256: Organic vs Paid Marketing: Strategies for Small Business Growth

Have you ever been stumped by the decision of whether to invest in organic or paid marketing for your small business? You're not alone! This episode is a deep dive into the merits and trade-offs of both, sparked by a listener question. Discover the benefits of SEO and content creation, and learn how strategic ad campaigns can make a difference to your bottom line

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

Hey there and welcome to the Girl Means Business podcast, the show where we're all about helping you feel confident, both as a mom and a business owner. I'm your host, kendra Swalls, mom of two, former teacher and full-time photographer and business coach. Each week, we'll discuss the challenges, success and secrets that make you say I can do this, because you absolutely can. So pop in those earbuds, grab your favorite snack and let's dive in, because this girl means business. Hey, friends, and welcome back to the Girl Means Business podcast. We have got a juicy episode for you today. It is listener question episode, and this is one that I am really excited to dive into. It's not something we have talked about, I don't think, here on the podcast, if we have. It's been a really, really long time. So buckle up, because you're in for quite a ride today. Before I get into our question for this week, I want to remind you that I try to do these listener question episodes about once a month and I am in need of some new questions. So if you have a question you would like to ask or have me answer on the podcast, head down to the show notes, click the ask me anything link and you can fill out the form there to submit your question or multiple questions. They can be as broad or as specific as you want them to be. No dumb questions here. They are all important questions. So please, please, please, feel free to head down to that link and fill out the form so that I can make sure all of your questions are getting answered here on the podcast.

Speaker 1: 1:48

Okay, let's get to our listener question. This one comes from Allison and Allison, I'm gonna apologize, it looks like Ryman, but if I'm incorrect, you can please let me know. So, allison Ryman. Okay, this was her question. She says hey, I have a question for you. I have been slowly building my online business for the last few years while working a full-time, nine to five job. I really want to leave my job by the end of the year to run my business full-time, but I need to build up my client base first so that I feel confident that I won't go broke.

Speaker 1: 2:18

I have been seeing a lot of courses and programs on social media that about running paid ads and it sounds kind of tempting. I would love to know your thoughts on paying for ads and if it's worth the investment. Okay, allison, this is a big topic and I am so glad you asked this question because we must have the same algorithm. I'm seeing the same content on social media right now a lot too. There are a lot of. I'm getting served a lot of ads for courses and programs. Talking about paid ads, one in particular. I think her name is Jenna or I can't think. I think that's right. Anyway, not Jenna Kutcher, but there's another Jenna and she's been running a lot of ads about ads and I guess at some point I got into that algorithm and now I'm seeing a bunch of those as well. So you're not alone in the fact that that is being fed to a lot of us, I'm sure small business owners.

Speaker 1: 3:15

So let's break down the difference and the pros and cons of paid versus organic marketing for your business. Now, one thing I will say is that I am a firm believer that with either option, you are investing in your business. The difference is you are either investing time and energy or you're investing money, and so you have to make the decision ultimately of what are you willing to invest, what are you able to invest, and then, what are you willing to invest. Do you want to invest time and energy into putting in the work to creating the organic traffic to building the relationships that know like and trust factor, all of those things that take time. Or are you wanting to invest financially to sort of shorten that window of time that you're getting people in the door? So again, pros and cons of both. We're going to break them all down, but that's essentially what it comes down to is what are you wanting to invest in your business right now? Are you wanting to invest more monetary or are you wanting to invest in your business right now? Are you wanting to invest more monetary or are you wanting to invest more time and energy? Because those are your two options.

Speaker 1: 4:32

There is really no magic path where you can invest a little bit of time and a little bit of energy and see massive results. It just doesn't happen, especially in this day and age where we're all kind of competing for space online and in real life, we're competing with all these other things going on. If you're going to go the route of investing time and energy, which is organic traffic, then you are going to have to invest quite a bit of time and quite a bit of energy. If you're wanting to go the I want to invest monetarily, you may still have to invest quite a bit, depending on what your goals are, but it may happen a little bit faster. So everything we talk about today all ultimately comes back to that decision of which road. You know, it's like that. What's that? Is it Robert Frost poem? I think that's who does it. It's like, you know, two roads diverge into a water, something like that, and it's like do you take the path less traveled? I'm probably butchering that poem entirely, but that's the point is, you're standing at these crossroads and you're deciding do I go this direction and do organic, or do I go this direction and do paid? And you can do a little bit of both, and we'll talk about that as well. So, okay, let's break down the pros and cons.

Speaker 1: 5:48

Let's start with organic marketing. So organic marketing is anything that you're doing that is not paid advertisements. So it is, you know, seo strategies. It's the blogging, it's email marketing, it's social media, it's networking, it's all those things that again require your time and your energy, but they don't typically cost a whole lot of money, if anything. You know, social media, for the most part, is free, email marketing low, low cost, because you're just paying for your monthly platform that you host your email marketing on Networking typically is free, although you can pay to be in certain networking groups. Seo and blogging, again, for the most part is free. You have to have, obviously, a paid website hosting platform and a domain, all those things, but it's low, low cost. So the monetary investment of organic marketing is very low, which is what appeals to a lot of small business owners who are starting out, because they are like I don't have money to throw at this right now. I don't have disposable income that I can put towards this because my business isn't making money. So it's kind of this catch 22,.

Speaker 1: 7:02

But with organic marketing, the time and energy piece is where you come in. So let's start with, like, the SEO and blogging. Obviously you're going to have to put the time in to build up those SEO strategies, to create blog content on a regular basis, to market that blog content, to get traffic to it. So putting it on social media, putting it on Pinterest, making sure it's keyword optimized so that gets found in a Google search, all those things, that takes time. Then you have, you know, social media, kind of the same thing.

Speaker 1: 7:32

It's going to require time and energy to create content consistently so that you're staying front of mind. Because when it comes to organic marketing, you have to stay top of mind. That is the key. Is that, because you are not necessarily putting ads in front of your audience and having kind of an algorithm help you with that, you're having to sort of manually go in and say, okay, I'm going to add more content to keep the hamster wheel going. So that's where, like the you know, with organic marketing, you get that time piece kind of in there and the effort piece. You got to create the content, you got to schedule the content, you have to engage with the content, all those things. And then when it comes to networking, obviously you're going to have to go out into the world and face-to-face meet with people and you can do some online networking. But when it comes to growing your business, the more in-person networking you can do, the more faces you can put to a name, the more connections you can build, then the more likely you are to get referrals or to get new clients. But again, that takes time. So you're seeing a trend here that the organic route can be really beneficial.

Speaker 1: 9:54

There are a lot of people In fact I built the majority of my photography business with organic marketing. I did not start doing ads paid ads until probably 2019, maybe 2018. I started dabbling with it, but I think 2019 was when I really kind of started implementing some paid ad strategies and I've done them off and on over the last several years and I'll get into all of that with the paid strategy. But, for you know, six years prior to that, I built everything on organic marketing. So it can be done and I was successful enough with organic marketing that I was able to leave my teaching career and go full-time into photography. So it can be done. It can be done if you are willing to invest the time and the energy that will be needed to really see results from those strategies. Okay, so pros of organic marketing obviously it does not require a lot of cost up front, so it's very cost effective. That is the major pro of organic marketing.

Speaker 1: 11:00

Another pro of organic marketing is that you are going to have a more I don't want to say loyal, but I mean, yeah, I'm going to go there You're going to have a more loyal fan base when it comes to organic marketing because you have invested the time to build relationships with people. When you're putting paid ads in front of someone, most of the time they don't have a connection to you. And so one of the pros of organic marketing is that you build a stronger connection. You build that know, like and trust factor with your potential clients because they are spending a lot of time with you prior to working with you. They are getting to know you as a business, as a person. They're getting to know your personality, your brand, your services, your products all those things because they are seeing you multiple times over a period of time. So a lot of times when you have organic marketing you do have more of a loyal fan base because they're with you throughout the entire journey. So pro it's low cost. Pro it does build a more loyal fan base. You have people who are kind of more of your diehard fans and followers and those kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 12:16

And then another pro of organic marketing is that you have more longevity in your marketing. When you are using organic strategies, you're laying a foundation in your business that you can grow on for a long period of time. So let's use blog posts, for example. You create blog content. That's organic marketing. You put it out there, you put it on Pinterest, you put it on social media. It lives on for a long time. I have blog posts that are six or seven years old that are still getting traffic because they have a longer shelf life. When you are doing paid marketing paid ads you click a button to turn that ad off and it's gone. All that work you've done is just kind of vanished. So you don't have the same foundation of longevity that you have when you create organic marketing strategies and anything you're doing that's evergreen. So the blog content, podcast, youtube videos that's all evergreen content that lives on for as long as your account is active or it's. You know that you have it live and it can work for your business time and time and time again for a really long period of time, and so that is one of the kind of bigger pros for organic marketing.

Speaker 1: 13:34

Now, cons of organic marketing, obviously, is that it is time intensive, so it's not something you can just create and turn on and it will work for you immediately. It takes time to create the content, it takes time to schedule it and put it out there. It takes time to engage, it takes time to build those connections, and so because of that, you're going to have you're going to see results come in a little bit slower when you turn on paid advertisements, they can start working for you right away, but when you do organic marketing, it's a slow burn. So you're going to be like I said you're laying that groundwork that it will last longer in your business, but you're not going to see those immediate results. And I see this as a frustration that a lot of business owners will comment on, where in conversations they'll say things like well, I've been posting to social media for three months consistently and I'm not seeing any results. Well, that's because you're relying on organic marketing and hoping it gets you the immediate result that you might get from paid marketing, and so with organic, you're just going to take you a little bit more time. You also have a little less control.

Speaker 1: 14:47

So another con to organic marketing is your limited control, and so you have to be a little bit more strategic in your strategies that you're using, especially when it comes to, like, social media and if you listen to the episode a couple of weeks back on, what's working in social media right now, one of the things I talked about was that they're leaning more into these SEO keywords as opposed to hashtags, so they want us to be creating content that gives them keywords that are going to tell the algorithm, tell the platform who to show our content to. So we're a little more reliant on you know the algorithm and the platforms that we're putting our content on to show our content to the right people, whereas when you do paid ads you have a little bit more control over that targeting, over who gets to see your content. And then another con is that it requires a lot of your expertise, whereas when you can put on, you put out an ad and it's kind of the standalone thing. When you are creating content organically and you're putting it out there, your audience, you know, like I said, the pro is that it builds this trust and it builds this loyal fan base. The flip side to that, the con, is that then it requires you to kind of be on. It requires you to show off what you're actually capable of. It requires you to step up and go. This is what I know and this is what I do and this is why I'm good at what I do. And you have to be comfortable with kind of talking about yourself in that light. And there's a lot of people who are not always comfortable with, in a sense, bragging about themselves or patting themselves on the back and saying, yeah, I'm really good at what I do and I'm really knowledgeable in what I do, and so if you're someone who struggles with that, then creating organic content might be a struggle for you, because you are going to have a hard time positioning yourself as that expert in your field or niche. So those are some of the pros and cons to organic marketing.

Speaker 1: 16:53

So now let's talk more about paid marketing. Let's start with some examples of paid marketing and I'll talk a little bit my own experience with this. So I consider paid marketing on really two main outlets. One is Google ads and the other is social media ads. Now, I know each platform usually has their own version of ads. I know, like Pinterest has ads If you're selling on Etsy, you can do Etsy ads LinkedIn has theirs, twitter has theirs, facebook and Instagram have theirs. Everybody kind of has their own version of paid ads, but the two that I want to focus on are Google and then primarily, facebook ads.

Speaker 1: 17:37

So for me, my first experience with running paid ads was with Google. So I set up a Google ads account and when I was, I had already left my teaching job. I was kind of transitioning from wedding photographer to boudoir photographer and I was finding that having creating organic marketing for boudoir can be a little bit tricky because it is a very sensitive subject matter. There were a lot of people I worked with who did not want their images shared, so I had limited images to share, and so a lot of my marketing organically was more around expertise and content marketing as far as educational content, as opposed to look at my work that I've done and so I decided to try Google ads. So I ran Google ads to my boudoir business. I don't remember exactly. I want to say the budget was like maybe $150 a month, tops somewhere in that range. I believe I may have gone up to like 300 for a couple of months around like higher price, like holiday seasons and things like that, but I think on average I spent about $150 a month for Google ads and it drove a ton of traffic to my website and it was one of the primary ways that I got booked for clients, so it was very, very effective In the long run.

Speaker 1: 19:06

I decided to turn them off for a while. I have not turned them back on just because I, you know, I'm not doing as much boudoir, I'm doing more personal brands and I have found organic marketing for that has worked really well for that aspect of my photography business. So if I were to want to advertise more of the boudoir, I might go back to, you know, facebook ads, the I mean to Google ads. The benefit I found with the Google ads is that when someone would search for those keywords and a lot of times I would use the keyword boudoir but I would also use like sexy or wedding gift or bridal, even sometimes lingerie photos anything that people because a lot of times they didn't know the word boudoir it's an odd word anyway and so I was using these other kind of keywords. So if someone in my area went and searched for, you know, lingerie photographer or lingerie photo shoot, then my business would come up as one of those first three kind of sponsored posts or sponsored links, and so I was getting a lot of clicks from that. Now, the content obviously was that I was paying for that, but it did help for people to find me and to at least learn more about who I was. I found that I was getting more traffic to my social media pages as well because they would find me, they would click on the link, they would go to my website and then they would go to my social media and they would follow me there. So it did have a pretty good return on the investment. If I booked even one session a month, I would make back my investment plus some. So for that reason, I found it really beneficial.

Speaker 1: 20:49

Now, when I have run Facebook ads, I have gone into it with a very different strategy, because to me, facebook ads are a whole different beast compared to Google ads. With Google ads, I am just literally putting my website link as one of the suggested links. I'm not trying to drive them to a specific offer. I'm not trying to drive them to a specific deal or anything that. I'm literally just saying go check out my website and if you want to learn more, you can contact me through there.

Speaker 1: 21:21

With Facebook ads, you have to be a little bit more strategic, and one of the biggest mistakes I see people make when it comes to creating Facebook ads is that they will go into it with the idea that if I create an ad showing off or advertising my service or my product, I'm going to get all these people that want to work with me, that want to buy from me. So, for example, there are some photographers that I've worked with in the past as coaching clients. We've discussed social media ads or they have run social media ads in the past and they come in going well. They just don't work for me, because I ran this ad for my spring mini sessions and nobody booked. So here's the thing with paid ads. Well, let me.

Speaker 1: 22:12

Here's the thing with Facebook ads is that when you are creating a Facebook ad, you have to go into it with the right mindset. If you go into it with the mindset of I'm going to post this thing and all these people are going to want to book with me and they're going to hand over their credit card information right off the bat, you're going to walk away disappointed and you're going to feel like you wasted money and you're going to feel like you did not accomplish what you wanted to accomplish. But if you go into it with the idea that either A you're in it for the exposure or B my main goal here is that you are going to be in it to collect potential leads. So I always tell people when you are running Facebook ads I don't want you to run ads asking somebody to spend more than a hundred dollars with you. So for most of us, our products or services are probably priced at more than a hundred dollars, especially if you're doing like photography or wedding planning or any of those kinds of things that require, you know, a higher investment. Because when someone is scrolling social media and they come across an ad and that ad is for a $500, you know photo session or even a $150 mini session, that's a pretty big investment for somebody to make an impulse decision on. And that's what social media ads are. It's almost like an impulse buy. It's like, ooh, I see this thing, it's a really great deal. I'm going to click on it. I'm going to hand over my credit card information. So if you're asking them to go and hand over more than a hundred dollars, that's going to require a lot more on like the retargeting side, where you're showing the same ad to the same people over and over again and that costs a lot more money. So if you go into it going, okay, instead of getting them to book a session with me or to hire me, I'm going to go into the mindset of I'm running this ad to get people onto my email list, or I'm running this ad to get people to follow me on Instagram, or I'm running this ad to get people onto my email list, or I'm running this ad to get people to follow me on Instagram, or I'm running this ad to have them purchase this really low ticket item that then I can then upsell to them later on a larger ticket item. You're going to find more success with that. I always tell people when I'm helping them create their first like paid ads, when I'm helping them create their first like paid ads, drive people to an email list. No-transcript.

Speaker 1: 24:31

If you are a family photographer and you are doing mini sessions, you have a whole thing of like summer back to school mini sessions coming up and you're like okay, I want to get people to buy these mini sessions, but they're priced at like 150, 200, $250. That's not an impulse buy. So instead I want you to create a lead magnet. I want you to create something for free that you or low cost that you can provide for them. For example, if you know you're going to be offering these summer back to school mini sessions in July or August, then I want you to start now in May, and I want you to say, okay, I'm going to create a family fun summer guide. It's a PDF document or it's you know a PDF sheet, whatever, and it is 25 things to do with your kids this summer, and it can be. You know. Here's five fun splash pads and water parks to go to. Here's five indoor play areas that are really fun for kids of all ages. Here's five at home you know activities you can do when it's a rainy day out or it's too hot to go outside. Here's five places to go eat that have really fun activities for kids to do or are kid friendly.

Speaker 1: 25:46

Like you can make it super simple, you offer that you run ads to that. So, yes, you're paying to run ads to a free item. However, stay with me, I promise it pays off in the end. You run those ads. You get all these people who, again, are scrolling Facebook on a Tuesday night at eight o'clock when the kids are already in bed. A mom comes across this free like hey, here's 25 fun summer activities for free. Go download it. Heck, yeah, I'm going to download that. It's free. I don't have to take out my credit card.

Speaker 1: 26:18

Now she's on your email list. Now you can sell your mini sessions to her through email, because when she goes into her email account, she's not impulse buying, she is taking time to actually consider what you're having to offer. So you got her in the door with this free or even if you charge $5 for this in-depth guide of things to do with your kids over the summer, then you're getting people in the door. Once they're in the door, you have an automated series of emails that go out that introduce her to who you are, that talk about your upcoming summer mini sessions that you have available, your back to school mini sessions. Maybe you give her a couple little extra bonus, like hey, this wasn't in the free guide, but here's three more really cool activities coming up in our town this summer that I think your kids would really love. You're educating her. You are building know, like and trust, which you don't get from paid ads. And so you are drawing her in with this paid ad for a free thing, but then you're selling to her on the backend and statistics show.

Speaker 1: 29:14

The data shows that people are more likely to buy from an email than they ever are from social media. So if you are going to run paid ads, you have to have the right mindset going into those paid ads, because if you were to run a test and you were to say okay, for two weeks I'm going to run ads to two different things. One is to this free summer fun guide. The other one is to my back to school mini sessions that are $175. I guarantee you, and if you put the exact same amount of money behind each one let's say you do $5 a day for each one for two weeks I guarantee you're going to have a bigger return on your investment in the end from the free download than you are from the one-time thing. Because let's say you, you know, $5 a day for 14 days let's see, I need to get my calculator right because I don't do fast math. So 14 times five, so you're spending $70. Is that right? 14. Yeah, so you're spending $70 on these ads for two weeks. Okay, you are.

Speaker 1: 30:17

Let's say you book one mini session from those ads Okay, that's, I'm getting generous here. Let's say you book two. So $175 times two, so that's $350, minus the $70 you spent, so you profited $280. Not bad. Now let's say you run that same $70 to the free download guide, the free guide, and let's say you get 50 people on your email list from that free guide over the course of two weeks. So you've spent less than, or about a little over a dollar per person to get them onto your email list. Not bad. Now let's say that five of those people book mini sessions at 175 when you sell to them, you know, in the emails. So 175 times five, that's $875 minus the $70 you spent, you've now made a profit of $805. So ultimately, the free one costs a little more upfront but you make more on the backend. The other option costs you the same amount upfront but you make less in the end. Seems like a no brainbrainer. So again, if you're going to run paid ads, they have to be done in a really smart, strategic way with the right goals in mind. Okay, so I've kind of broken that down for you there.

Speaker 1: 31:41

Now let's go through the pros and cons of paid ads. So the pro, one of the biggest pros, is that you're going to get almost immediate results. So, like I said, when you go into your ads manager, either for Google ads or social media ads, it's checking off a box, yes or no, like it's clicking a button to turn something on or off, and when you turn it on, you are immediately getting in front of your potential audience. You're getting traffic, leads, all the things, and so for that reason it's a huge pro that you can kind of control when your ads are working for you versus when they're not, and so that's a big piece of it. Now, another pro is that you get very targeted reach.

Speaker 1: 32:26

So I mentioned this as kind of a con for organic marketing that when you are doing organic marketing you don't have as much specific targeted control over who your content is shown to, whereas with ads, you go in and you tell your ads manager who you want your content to be shown to. When I set up Facebook ads, I go in and I say I want it to be shown to women between this age and this age, in these locations, with these demographics and these specific interests. So if I'm marketing to boudoir clients, I can say I want to advertise to women who are between 32 and 42 and in these specific areas around me who have interest in you know um, shopping, beauty services, certain magazines, certain television shows. Like you can get very, very specific down to like marital status, family status, career status, income levels, like there's so many targeted things you can pinpoint when it comes to your paid marketing who your content is shown to. So that's a huge, huge con, in my opinion, that I can get very specific in who my ads are shown to. You also have control over your messaging and your placement, kind of along the same things with the targeted audience. You can decide. You know who or where you want them to be shown. Do you want them to be shown to a specific, not just an audience, but like do you want them just shown on Instagram? Do you want them just shown in Instagram stories? Do you want them shown on the Facebook feed, like? There's so many different ways and then you can also.

Speaker 1: 34:09

Another big pro is that you have measurable return on investment. So you can see I'm putting in X amount of dollars, I'm getting X amount of dollars in return. You know, I just did those examples with the numbers, with the um. You know the paid ad versus the, for the lead magnet versus the mini session, you can see a visible return. You have all of this data. You have all these stats on. Okay, I spent this much. This is how much it costs per click. This is how much it costs per lead. This is how much money I made in return, based on how many people purchased from me, from this email sequence that I sent to them afterwards, afterwards, or from clicking the actual button and buying. You know you have all these. You can get into all the details of like, the pixel tracking and all those things, but you have a very measurable return on investments. That is another big pro when it comes to paid advertising.

Speaker 1: 35:01

Now let's talk about some of the cons. The biggest one is the cost, obviously, and cost can sometimes escalate. So if you are running ads and you are running them in a way kind of like the example I gave of like you're running them with the wrong intentions, or you're running them with the wrong idea behind them or there's something that's not quite clicking with that ad maybe it's the copy, maybe it's the image, maybe it's the placement or the targeting it can cost you quite a bit of money sometimes to really figure out what's working and what's not. Whereas with organic marketing it's okay if something doesn't register right away with your audience because you didn't invest monetarily into it, just your time, and so with paid ads you almost want to either go into it with the idea that, like I'm just going to be out this amount of money, and if you're not, that's great. But there is a learning curve, there is a process of refining what works for you and what works for your audience, and that does cost money when you're doing it through ads.

Speaker 1: 36:07

The another one that's a con, which you kind of briefly touched on too, is that limited credibility. So when someone sees your ad they don't always know who you are before seeing your ad. So you're essentially cold calling people via social media or Google searches and so you you're losing a little bit of that. You know expertise behind it, that know like and trust. So that can be a con, because then you also have to get them to be interested in working with you or buying from you without that built up connection prior to them, you know, coming into your funnel.

Speaker 1: 36:43

Another con is there is a thing as ad fatigue, and so with consumers, you know, with people on social media, we've gotten really good at recognizing what's a paid ad Obviously they say sponsored or whatever on the ad itself, but we've gotten really good at recognizing when we're being sold to and scrolling right on by, and so that is a real thing is ad fatigue and what we call ad blindness, where people, consumers, kind of just become immune to the ads we're putting out there and they become white noise and they become less and less effective. You have to get really good at honing in on what is going to actually stop the scroll, what is going to attract attention, what is going to get people to notice my ad when they see a million ads a day? And then the last con is that there are software programs now that block ads, and so if people are not wanting to see paid advertisements, then it blocks them. So you don't have control over that. That is one aspect of it that you don't always have control over. So there are definite pros and cons to both paid and organic ads.

Speaker 1: 37:57

So, um, you know, when it comes to answering Allison's original question, I wish I could say there's like a clear cut, like you should do X, y or Z, but ultimately it comes down to that decision I mentioned at the beginning. Those two roads diverge in a woods is do you want to invest monetarily and maybe get some faster results if you're doing it in a really strategic way but you're going to be investing money? Or if you're doing it in a really strategic way but you're gonna be investing money, or if you don't have the money to invest, you're gonna have to invest time and energy. You have to choose one or the other, because otherwise you're just kind of sitting there at that crossroads going staring at both directions. So, allison, I hope that that gives you some information and anybody else listening who's been kind of in this idea of like do I pay, do I not pay? Hopefully this gives you some kind of food for thought, to chew on and be like okay, this helps me kind of map out like these are the pros and cons of this. These are the pros and cons of that. What's more important to me right now in my business and again, these are things you can kind of play with both at one time a little bit.

Speaker 1: 39:06

You can be doing organic marketing while you're running paid ads. You can use your organic marketing to determine what types of paid ads might work best for your audience. They can work in conjunction with each other. But ultimately you are going to have to kind of make a decision of if I can't invest time and money, I have to pick one or the other. You're going to have to decide what works best for you. So again, I wish there was a better, more clear cut like this is going to be what works for you. There's just not, and that's that's marketing and that's business.

Speaker 1: 39:39

However, if you do want to get more personalized help with this, um, I would be more than happy for anybody that's you know, whether it's talking about paid ads versus organic or talking about anything else in your business, you can work with me one-on-one. Or, if you're a photographer, you can join my Focus Photographer Lab membership, which gets you one-on-one help with your business and that will allow you to have more personalized guidance from me on. Here's where you're at in your business. Here's what I think will work best for you based on your audience, based on where you're at, based on you know what you have the capability to give into your business, whether it's time or money, and I can help you refine all of those things. So if that is something you are interested in and, like I said, if you're a photographer, you can check out the Focus Photographer Lab membership to get access to that. If you are not a photographer but you would like to work with me one-on-one, then you can reach out to me either on Instagram at girlmeansbusiness, or you can send me an email at kendra at girlmeansbusiness, and we can chat about the different options for working together one-on-one.

Speaker 1: 40:44

All right, allison. Thank you so much for your question. If you have questions you would like for me to answer here on the podcast, you can do so by filling out the Ask Me Anything form down in the show notes. So go and click on that and fill out the form and you never know, your question might be the next one we have on our Ask Me Anything episodes. All right guys, have a fabulous week. I will see you back here next week, same time, same place. All right guys, have a fabulous week. I will see you back here next week, same time, same place. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love for you to take a screenshot, share it to social media and don't forget to tag Girl Means Business. And, as always, we greatly appreciate any reviews you leave for this podcast. Thank you so much for being here and we'll see you next week.