if you're not one of these industries I'm gonna cover at the beginning of this episode, then you likely have either not tried it at all, or you tried it and you half-assed it.

If you're being honest with yourself, you half-assed it, which we can talk about that later. so let's talk about where paid ads struggle. Where are the places that they may not work well or at all? And this can be, uh. very freelancer dependent.

if you're a great executor, somebody who tends to be successful at most of the things they try, you can still make it work in some of these industries, but you may struggle. But if you are not a great executor, you're somebody who has no self-confidence, you don't succeed at all the things you try, then these are not the industries that I would try to do paid ads in.

The first area is what I'm kind of lumping in together into like team-based creative industries. This is a broad thing. I don't know how else to categorize this, but this is things like when you're building a crew for something, examples are like TV and film. When you're putting together a large production crew to do a big project.

That's what I'm talking about here. It could be something like you put together, video editors, music composers, video colorists, audio engineers. They have. All sorts of creative freelancers to build apart of this large team, if that's the industry you're in, paid ads will probably be a struggle for you if not an outright fail for you.

And that's because at these points when they're building out teams, they're calling on past relationships and recommendations from the network, and referrals from inside. They're little circles. They're not really looking for paid ads, they're not looking to become a lead in a funnel. Now, I have seen paid ads work here, but it's usually a struggle for most people.

and one more kind of like reason this doesn't really work well is because this is more of like, I'm looking for a job. I'm looking for like a three to six to 12 month contract for labor somewhere as part of a big team. And then the project wraps up and then I go away. That's more of a looking for a job, less.

I'm looking for a client.

That's the first industry where paid ads are gonna be a struggle for you is if you're doing team-based large production crew type work. the second type of industry where this will be likely a struggle for you, is what I call like a button seat offer. This is not really an industry as much as it is an offer issue, but I still wanted to talk about it here because this is an area I see a lot of freelancers struggl in.

And it's, again, not an industry, but it's a reason paid ads fail for you. And that is where you have like a non niche, non-specialized common type service, where you do like video editing or graphic design or likebasically anything where you would be competing with Fiverr or freelancer.com.

in these cases. You cannot beat billion dollar companies out there who have better marketing budgets, huge teams, big brains solving the marketing equation, which is what Fiverr andfreelancer.com do. You can't beat those at commoditized services.

The only way you can beat those is to specialize. and I have seen this work, I have seen people succeed with this, have a button seat offer, and it actually works. But I've seen it struggle more often than not. The good news is this one's pretty fixable. Assuming you're in an industry, we can actually make this work.

If you have a button seat type offer,

we can do a whole lot. And I think I covered it last week on episode 3 98. We're talking about the seven sins or the seven mistakes. This is probably one of the mistakes. I'm pretty sure it was. I can't remember. I still wanted to cover it here. The next industry where paid ads is a struggle for freelancers is if you're targeting large businesses. I kind of lumped this into like $20 million a year revenue or higher at this point. If you're going after 20 plus million dollar a year businesses, the decision making process is a lot different.

The founder owner, there's no longer the buyer for this. the way the decision making process is done is they have some sort of team member or department head or employee who's, going to be in charge of getting this project done. And they may be building out a small team of people around them to help out,

in which case you're essentially looking for a job. It's a similar thing to before where it's just a long-term contractor position, which is not to me, it's not freelancing that's contracting. I know it's technically freelancing, but I still think there are two wildly different things.

I'll talk about this more in a bit, but in most cases, if you offer a service that's like you're a web designer or you're a brand designer, or you're doing some sort of like big one-time projects, not ongoing, just like button seat work and you're targeting 20 plus million dollar year business.

These employees are usually gonna hire agencies, and the reason they're gonna hire agencies is because they want a safe option. don't want their jobs at risk because they hired somebody that they thought would do a great job, and then they flake out on them.

Freelancers don't have the greatest reputation. You tend to flake out more. You're less reliable because there's only one person. Maybe you get sick, maybe you get bored, maybe you get burnt out, maybe you go on vacation. Right when it really mattered well with agencies. Businesses won't have that problem.

if somebody goes down in an agency, somebody burns out, quits, gets fired, goes on vacation, there's another person that they can slot in that position. so when you're going after these larger businesses and there's an employee making the decision, they're likely going to go with a safe bet, which is not you unfortunately.

On top of that, assuming you could even be a great option for them, the average freelancer has like little to no chance of navigating. Kinda like the enterprise sales process now, $20 million a year type business, that's likely not gonna be a full enterprise sales process. But when you get up to the 50, 8,000 plus million dollars businesses, that's where navigating the sales process is gonna be a nightmare and something you cannot.

Reasonably due as a freelancer, everything from procurement to legal, to it, to security, to compliance, like good luck with figuring all that stuff out. On top of that, bigger businesses tend to have longer sales cycles, meaning like three to six months to go from like first contact to actually you close the deal and can start works now or soon.

So meaning you have to keep pushing the deal through the pipeline and through the stages consistently for six months straight. Without getting paid. And then whenever you do land the project, you're gonna get net 90 terms. So it means you're gonna do the work and they get paid 90 days later. Meaning the first dollar hits your bank account like nine to 12 months after the first initial contact you have with a client.

That is unsustainable for most freelancers.

again, if you're targeting large businesses as a solo freelancer, it can work. Absolutely. Especially if your only client source has referrals because. Can get referred within higher circles, but for paid ads to work in that sort of world, very difficult. I don't think I've seen it succeed yet.

the next industry. Where paid ads will be a struggle for you is the luxury and like high fashion brands type industry.

and a lot of it's for the same reason as I talked about before, with large businesses and teams slash crew based.

Because a lot of these businesses in the, in the highfashion or luxury world are 20, 50, a hundred million dollars plus businesses. So all that same stuff applies. And also, many times you're a small cog and abig machine, meaning you're a small piece of a large crew.

So it goes back to that team based kind of creative industries issue where you're part of a crew. All those same things apply.

But I wanted to mention this specifically because we get so many people who apply for our coaching program who are in this industry. We actually have to screen people out for this.

a lot of freelance fashion designers out there who apply to work with us. So yeah, this is like a creative industry, but we have have to reject all those people because

we just can't help them and not just with paid ads. By the way, everything from like content marketing, social media, Email marketing. A lot of the other ways that you can still get clients without paid ads in other industries don't necessarily work in this world because it's more of like, this industry luxury and high fashionis one of the most, who, you know, worlds out there.

at least in the creative field, again, this is like building crew like tv, film production. And from what I've seen this, most of these gigs that they're doing is in like the three to six month engagement range, which again, that is a job. It is not a client, at least in my eyes. If you go back to episode 316. I really dig into this a lot. the episode title is Contracting is For Suckers.

There's a Better Way to Freelance kind of a controversial title there, episode three 16. You get there by going to six figure creative.com/ 3 1 6, or if you just go to six figure creative.com/ 3 9 9 For this episode, it'll have all the links that I mentioned in this episode. So if there's like multiple things you're hearing or like should I want all those links and go listen to all those episodes, just go to the show notes page for this episode. But long story short, with that, the reason contracting sucks is because you have all of the downsides of having a day job. You generally have like a boss, and the dynamic is like very much boss employee relationship. You have no benefits, no health insurance, no paid time off.

can get paid better, which is a good thing. But at the same time, you have one solo source of income generally at a time. Like you might just contract with one or two people at a time. So like. Anything from a hundred percent to like 33% of your income is tied into one client, and that's a significant drop in your income.

If you lose a client and there's no recourse for them firing you, they can just let you go at any time for any reason, for at all, no severance, nothing. Whereas in freelance, we like to say if, you have a stable freelance business, no client's worth more than 10% of your annual income.

That's a lot more stable. So that's the luxury and high fashion brand world. Again, big struggle one, we just don't, we don't even touch in our coaching program. But one last one I wanna talk about, and this is, one that we've had to learn the long and hard way with some of our clients, and that is broad or vague industries.

So.We're all about niching down. That's like no big secret. It's the world's worst cap secret that in freelancing the more specialized and niche you are, the easier it is for client acquisition, especially if you're trying to turn strangers into clients. And if you haven't accepted that yet, then you're, clowning yourself.

I don't know what to tell you.if you're in a broader world, you're very specialized in niche by your service, or generally you are specialized in niche by your clients and you have a broad, slew of services you can offer them. That's generally kinda the two directions I see freelancers going.

Rarely have I ever seen somebody successful who does everything for everyone, and the few exceptions you could probably throw at me, they've probably been doing this for 30 years and they niche stack their way there. Meaning they did one little tiny niche thing and then they nailed that and got known for that and then they did the next tiny niche thing or other industry and they slowly stair step their ways up.

But what I've seen freelancers struggle with is when there are these broad, vague industries that maybe at one time used to be considered a niche. And the examples I give here are like SaaS, which is software as a service and e-commerce. We have a lot of freelancers that come into the coaching program that are targeting SaaS and e-commerce specifically.

And in my mind that was, that waspretty niche. Like, hey, we do branding for e-commerce companies, or we do. CRO for SaaS companies, or we do web design for SaaS companies.

early on in the coaching program, we started bringing these people on. I didn't have experience as like a web designer in the SaaS space. So my mind, it made sense, it would work. And we learned the hard way that is too broad. We learned that. Those are no longer niches. They're essentially their own industries.

Now, SaaS is an industry. E-commerce is an industry. It's so fragmented. There's no realistic way to appeal broadly to these massive markets that are now their own,their own buckets. All of the little fragments that have come from all the different types of e-commerce companies and all the different types of SaaS companies require their own nuance specialization.

An example I wanna give you is like in the SaaS world, there's a lot of different fragments, but there's like FinTech, which is financial tech. There's health tech, there's legal tech, there's like restaurant or hospitality tech. There's like ed tech, which is like education tech.

There's so many different industries between those specific industries, and there's way more than just that. And trying to figure out messaging for just one of those is its own thing. There's no way you can appeal to a FinTech company.

In a restaurant slash hospitality tech company the same way

if I run a tech company who has software in the restaurant industry, and I'm looking for somebody to make our website or to write our copy or to design our brand,

I'm not gonna hire the generalist. I'm not gonna hire the person who has just FinTech in their, portfolios, eitherI'm gonna hire the person who's done other brands like us that understand the restaurant slash hospitality industry in the tech world.

And while you may have a couple different of these types of avatars around you, they're not gonna be wildly different, and you better have a lot of different examples for each one of these, because one thing I've learned working with a relatively wide variety of freelancers, although we work in a few industries a lot more than than others,is that.

No matter if the business model's the same, no matter if, like, there's a lot of similarities, even the smallest differences between niches can warrant, somebody thinking that they're a special snowflake and that because this 1% is different in our world, then nothing you say or do is relevant or will work for us.

And because of that, we've had to adapt our messaging on ads on our front end and our funnels and our emails everywhere. We've had to adapt a lot of different things to make up for that. It can be done. We've made it work. But the solo freelancer who doesn't have a team of 13 people behind them, helping them out every step of the way, when you're just you, the freelancer, you don't have the bandwidth or the knowledge in order to navigate that.

So you tend to want to just work in one area until you've mastered it. You've built your name up for that, and you can start stair stepping into other niches, other industries.

But that's the last industry that I've seen truly be a struggle for freelancers. That is the, again, broad, vague industry, SaaS, e-commerce. But let's talk about where they actually work. 'cause this is more important for a lot of freelancers out there. Hopefully you didn't land in one of those buckets if you did.

Consider what you wanna do from here. Do you want to just keep getting, like gigs as a production crew somewhere? Do you want to, stay broad and, keep struggling, or do you want to maybe make a pivot and go to one of these other areas where it does actually work? That's up to you. I'm not here to tell you either way, but I'm, say if you listen to this podcast or you join our coaching program, this is the area where we're gonna have to either push you towards or gently nudge you towards in order for paid ads to work.

If paid ads are your goal.

The first area is what we call like B2C, creative services. This is like where you're targeting consumers business to consumer.

Easy example of this is things like photography, video work, some video work, not all video work. Music production. where you're targeting like solo musicians, even bands, unless they're large bands and consider themselves like actual businesses. And it's technically B2B, but I still consider most music production services and kinda like the B2C world because you're selling to just individuals more than anything else.

You're not selling to a large corporation photography. If you're working with like families and stuff, videography, same way if you're working with like families or anything in the consumer. Ads really work here because it's an emotional buying decision in these, cases, and it is a very short sell cycle.

You could realistically go from someone seeing your ad to paying you money the same day, definitely the next day, and definitely on average, like within like a week or two to make that decision. it's not a huge decision. There's no procurement processes and there's legal, there's none of that stuff.

Emotionally, do I want this thing? Does the pricing make sense? Is this person the one I wanna hire? Do I like their process? Then yes, let's go forward. In these cases, clear value, especially if you have like a transformation. You're offering somebody,

like a photographer who uh, does photos for dating profiles. It's like. my Tinder photos suck or whatever. Dating apps are out there. Now. My Tinder photos suck. This person's going to level up all my photos so that I actually am more appealing in the dating pool so they can get a girlfriend or a boyfriend, eventually get a wife or a husband.

That's a clear before after value.

So that's B2C services. Definitely works there. Paid ads, a hundred percent work there. next area where paid ads really work for freelancers is if you're working with solopreneurs like anyone running like aone person business. If that's your client, it will work for you. And this is where they're looking for a better value over an agency.

Whereas large businesses, the safe bet is to hire an agency. They're gonna pay a massive premium over going with a freelancer. so, they're getting safety for their money, but they're gonna pay a lot more for that. There's certainty, but there's a lot more for it.

Whereas when you're working with solo businesses. And solopreneurs and one person businesses, they want all those things that an agency offers, they just can't afford it. Whereas a freelancer is a better value for them.

I'm not saying you have to be cheap, but for the level of quality that you offer, where an agency is gonna be 20, 30, 50%, 80% more than you, sometimes that's a great value where you can come in at, half the rate and you're still getting exactly what you wanna get paid. They're getting the same or better quality than you get in an agency for half the price.

That's a great value. They also value speed. Agencies tend to be slower and although not always, but they just tend to be a little slower. Whereas you can work faster, you're more nimble because it's just two people. There's not too many cooks in the kitchen and they value access. solopreneurs, one person businesses, they want to actually connect with a person who's working with 'em.

So if you're like a brand designer for businesses, if you're working with an agency, they're gonna basically be assigned an account manager. who's going to basically be the middleman between the client and the creative services team at the agency.

So there's no access directly to the people actually doing the work at the agency. whereas a freelancer, you're working directly with the business owner because there's one person that's running the business, so they have a lot more access to you to make sure they get what they want.

Agencies tend to charge a premium over freelancer because agencies have so many malice to feed. They have to haveprofit margins, they have to pay for benefits, they have to pay for workers' comp, they have to pay for all these things that a freelancer never has to think about,

and that's why you're able to charge less, but make more than probably the average person at a free at an agencyif you're doing this full time and doing it well. There's also like mom and pop local businesses, service-based businesses, professional services, all that sort of stuff.

Consultants, coaches, though that can be a very competitive industry and has its own challenges with, itstill works, but it's got its own challenges. And then like personal brands, I've seen people work with like personal brands where they'll do like. Meine or something else for likeinfluencers, or they'll do like book cover design for big authors, or they'll do something again where you're working directly with the person who has a personal brand.

So the second category that I've seen work time and time again is when you're working with solopreneurs or like one person businesses. The next category I've seen paid ads work really well with our clients issmall to medium businesses.

This is a great category. And I say this as like anywhere from like two to three person businesses all the way up to like $10 million a year businesses. That's kinda the sweet spot. This category is like the sweet spot for B2B freelancers. If you're a freelancer who works with businesses, try to work your way up to this space.

You can start with one or two person businesses and then start to work your way up the ladder to where you're working with those. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 million a year. Businesses great place to live. you still tend to work with the owner or at least their decision maker, so you can appeal to the owner.

They're still cost conscious, meaning they want a better value out of stuff. This is where, again, my business lives and I almost always prefer to work directly with a freelancer compared to an agency. Not just because of the fact that we want to support freelancers compared to agencies, but because the value of working directly with a freelancer, if you know how to manage the freelancer well is just so much better than working with an agency.

So we're still cost conscious and they still want results. They don't want proceeds, they want results.And again, I can speak from. Experience here, knowing what I want as a business owner in that,sweet spot range. small to medium business. I want results. I don't want just prestige.

And a lot of these larger businesses, they hire the big agency out there, the big name agency, because they can afford it. And that's prestige associated with it, not always results.

So for examples here, any sort of local business, almost all local businesses are in this small to medium business range. There's very few businesses in your local city, over $10 million a year. Unless they're like an a national or international brand. There can be some hu out there,but almost. All of them are usually in that small to medium business range.

Service-based companies, again, if they have a multiple team, like CPAs is another one. Professional services, mom and pop brands that have kind of leveled up. So maybe they started with likeone little restaurant and then they opened up like six more in the same city. We have a lot of those here in Nashville,

but paid ads works really well here.

And this is again, the sweet spot that I,I like to see most freelancers kinda work their way into. let's talk about where it depends. There's a gray zone here, and if you're smart and you've follow along and maybe you've,gathered that, but there's this B2B range between 10 and $20 million a year is what I call kind of the gray zone. this is where it can get really tricky because at this point the business can't afford agencies. They've started to professionalize, they've started to likebecome a more professional company with department heads and maybe some leadership team, and like all these other things that a lot of other businesses have, Trust becomes a big filter for who they work with at this point, which I guess that's the same for everybody,

but agencies tend to be abetter appeal for businesses of this size But there's an exception here. And the exception is when you have enough social proof and authority and you have a reputation with trust you've built with these types of businesses in the past, you have a strong track record of working with these larger businesses,

and you have the right pitch for this, and the, pitch goes something like this, it's like if you work with me, you're gonna get a hundred percent of my focus for the project for lessthan the agency, and the agency's gonna give you 20% of their focus. Plus most of the work will be done by like a junior designer,

whereas I'm like a senior level designer and I'm doing it for less This is not how you would pitch somebody. I'm just saying that's the gist of the pitch that you're doing. You're offering a better value. In other words, you have the track record, that's great, but if they're pitting you against a large agency, this is essentially your pitch in so many words.

However you present it, you're charging a good amount less, although you're happy with this number, then agency is, but you're working direct with the business. They've got a high level of talent with you they're gonna get a hundred percent of your focus. A lot of businesses will take you up on that offer if all the other boxes are checked off.

But my key takeaway for you is this. For 95% of the people listen to this podcast meaning you don't fall into one of those earlier categories that I've seen people struggle in. Then ads don't necessarily fail or succeed based on industry. They work. Or fail based on your understanding of how buyer behavior is, your understanding of who the decision maker is, your understanding of the risk tolerance of whoever you're trying to target has a lot to do with your own trust signals like social proof and authority and your portfolio, your offer clarity. A lot of these things come into whether or not you can get paid as to work more so than the industry itself.

Most freelancers fail at this simply because they never try. They never had the confidence to try. They never had the process to try. They were too scared to try. And if that's you, I would just encourage you to face your fears and at least give it honest chanceYou may or may have seen this, but over the last week and a half, we've been promoting the fact that we're gonna give you a $500 ad budget if you work with us, this month in January, I think we've got

until Friday to apply for the coaching program

and we'll give you the 500 test budget. If you're on the fence or you're not sure about it, I would just encourage you to apply. we'll sit down, we'll chat with you. We'll see, what industry you're in. We'll figure out what things you have at your disposal.

We'll look at your portfolio. we'll get a sense of whether or not this will actually work for you, and we can talk about it. And if we don't think it'll work, we'll let you know. We'll gently let you down,But if we do think it'll work, we'll talk about how we can work with you. We'll first start with a full plan that we can implement together. We'll build out this plan we'll, we call like yourcontinuance clients to Marketing Roadmap where we'll map out all the things we're gonna do together.

What stuff do we need to fix? What stuff do we need to maybe rip outta your business? What stuff do we need to maybe rebuild in your business? what do we need to add to your business that you don't have right now? And then we will. Essentially pitch that to you and you can approve or reject it. If you approve it.

We'll work with you. If you reject it, we'll just part ways, you're out $0 and you move on. Once we work with you, you have one-on-one help. We'll look at every single thing that you're working on. We'll give you approvals on whether or not we think something will work or not. Um, help you troubleshoot every issue you come across, especially with paid ads.

And again, we'll give you that 500 ad budget. If that sounds interesting, just go to six figure creative.com/apply.

fill out the short application, and we'll go from there. So that's all I got for you this week. Thanks so much for checking this out. this is your first time, welcome, there's like 380, 98 other episodes for you to check out. stay tuned for next week for episode 400 where I'll talk about again, the future of this podcast, the state of six figure creative right now.

Give you kinda a life update on everything. And, uh, yeah. See you next week. Peace.