Brian: [00:00:00] You might think of paid ads as a necessary evil, something that you are probably against. Maybe I talked you into it at some point. And we've talked about paid ads a lot on this podcast before. And you're just thinking, I just want to get ROI my money. I just want to get more out than I put into it.

Brian: Preferably way more than we put into it.

Brian: And while that's obviously my goal too, I want to make more than I spend on paid ads and I do, there's also some unexpected benefits that come from paid ads that.

Brian: Most people don't think about, I've seen this in my own business. We're spending over 30, 000 a month right now on ads. And I've also seen this in the clients that we work with. And many of them spending much smaller budgets under a thousand a month.

Brian: and I want to share those benefits with you in this episode. Now, obviously, ROI is the goal. any of our clients, we shoot for them to have at least a five to one return on ad spend,

Brian: meaning that for every dollar you put into the ads, you're getting at least 5 back or more. So we put a thousand in, you get 5, 000 back or more preferably preferably closer to 10 to one. But some of these benefits are so good that they are worth spending money at a loss in order to get some of these benefits, at least on the short term.

Brian: So that's what I'm going to dive into in this episode. If this is your first time listening to the show, hello, I'm Brian. This is my podcast. If you're watching on YouTube, hello. I don't know [00:01:00] why you're watching YouTube, but whatever you like to see my face, it's fine. This podcast is for you. If you're a creative freelancer, you want to make more money from your creative skills and you want to do it without selling your soul.

Brian: We take all of the elements from other businesses and business models and industries, other people within the creative freelance niche and bring them into one place so we can all learn from each other.

Brian: So with that being said, let's get into the actual meat of the episode. I've got several things to cover here and they're all over the place, I want to start with this first one. basically talking about why. You might want to run paid ads at a loss temporarily in order to get this unexpected benefit.

Brian: And that is instant market feedback. Here's what I mean. When you were running paid ads. you can test rapidly test different messages, different hooks, different things that you are saying to the person in order to see, are they actually interested in this or not? And when you could do that through paid ads, that means you can spend 10 bucks a day.

Brian: are testing processes, three ads, 10 bucks a day, or let it run for two to three days. Let's look at the data and see what we see. Sometimes it's awful. Very low click through rate, very low lead conversion rate very few people get through the end of the funnel. Very bad results, right? But we've learned that's not the angle.

Brian: That's not the hook [00:02:00] That's not what people resonate with and then we have others that you might through two three four tests You've done five ten fifteen ads in a very short amount of time and you find that one Angle that one thing that people are like all of a sudden responding to and it's like magic It's like flipping a switch and all of a sudden everything works.

Brian: That is really only possible through two areas that I know of One is paid ads, which is wonderful. And this is why I'm talking about it in this, the other is short form, organic social media. The reason I don't like this approach with organic short form media is because you can't just spray and pray on there like you can with paid ads with paid ads.

Brian: Whenever you spend money on a test of just say at three ads, it will quickly pick which one it thinks is the best of the bunch and put all the ad spend behind that. You could really test with more than three at a time. You could put five or six or seven in one ad set and put some money behind it and it'll quickly find the best of the bunch in that.

Brian: And that still might not be that great, but it allows you to test more rapidly than you can through organic social media because generally people don't want on social media, at least short form, don't want to try some of the things they might try when they're doing it with ads where it's just going out to complete strangers.

Brian: It's just a weird thing where. If you're trying to test angles or [00:03:00] hooks or messages, especially for direct response type ads, it can be very challenging to do on short form social media. You can do it, but it's challenging.

Brian: And here's why this is important. People think they know what their clients want. People think they know how to say what it is and express in the right wording, what the client wants.

Brian: And listen, I consider myself an expert at paid ads. I've been doing this for over a decade at this point. While there are people that have spent way more on ads, even people on my team who have spent way more on ads than me, people who spent millions of dollars in ads, I've still spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars on paid ads profitably in my life.

Brian: And yet I am still. Utterly surprised and perplexed at what actually works with messaging. So if that's my experience. Why do you think people that don't have a lot of marketing experience or a lot of experience running paid ads feel when it comes to their messaging it's the Dunning Kruger effect.

Brian: They have this uninformed optimism. They think they know more than they do. And as soon as they actually start testing these things out, testing what they think will actually work messaging wise with their clients, they start to realize that those hooks, those angles, what you're saying to the people, how you're saying it, doesn't resonate with [00:04:00] them whatsoever.

Brian: They don't care about it. And so all of a sudden you start realizing how little you know. and so you start falling down into the trough of sorrow where you realize how much you need to learn in order to do this right. Now here's the good news is with paid ads, you can. Find this out relatively cheaply under 500 bucks.

Brian: You can do it relatively quickly under a month, probably in just a couple of weeks, if you're doing it well, you know what you're doing,

Brian: but in my opinion, it's better than just going through the rest of your life, thinking, you know, something that you don't actually know. So when you're able to run a paid ads and rapidly test different messages to your ideal clients, you can. Quickly start seeing what works and what doesn't, which is a huge added benefit because even if you can't get your ads to be profitable, you still figure out which messages work better than others.

Brian: And you can deploy those everywhere on your website, in your forms, in any of your content that you might be doing, any landing pages or funnels that you might have, you can take all those learning and put them everywhere. That's why it's worth doing this even at a loss for a short amount of time to take those learnings and deploy them in your entire business.

Brian: Now, there's another benefit with this kind fast feedback loop that you don't think about. It's not just front end messaging [00:05:00] with ads and hooks and angles and just a lot of that's just in marketing speak stuff. But it matters for every freelancer out there because communicating what you do, how you do it, what's the process, maybe the benefits, who else have you done it for?

Brian: These are just basic things you have to be able to express to your clients or your potential clients in order to get them to trust you over the other freelancer out there, especially the more button seat you are, where it's a commoditized service. But there's another benefit here that you don't really think about when it comes to rapid instant market feedback.

Brian: And that is getting on a lot of sales conversations with people. You can rapidly improve your sales process through paid ads because you're getting on lots and lots and lots and lots of sales calls, potentially.

Brian: And with you getting on lots and lots and lots and lots of sales calls, I think our record from one of our clients is they got on 45 sales calls in a month, some ridiculous number like that. That's what he wanted. I don't think most freelancers want to do that, but he wanted to do this because he wanted to learn every single sales call he got on and he would have one or two a day.

Brian: He would go through his process, go through his sales outline that we helped him craft. He would figure out what worked, what didn't work. He would revise it and he would. try it again for the next call and he had all these lined up back to [00:06:00] back to back So how much better do you think his sales process was?

Brian: And his ability to turn strangers into clients after doing 40 sales calls in a row in a month period probably a lot better

Brian: But not only that the sales process is more than just the sales call the sales conversation a lot of it's in the follow up and freelancers are notoriously bad about following up with people because they Don't want to bother them and I understand that you can feel your emotions will tell you I don't want to look desperate, or I don't want to bother them.

Brian: In reality, I just forgot about you. Or they got other things going on in their life, especially B2B, where you're working with other businesses, business owners, people in departments who have other teams that they're managing, they got a lot of stuff on their mind and a lot of stuff on their plate. When you follow up with them, it's just like, oh yeah, I need to get back to them about that project, right?

Brian: It's super simple. But with paid ads, when you were paying for those leads, and those leads are sitting in your inbox or your CRM, and you're looking at them, and you're thinking, I paid for those. I need to follow up with those. the mere fact that you're like, damn it, I paid for those leads. I'm going to get my money's worth out of those leads makes you follow up more with those leads.

Brian: So that's another added benefit when it comes to improving your sales process and being able to test different follow up approaches is awesome as well. Cause most freelancers, you might get two or three good [00:07:00] inquiries a month. Maybe four or five, if you're lucky, that doesn't leave much room for testing that leaves a lot of room for desperation.

Brian: And one other area you can get instant market feedback or close to instant is with all these sales calls that you're doing and improving your sales process. It also allows you to do pricing testing. There's something called price elasticity, and that is there's an upper limit to how high you can go on your rates and your given market based on your quality of work whatever other competitors are charging.

Brian: There is some upper limit in your market. It's somewhere between a dollar and 10 billion dollars, right? at a certain point, you're going to hit this number where nobody's saying yes, or conversion rate drops off.

Brian: for your business, it might be, you're charging 5, 000 now, and the next call you try 6, 000, then you try 7, 000, you try 8, 000. You realize between seven and 8, 000 is the point where people are dropping off. getting a lot of excuses or a lot of pushback or a lot of objections.

Brian: but at 6, 000 or maybe at 7, 000, I'm not getting those objections. I'm not getting as much pushback. So that's the area that I'm going to stick for now. And when you start getting comfortable selling that price. Over and Over and over again, you try that test again, because many times we're not able to close our clients at the [00:08:00] higher price because we don't believe in ourselves that we're worth that much.

Brian: And the number one hack in sales is just having the most belief that you are the best fit for that client. And that comes with experience, that comes with getting paid that amount. And as you get paid that amount more times, you start to associate yourself with that worth more. And again, I'm tying this back to paid ads because with paid ads, you can generally get more book calls, have more conversations, have more time to test these sorts of things.

Brian: and that leads me to some other unexpected benefits. your ability to have confidence in your pricing,

Brian: knowing you have five more sales calls this week, in our case, we'll have like 25 or 30 more sales calls this week to go to.

Brian: It means you'll stay rock solid on your pricing. You're not going to haggle with someone when you give out a price. You're not going to have this horrible urge in the pit of your stomach to throw out a lower number just to try to close the client. we've seen lots of people with that feeling

Brian: one of the things we train our clients on is Talk money on the call if you've listened this podcast for a while, you know this But when you tell the price say the number and shut the up, And so mr.

Brian: Client. This is what we're gonna do. This is how I think it's gonna go and The price for that's gonna be 7, 000 And just let that silence sit until they talk and it sounds [00:09:00] stupid, but it's, this is not like some psychological warfare you're doing with your client. It's honestly to keep you from backing down,

Brian: allowing you to take the time to read the client. How's their response? So you feel like they had sticker shock, like the surprise in a bad way, surprising a good way. Maybe you undershot yourself.

Brian: But confidence in your pricing only comes with experience. And that experience for many people only comes when you have enough prospects coming to the door to have these conversations with.

Brian: This is obviously tied to more clients, which is kind of like the traditional thought Oh, I want to spend money on ads so we can get more clients. But the unexpected benefit here is just having the confidence in your pricing because you've had so many at bats, right?

Brian: Here's another unexpected benefit of paid ads higher perceived authority. I almost didn't put this in here, but this is something I've seen in myself. And this may not be. As relevant to people at lower ad spends, but I do think this is relevant for people who do this consistently over time. Because I've seen many times people see me in public and recognize me not in like just the general public, like out downtown Nashville or anything, but like in niche settings where I'm around other creatives or freelancers, people will recognize me.

Brian: This happened in my coworking space the other day.

Brian: [00:10:00] People will say, dude, I've seen your ads for like the last three years. tell me about what you do stuff like that and not only that, but I've also been invited to be on podcast from people that have seen my ads over and over and over again. So there is some perceived higher authority when people see you on their newsfeed through paid ads over and over and over again, especially if you've been doing it consistently, because I know myself, if I see someone's face on paid ads for months or years.

Brian: I know they're crushing it because I know how much they're likely spending in order to be in my feed that often for that long of a period of time.

Brian: Here's another unexpected benefit. paid ads are something you can dial up or dial down whenever you need it. It's like a water faucet whenever you're in a famine season. Maybe there's a drought, right? Being able to turn on a water faucet to water your plants, that's a good thing, right? And when it's raining a lot outside, turn it down, turn it off, right?

Brian: Just in your own business, many freelancers, they go through these up and down feast or famine cycles.

Brian: And generally when you're in a feast, you're loving it. You're just eating it all up. You're getting tons of clients and you're happy and you're making tons of money. And then you're on a famine. And generally when you're in a [00:11:00] famine, most freelancers have no idea what to do. You're just hoping it goes away at some point.

Brian: And that's where we get a lot of our clients as people that are in their current famine right now, and they have no idea what to do and how to change it. And they're hoping we have the answer. And we generally do not for everybody we do for most people,

Brian: paid ads are a wonderful thing to dial up during those famine seasons. And then dial back whenever you're booked solid when there's too many things going on, right? And there's not many other avenues of getting clients consistently that that is possible. For example, if you're doing content marketing or doing social media marketing or something like that, or doing a podcast like this, generally if you're booked solid.

Brian: Your only option is to just stop doing it all together, which kind of kills all your momentum with paid ads. You can just cut it off in an instant, cut it back on. There are some consequences when it comes to AI learning algorithm finding the right pocket of people to send your ads to, but it's pretty minimal curve.

Brian: It's like maybe a week to ramp you back up.

Brian: But here's the biggest, most unexpected benefit of paid ads that I think people are going to be interested in. And that is, you're going to see that those famine periods just start to go away.

Brian: It takes time. You'll have feasts or famines running paid ads, especially early on. But [00:12:00] if you do this consistently over time, those are going to largely disappear. And here's why when you're in feast period, it's generally because you're getting referrals, you're getting word of mouth, you're getting clients coming back to you, right?

Brian: when it rains, it pours, they say, right? So you get a lot of at the same time, And then when you're in a famine period, it's because you're just not getting as many referrals. You're not getting that many clients, right? But when you're doing paid ads and you're ramping that part up during the famine periods, you're getting more clients.

Brian: And that starts to snowball. because those clients you got through that, famine period through these paid ads, those clients are now referring other clients to you. They're part of your referral network. And they're also coming back to you again and again.

Brian: If you have service that needs something more than one time, or you have multiple services, you can sell to that client.

Brian: not only that, but the byproduct of paid ads, the waste, if you will, is you've built a mailing list. And also you have all of those unclosed leads in your CRM. Those people who have inquired, maybe had a sales call, but they didn't close for whatever reason. They weren't ready yet. They didn't have the budget yet.

Brian: You close more of those over time. We get another 50 percent of our clients. From any given month over the next year, meaning if we got 10 clients in January, we'll get another five over the next 12 months from those leads and those book calls that we paid for in [00:13:00] January, we'll close 10 in January and we'll get another five or more sometimes over the next 12 months.

Brian: And we do that because our follow up game is strong. we practice, what we preach. We follow up until they say yes, they know, or one of us dies, right? We have an email list that we nurture them through. We have a podcast that we nurture them through. If you're watching or listening to this right now, this is part of the long term game I'm playing you know, maybe you're listening right now because you found us through a paid ad months ago or years ago, and you're still listening.

Brian: You're still watching one day. Maybe you'll, pay me to help you with client acquisition.

Brian: People just get into your orbit and they stay there through paid ads. And those people that are in your orbit is what allows you to get more referrals, more repeat clients that just does away with the feast or famine period. And the difference between. My business and most freelance businesses is that my business is very scalable.

Brian: We have multiple coaches. We have multiple people taking the sales calls. we have a whole team of people, eight people at this point, and we're still growing or hiring right now. And so there's not a real true upper limit as to how big we can get.

Brian: However, most freelancers, you're going to fill up your schedule, fill up your roster, and that's that.

Brian: So with [00:14:00] me, I'll keep spending more on paid ads. With hue at a certain point, you'll dial back your paid ads and it's only supplementing what you're currently doing. And eventually you may not need it at all because you have so many clients and referrals that you're able to just cut it off completely.

Brian: And that's great,

Brian: but this is ultimately about refilling that cup up over time. Clients naturally move on to other people where they lose interest in whatever it is that you help them with. Happens in music production all the time.

Brian: The band breaks up, right? So if you never fill up your cup with new people, new clients, new people to refer people to you, if you never refill that cup, then you're going to start shrinking as a business. And we see this all the time.

Brian: People that, peaked at a certain point, they start trailing off. what's happening. What do I do? Paid ads are a wonderful way to refill that cup. We have a very big cup here at Six Figure Creative. We have tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand plus people on our email list. We have thousands and thousands of what I call sales leads, maybe 10, 000 at this point, people who have inquired about working with us, hiring us, we get hundreds of applications a month, thousands a year, And that leads me to kind of like a final unexpected benefit is just this predictability and stability. The reason this is unexpected is because I didn't realize how [00:15:00] stable and predictable paid ads were until I saw a big business. On the opposite side of things, people who didn't do paid ads, but they did all organic.

Brian: It was acquaintance I met at a event. It was one of the Alex Ramosi events. He was doing 3 or 4 million a year. And the problem was all his clients were coming through organic social media, actually organic And while that's great, because he doesn't have to pay any money for that.

Brian: It's just literally whatever his video production costs might be for that, which is probably in the low thousands a month. Um, essentially has. no cost associated with his marketing, which is amazing. But the downside of that is it's really hard for him to scale his team out as the business gets clients.

Brian: They come in waves, big fluctuations, big ups and downs. He can't hire a team out accurately predictably figure out when he should hire because he might have long periods where the videos are not doing great and then have one massive viral video that blows the business up and he's had to let people go because the business wasn't doing so great.

Brian: And then the viral video shot his business right back up and he had to hire new people rapidly. That's very challenging. Hiring is one of the most difficult things I do in this business. It's the most time consuming, mental consuming. And so that's an unexpected benefit is [00:16:00] with paid ads. I'm able to scale in a very stable, predictable manner that allows me to grow my team in a natural way.

Brian: Now, for most freelancers, that's not that big of a deal. It's not something you're looking to do, but for my agency owner listeners right now, if you're trying to grow an agency and you're getting clients through organic social media or you're doing YouTube or you're doing podcasts or you're doing referrals only, anything that's not stable and predictable that you can literally turn into a clear inputs output scenario.

Brian: If it's not clear inputs. It was clear outputs and you know how many inputs you can do a month. So you know how many outputs you're going to get? If you can't do that math they're going to have challenges as you grow and scale because of exactly what is explained with that person that I met, you're going to have these crazy feast months.

Brian: Where you have to hire more of a team and then you get bloated and then you have famine months. And then now you have this bloated team. So your profit margins fall. You might start even losing money. And that creates an amount of stress. I don't want to think about because it's already enough stress to run a business.

Brian: It's not like it's completely stress free. even for me, as if I'm like some crazy example of an unstressed business owner, we all have our own stresses for different things. But we're very profitable. We're [00:17:00] doing great. We've been growing year over year over year. I don't want to take that sort of business and then throw the added pressure of low profit margins and then even negative margins because I'm relying on an unstable source of clients.

Brian: I don't want to deal with that. So I personally. do organic things and this podcast is a big part of our client acquisition efforts. Paid ads are the bulk of it. That's like the, main thing I rely on. paid ads lead to email subscribers, which lead to podcast listeners, which leads to clients eventually.

Brian: And it's. Simple, but it's unexpected in that I didn't realize how bad it can be and hard it can be to grow in scale when you don't have something like paid ads dialed in. The other side of things that can be just as stable and predictable is cold outreach, or what Alex Ramosi calls cold outbound, because it is clear inputs and outputs, but it's not a thing that we've done.

Brian: And I'm not sure if we will do that, but it can be done. As I think Alex says, all things work. It's just a matter of, can you get it to work for you? So if you want help with paid ads, if that's something that you're interested in doing maybe I've beaten you to death on podcast episodes.

Brian: You're like, finally, Brian, I'll give it a chance. Fine. We're happy to help. I've got a new [00:18:00] coach. I'm onboarding right now. His name's Richie. He's literally does this for a living. He's got an agency. He's grown to coming up on half a million right now. He's got a team that runs it. He coaches for us because his team runs the day to day.

Brian: and if you want him as a coach to help you with this, again, his agency does paid ads and he's grown his own business almost a half a million year at this point. So he's taking on clients right now. If you want him just go to six figure creative. com slash coaching fill out the application.

Brian: If it's a good fit, we'll chat with you when we chat with us, just say, Hey, I want to, be paired with Richie,

Brian: we will walk you through the process of setting up. All of this stuff, making sure your business is even ready for paid ads, because there's a lot of stuff you got to do before you can even do paid ads.

Brian: But yeah, those are some of the unexpected benefits. There's others that are out there. But these are the ones I could come up with this morning when I was outlining this episode. So if you have unexpected benefits of paid ads that you've experienced yourself or that you can think of, just leave them in the comments, shoot me an email, whatever you want, but that's all I got for you this episode on the six figure creative podcast, take care and I'll see you next week.

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