Welcome to the fourth episode of the ‘Marketing Questions Answered’ series. In this episode, I address a common struggle that many business owners face – feeling overwhelmed and unable to handle everything on their own. This question is especially relevant to entrepreneurs who need support in their marketing efforts but may not have the resources to pay for it. I provide insightful advice and practical tips for prioritizing and sustaining marketing efforts, even without a team or much help. 

I even reveal what it looked like for me when I began my business, with a child in tow and no money to hire help. If you’re a parent or even have a full-time job, this conversation may resonate with you. I also discuss questions you should ask yourself to decide if you can have some support in your business (even if right now it feels out of reach). This episode is a must-listen for anyone currently feeling deep into entrepreneurship and are seeking practical tips to pull through the busy season.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

Getting some form of support, whether that is a full-blown agency or whether that’s just a training program that supports you, the amount of time that’s gonna save is worth it a hundred times in the amount of time you would put into it otherwise, and the value of your time.

You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 494.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. We are on the fourth episode of the Marketing Questions Answered series where I’m diving into your questions that you guys asked me. So thank you for such great questions. And this question is more related to your role as a CEO in getting support in your marketing. But I read it and at first I was like, well it’s not marketing strategy related. Do I want to answer this? But I really think that a lot of you guys are going to resonate with this really no matter what level you are at in your business, even if you have no team at all or you have maybe a couple of team members because there’s always a need to do more in marketing or at least the feeling of needing to do more. And so this question was, I can’t do it all.

I don’t have enough to pay for help. How do I choose what to consistently do in a sustainable way? And this tells me this, this individual is definitely feeling the overwhelm of their business, of marketing, what step to take next, how to prioritize things in all of those components. So I wanna talk about that because I think a lot of you guys probably experience that. And like I said, you probably still experience that even if you have a little bit of help. So first of all, no, you can’t do it all as a ceo especially when it comes to your marketing. You also have your whole business to run. You have your delivery of your offer, you have, you know, connecting with your customers. You have the whole operations side and just overall business management. And you can’t do it all Now in the beginning stages of a business, like let’s just talk, let’s say you’re, you just started your business, you have no help.

 That is a time where I believe hustling is acceptable and grinding is acceptable if you choose to do that. But I shared this a little bit ago on my Instagram because people oftentimes look at my business and they look at the support I have and the team I have and the support I have in my house. And they’re like, how do you do all this? And I’m like, I do it all from that support because I have that support. But it did not start out this way. It started out with just me, just like a lot of you guys. And it was messy. I didn’t have support in my house. I had a newborn baby. I was building my business. I didn’t really know what I doing. I was saying yes to a lot of things. I was trying things I wasn’t even specialized in in Facebook ads and marketing yet.

And I would work from like 8:00 PM to midnight most days cuz that was my time that I didn’t have my baby. And I think that’s something important to note because when you are in the stage at the beginning stages of your business or you don’t have support and you don’t have a team and you feel like you can’t afford help, which I wanna speak to that, but it’s messy. It’s messy. And you have to just figure out one, what the priorities are and two, when you’re gonna fit them in and making it a non-negotiable. And sometimes that’s really late at night, sometimes it’s early morning, sometimes it’s the weekend. That is the kind of state of being a solopreneur and what we signed up for if we wanna grow our business, obviously you can set boundaries and say I wanna grow slower and I don’t wanna experience that and so I won’t do that.

But that is how the beginning stages are until you can get support and start to offload those things. So I think that’s something really important to note because a lot of people compare themselves to entrepreneurs who have a big team, who have been in business for five plus years, who have built the process, who’ve been through it and feel like they are so behind and they’re failing. But you have to understand, everybody starts where you are. So in in the sense of I can’t do it all and what should I choose to do consistently in a sustainable way? If you are at the place where you cannot hire any support, you have a few options and I am gonna talk about can you actually hire the support or are you afraid to hire the support? But you have a few options. First of all, I think the most valuable use of your time at this stage is in relationship building and connecting.

How I built the beginning of my business was through Facebook groups, which is was seven years ago. So the strategy is probably not the same, but I would literally go into Facebook groups every single day, like two times a day and I would search keywords of Facebook ads, marketing support, and I would respond to every thread and I would get clients that way. Now this is gonna be unique to my business, but there is not an exact how-to of what you should do. But if you’re trying to get clients or you’re trying to sell your offer and you only have your time, one of the best uses of your time is in relationship building. So that could mean making time to reach out to a list of top dream 25 connections, either 25, you know, dream clients or maybe it’s people who their audience is your audience.

And if you could get in front of them, it would massively impact your business. Maybe it is going into communities or maybe it’s joining some communities and then providing value in showing up in as an expert in your industry, your time doing that. That is oftentimes one of the biggest needle movers because if you can get in the front of a few of these people’s audiences, then you get massive leverage and exposure quickly. Now you can also choose to do your marketing in the sense of building your funnel, running your own ads and doing all of those things. And so if you are in that state, you have to have time that you’re willing to set aside. It can’t be ambiguous. Maybe it’s one hour a day, maybe it’s 10 hours a week. My suggestion is that you decide how much time am I willing and able to commit to my marketing growing my own business?

And then you actually block that out in your calendar and then you define what you’re going to be doing during that time. Are you going to be focusing on relationship building and going into communities? Are you going to be learning how to run your ads? Are you gonna be building your funnel? Like what are you actually gonna be doing during that time? But step one is how much time are you willing and able to commit? And again, that might be late at night, it might be on the weekends at least temporarily until you can get support in the future. But if you go into it saying, oh, I have to do all my marketing and then you don’t define how much time you need to put into it and you don’t define what exactly you’re going to do to work on your marketing as we know, no progress is going to be made.

Now if you have this time defined, how do you choose what to do in the most sustainable way? This is again, gonna be different for each business, but it’s probably either relationship building, like I said, content creation, maybe with a paired, I talked about visibility ads in one of these episodes. If you wanna go back and listen maybe with a paired little bit of ad spend so you can get more reach. But building an audience, providing value, putting out consistent content and putting your time into that is very valuable. And oftentimes that is something only you can do. And then we get to the point where you have to decide, okay, am I the one who’s going to develop my entire strategy? Am I the one who’s gonna build the funnel? Am I the one who’s going to launch the ads and run the ads and learn how to do this?

And here’s where I want you to really weigh. How much would it cost to either A, get support on how to do that through at least a course or a training that would give you a shortcut in to do this versus waste a lot of time fumbling around, especially an ads manager and especially with tech, those are the two places that almost everybody gets stuck. Who tries to do this themselves? How much time would it save if you were to go get a really good course to do that, like our marketing accelerator course? And is that worth, is that money worth it in the sense of how much time of yours it would save? Number two, how much money would it cost and how much time would it save to actually delegate some of this? And for a lot of you, this is where you know, there’s creative ways in my opinion, there’s creative ways to come up with money and an investment in your business to be able to pour back into your marketing that we oftentimes don’t think about because we’re so close-minded to, oh I just can’t afford this and this is where, you know, maybe it’s, Hey, I, if I go network and I can sign two one-on-one clients, or I can do X, Y, Z type of work, I can take that money and then I can put it into getting support and I can create some cash in my business.

Our job as entrepreneurs is to solve problems. And in order to do that we have to ask the right questions. And a lot of times we put ourselves in a box of just like, no, I can’t afford it because I don’t have the cash flow. But what if the question was you have to figure out how to afford it, how are you going to do that? Because for a lot of you guys getting some form of support, whether that is an a full blown agency or whether that’s just a training program that supports you, the amount of time that’s gonna save is worth it a hundred times and the amount of time you would put into it otherwise and the value of your time, because a lot of us don’t value our time. And the problem with that is your time is so limited. So anything that you put your time into absolutely takes away from another thing.

So looking at that and asking yourself those questions and then asking yourself, okay, if it was gonna cost X, y, Z, then how do I go create that money? What if I had no option but to go create that money? What would I do? So let’s back up and do a little bit of a recap. First of all, if you need help prioritizing what you should be working on in your marketing and it is either just you or you have a limited team, you need to ask yourself, what is my main goal? What am I trying to accomplish over the next three to six months? And what are the biggest needle movers and actions that are going to help me accomplish that goal? Is it creating content consistently and launching a podcast? Is it relationship building and going into a community and doing that consistently?

Is it building out a funnel and figuring out your lead generation in your Facebook ads, what is going to move the needle the most and choose like a top two to three? And then what are the actions to move those forward? And can you figure out the time to do it all on your own? Or do you need that support and you need to figure out how you can invest in that support? So that’s the first thing in prioritizing. And I think if I were to prioritize for you first is relationship building. That’s pretty unpredictable obviously because you’re dependent on other people, their responses, it takes time, relationships don’t build overnight or even in a week, but it is a very valuable thing for you to put your time into. So doing that is how a lot of people at the beginning, beginning stages build their business.

The next thing is content. The next is building an audience is staying consistent, is figuring out what that is and probably pairing it with a little bit of ad spend. So new people see it from there. You get into needing a strategy, you need a funnel, you need to get your ads up, you need to get traffic to it. And that is a much bigger thing to do and gets really overwhelming. And so if you are gonna do that all on your own, it’s figuring out how am I gonna carve out the time, which is at least 10 hours a week if you’re gonna be doing all that on your own, at least probably more like 20 or what support can I go get and and get that support? And I want you guys really to question, am I holding back on getting support from a very scarcity place and am I devaluing my time to an extent that it’s hurting my business because I’m trying to do everything because I’m telling myself the story that I can’t afford it without even really trying to come up with the solution of how I can afford it.

And you know, I, I know that people get sensitive to this, but it is, even if it’s like I said, not an agency, even if it’s like a tech VA and figuring out what are the things that take you the most time that you could hire somebody to take off your plate that would give you back so much time that you could put into more strategic things, that is absolutely worth it. Now I wanna talk about here like how do you know when you’re ready for let’s say an agency or an ads manager or to run ads? And here’s my answer to this, it’s as usual, not black and white. First of all, you have to have a very clear understanding of your ideal customer. You shouldn’t be doing any major marketing, even organic without that because you will be completely lost. You don’t even know who you’re trying to attract, which marketing is all about that attraction and relationship building with specific people.

So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is that you have an offer or at least an idea of an offer, but if you’re moving to running Facebook ads, ideally you have an offer that you’ve sold, even if it’s just a couple of times, you have an understanding of I know that people want this. I’ve been able to get a positive response from it. And then the third thing you weigh is your resources. Because organic marketing, you know, going into groups, going into communities, like I’m talking about going on social media and posting is a time resource. Paid marketing is a money resource in your business and you have both resources and both are limited. And so you have to weigh which one do you have more of right now. And paid marketing is a great way to speed up getting traffic into a funnel and getting feedback and getting leads and growing your audience because you can do what you could do organically in months, in a week with paid ads, with you know, the right ad spend.

And so it’s a massive amplifier, but it’s only gonna amplify a strong foundation if you have a broken foundation because you don’t know who your ideal customer is because you’re not clear on your offer cuz you’re not clear on your strategy. All of those things, if that those are broken Facebook ads are not going to fix that. So then you weigh that. And then the other thing I always tell people is, if this is your first time running ads and hiring an, you have to go into it as if I don’t make this money back, I will be okay. I won’t be happy and I want to make it back and you should make it back. It might take more than three months to make all of it back, but you have to understand the progress of getting massive traction, of growing your email list.

Of growing your audience outweighs the initial money back. And so if you go into Facebook ads with, if I don’t make this money back this month, I can’t pay my bills or I can’t put food on my table, that is a problem. And I don’t recommend doing that because you’re setting yourself up for massive stress, bad experience and overwhelm. And so Facebook ads are not a bandaid, they’re not a saving grace. Like I said, they’re going to amplify what you have. But a lot of businesses hit a place where they’re just not reaching more people, they’re just not getting enough traffic. And so then we need to turn to Facebook ads. And the beginning 30 to 90 days of ads is ex an experiment. You’re seeing, okay, what is our cost per lead? What is our landing page conversion? How are le, how’s cold traffic converting, which is very different than organic warm traffic?

What do we need to change? What do we need to adjust? And so partnering with support that’s gonna help you through that process is very important because there will be refinements, I’ve said this before, but the game starts in marketing when the refinement starts. That is when things actually, you know, are at play because marketing isn’t about pressing go and it just working right away. It’s about constantly optimizing and refining based on data. So if you are looking to hire an agency or get support, the question to ask is, do you have that solid foundation? You don’t have to have full strategy in place to hire an agency like ours. We spend the first 30 days in strategy. We are going all in on funnel strategy, email marketing, the nurturing and sometimes we get live ads much faster, but we go through that process because we’re gonna amplify a strong foundation.

So is that in place? And then what is your budget? If you were not worst, worst case scenario to make this back, what is the budget you’re able to spend to at least start to get data and traction and feedback? And then what’s the resource that you’re willing to spend? Is it time or is it money? And that’s how I would weigh getting support. And if you’re looking at it like I can create some cash flow to do this, to make this progress much faster than I would with me trying to do it all by myself, it may be a good time to explore getting support. So I know I kind of went in a few different directions with that question, but I think it’s really worth it for you to reflect on how much you could potentially be holding your business back by not getting support.

Because I’ve seen this with hundreds of entrepreneurs, like when I go to an event, this is a huge problem that have is they try to do everything themselves and their business doesn’t grow. And I can tell you guys one of my keys to my success in my business was how fast I got support in my home, in my business, I’m constantly and still putting money back into my business and back, you know, resources back in to support me to get to the next level, to invest in the next level. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out. Sometimes I waste quote, waste money on, on investment or support that was not the right fit and it didn’t provide the results I wanted, but I was a learning lesson and I won’t do it again. And I can refine from there. And how fast you’re willing to do that and execute that without fear in that scarcity mindset is honestly one of the contributing factors to successful entrepreneurs compared to not, is like, are you willing to take some risks?

Are you willing to move fast on that? And what questions are you asking yourself? Are you very black and white on just, oh nope, I can’t afford this, there’s no way. Or is there actually a way? What if you didn’t have an option but to come up with that solution? And then finally, if you truly cannot get support and you are in that place, then it’s simple, you find the top needle movers and you block the time off in your calendar even if it’s late at night. Because when you are in that solopreneur place, you have to hustle. That is the way that business is. It is messy. You’re gonna work weekends, you’re gonna work at night. I mean you don’t have to, but if you want your business to grow, you might need to do that. And that is okay. That is normal for the beginning stages of business.

You have to earn the right to be able to afford support in a team. And then when you get that, you get to change your lifestyle. But everybody starts out at that place. All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. I will be back tomorrow with the fifth day of your questions answered, and I might throw a loop in here tomorrow is actually not a marketing question because I got this three times plus another time in my Instagram dms. So I’m gonna give you guys a more personal inside look into my life because you guys are asking for it. So I will see you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing, head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level no matter where you’re at today. We help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel, experiment with new creative marketing strategies, and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.

Emily Hirsh:

Getting some form of support, whether that is a full-blown agency or whether that’s just a training program that supports you, the amount of time that’s gonna save is worth it a hundred times in the amount of time you would put into it otherwise, and the value of your time.

You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 494.

Hello everybody. Welcome back. We are on the fourth episode of the Marketing Questions Answered series where I’m diving into your questions that you guys asked me. So thank you for such great questions. And this question is more related to your role as a CEO in getting support in your marketing. But I read it and at first I was like, well it’s not marketing strategy related. Do I want to answer this? But I really think that a lot of you guys are going to resonate with this really no matter what level you are at in your business, even if you have no team at all or you have maybe a couple of team members because there’s always a need to do more in marketing or at least the feeling of needing to do more. And so this question was, I can’t do it all.

I don’t have enough to pay for help. How do I choose what to consistently do in a sustainable way? And this tells me this, this individual is definitely feeling the overwhelm of their business, of marketing, what step to take next, how to prioritize things in all of those components. So I wanna talk about that because I think a lot of you guys probably experience that. And like I said, you probably still experience that even if you have a little bit of help. So first of all, no, you can’t do it all as a ceo especially when it comes to your marketing. You also have your whole business to run. You have your delivery of your offer, you have, you know, connecting with your customers. You have the whole operations side and just overall business management. And you can’t do it all Now in the beginning stages of a business, like let’s just talk, let’s say you’re, you just started your business, you have no help.

 That is a time where I believe hustling is acceptable and grinding is acceptable if you choose to do that. But I shared this a little bit ago on my Instagram because people oftentimes look at my business and they look at the support I have and the team I have and the support I have in my house. And they’re like, how do you do all this? And I’m like, I do it all from that support because I have that support. But it did not start out this way. It started out with just me, just like a lot of you guys. And it was messy. I didn’t have support in my house. I had a newborn baby. I was building my business. I didn’t really know what I doing. I was saying yes to a lot of things. I was trying things I wasn’t even specialized in in Facebook ads and marketing yet.

And I would work from like 8:00 PM to midnight most days cuz that was my time that I didn’t have my baby. And I think that’s something important to note because when you are in the stage at the beginning stages of your business or you don’t have support and you don’t have a team and you feel like you can’t afford help, which I wanna speak to that, but it’s messy. It’s messy. And you have to just figure out one, what the priorities are and two, when you’re gonna fit them in and making it a non-negotiable. And sometimes that’s really late at night, sometimes it’s early morning, sometimes it’s the weekend. That is the kind of state of being a solopreneur and what we signed up for if we wanna grow our business, obviously you can set boundaries and say I wanna grow slower and I don’t wanna experience that and so I won’t do that.

But that is how the beginning stages are until you can get support and start to offload those things. So I think that’s something really important to note because a lot of people compare themselves to entrepreneurs who have a big team, who have been in business for five plus years, who have built the process, who’ve been through it and feel like they are so behind and they’re failing. But you have to understand, everybody starts where you are. So in in the sense of I can’t do it all and what should I choose to do consistently in a sustainable way? If you are at the place where you cannot hire any support, you have a few options and I am gonna talk about can you actually hire the support or are you afraid to hire the support? But you have a few options. First of all, I think the most valuable use of your time at this stage is in relationship building and connecting.

How I built the beginning of my business was through Facebook groups, which is was seven years ago. So the strategy is probably not the same, but I would literally go into Facebook groups every single day, like two times a day and I would search keywords of Facebook ads, marketing support, and I would respond to every thread and I would get clients that way. Now this is gonna be unique to my business, but there is not an exact how-to of what you should do. But if you’re trying to get clients or you’re trying to sell your offer and you only have your time, one of the best uses of your time is in relationship building. So that could mean making time to reach out to a list of top dream 25 connections, either 25, you know, dream clients or maybe it’s people who their audience is your audience.

And if you could get in front of them, it would massively impact your business. Maybe it is going into communities or maybe it’s joining some communities and then providing value in showing up in as an expert in your industry, your time doing that. That is oftentimes one of the biggest needle movers because if you can get in the front of a few of these people’s audiences, then you get massive leverage and exposure quickly. Now you can also choose to do your marketing in the sense of building your funnel, running your own ads and doing all of those things. And so if you are in that state, you have to have time that you’re willing to set aside. It can’t be ambiguous. Maybe it’s one hour a day, maybe it’s 10 hours a week. My suggestion is that you decide how much time am I willing and able to commit to my marketing growing my own business?

And then you actually block that out in your calendar and then you define what you’re going to be doing during that time. Are you going to be focusing on relationship building and going into communities? Are you going to be learning how to run your ads? Are you gonna be building your funnel? Like what are you actually gonna be doing during that time? But step one is how much time are you willing and able to commit? And again, that might be late at night, it might be on the weekends at least temporarily until you can get support in the future. But if you go into it saying, oh, I have to do all my marketing and then you don’t define how much time you need to put into it and you don’t define what exactly you’re going to do to work on your marketing as we know, no progress is going to be made.

Now if you have this time defined, how do you choose what to do in the most sustainable way? This is again, gonna be different for each business, but it’s probably either relationship building, like I said, content creation, maybe with a paired, I talked about visibility ads in one of these episodes. If you wanna go back and listen maybe with a paired little bit of ad spend so you can get more reach. But building an audience, providing value, putting out consistent content and putting your time into that is very valuable. And oftentimes that is something only you can do. And then we get to the point where you have to decide, okay, am I the one who’s going to develop my entire strategy? Am I the one who’s gonna build the funnel? Am I the one who’s going to launch the ads and run the ads and learn how to do this?

And here’s where I want you to really weigh. How much would it cost to either A, get support on how to do that through at least a course or a training that would give you a shortcut in to do this versus waste a lot of time fumbling around, especially an ads manager and especially with tech, those are the two places that almost everybody gets stuck. Who tries to do this themselves? How much time would it save if you were to go get a really good course to do that, like our marketing accelerator course? And is that worth, is that money worth it in the sense of how much time of yours it would save? Number two, how much money would it cost and how much time would it save to actually delegate some of this? And for a lot of you, this is where you know, there’s creative ways in my opinion, there’s creative ways to come up with money and an investment in your business to be able to pour back into your marketing that we oftentimes don’t think about because we’re so close-minded to, oh I just can’t afford this and this is where, you know, maybe it’s, Hey, I, if I go network and I can sign two one-on-one clients, or I can do X, Y, Z type of work, I can take that money and then I can put it into getting support and I can create some cash in my business.

Our job as entrepreneurs is to solve problems. And in order to do that we have to ask the right questions. And a lot of times we put ourselves in a box of just like, no, I can’t afford it because I don’t have the cash flow. But what if the question was you have to figure out how to afford it, how are you going to do that? Because for a lot of you guys getting some form of support, whether that is an a full blown agency or whether that’s just a training program that supports you, the amount of time that’s gonna save is worth it a hundred times and the amount of time you would put into it otherwise and the value of your time, because a lot of us don’t value our time. And the problem with that is your time is so limited. So anything that you put your time into absolutely takes away from another thing.

So looking at that and asking yourself those questions and then asking yourself, okay, if it was gonna cost X, y, Z, then how do I go create that money? What if I had no option but to go create that money? What would I do? So let’s back up and do a little bit of a recap. First of all, if you need help prioritizing what you should be working on in your marketing and it is either just you or you have a limited team, you need to ask yourself, what is my main goal? What am I trying to accomplish over the next three to six months? And what are the biggest needle movers and actions that are going to help me accomplish that goal? Is it creating content consistently and launching a podcast? Is it relationship building and going into a community and doing that consistently?

Is it building out a funnel and figuring out your lead generation in your Facebook ads, what is going to move the needle the most and choose like a top two to three? And then what are the actions to move those forward? And can you figure out the time to do it all on your own? Or do you need that support and you need to figure out how you can invest in that support? So that’s the first thing in prioritizing. And I think if I were to prioritize for you first is relationship building. That’s pretty unpredictable obviously because you’re dependent on other people, their responses, it takes time, relationships don’t build overnight or even in a week, but it is a very valuable thing for you to put your time into. So doing that is how a lot of people at the beginning, beginning stages build their business.

The next thing is content. The next is building an audience is staying consistent, is figuring out what that is and probably pairing it with a little bit of ad spend. So new people see it from there. You get into needing a strategy, you need a funnel, you need to get your ads up, you need to get traffic to it. And that is a much bigger thing to do and gets really overwhelming. And so if you are gonna do that all on your own, it’s figuring out how am I gonna carve out the time, which is at least 10 hours a week if you’re gonna be doing all that on your own, at least probably more like 20 or what support can I go get and and get that support? And I want you guys really to question, am I holding back on getting support from a very scarcity place and am I devaluing my time to an extent that it’s hurting my business because I’m trying to do everything because I’m telling myself the story that I can’t afford it without even really trying to come up with the solution of how I can afford it.

And you know, I, I know that people get sensitive to this, but it is, even if it’s like I said, not an agency, even if it’s like a tech VA and figuring out what are the things that take you the most time that you could hire somebody to take off your plate that would give you back so much time that you could put into more strategic things, that is absolutely worth it. Now I wanna talk about here like how do you know when you’re ready for let’s say an agency or an ads manager or to run ads? And here’s my answer to this, it’s as usual, not black and white. First of all, you have to have a very clear understanding of your ideal customer. You shouldn’t be doing any major marketing, even organic without that because you will be completely lost. You don’t even know who you’re trying to attract, which marketing is all about that attraction and relationship building with specific people.

So that’s the first thing. And the second thing is that you have an offer or at least an idea of an offer, but if you’re moving to running Facebook ads, ideally you have an offer that you’ve sold, even if it’s just a couple of times, you have an understanding of I know that people want this. I’ve been able to get a positive response from it. And then the third thing you weigh is your resources. Because organic marketing, you know, going into groups, going into communities, like I’m talking about going on social media and posting is a time resource. Paid marketing is a money resource in your business and you have both resources and both are limited. And so you have to weigh which one do you have more of right now. And paid marketing is a great way to speed up getting traffic into a funnel and getting feedback and getting leads and growing your audience because you can do what you could do organically in months, in a week with paid ads, with you know, the right ad spend.

And so it’s a massive amplifier, but it’s only gonna amplify a strong foundation if you have a broken foundation because you don’t know who your ideal customer is because you’re not clear on your offer cuz you’re not clear on your strategy. All of those things, if that those are broken Facebook ads are not going to fix that. So then you weigh that. And then the other thing I always tell people is, if this is your first time running ads and hiring an, you have to go into it as if I don’t make this money back, I will be okay. I won’t be happy and I want to make it back and you should make it back. It might take more than three months to make all of it back, but you have to understand the progress of getting massive traction, of growing your email list.

Of growing your audience outweighs the initial money back. And so if you go into Facebook ads with, if I don’t make this money back this month, I can’t pay my bills or I can’t put food on my table, that is a problem. And I don’t recommend doing that because you’re setting yourself up for massive stress, bad experience and overwhelm. And so Facebook ads are not a bandaid, they’re not a saving grace. Like I said, they’re going to amplify what you have. But a lot of businesses hit a place where they’re just not reaching more people, they’re just not getting enough traffic. And so then we need to turn to Facebook ads. And the beginning 30 to 90 days of ads is ex an experiment. You’re seeing, okay, what is our cost per lead? What is our landing page conversion? How are le, how’s cold traffic converting, which is very different than organic warm traffic?

What do we need to change? What do we need to adjust? And so partnering with support that’s gonna help you through that process is very important because there will be refinements, I’ve said this before, but the game starts in marketing when the refinement starts. That is when things actually, you know, are at play because marketing isn’t about pressing go and it just working right away. It’s about constantly optimizing and refining based on data. So if you are looking to hire an agency or get support, the question to ask is, do you have that solid foundation? You don’t have to have full strategy in place to hire an agency like ours. We spend the first 30 days in strategy. We are going all in on funnel strategy, email marketing, the nurturing and sometimes we get live ads much faster, but we go through that process because we’re gonna amplify a strong foundation.

So is that in place? And then what is your budget? If you were not worst, worst case scenario to make this back, what is the budget you’re able to spend to at least start to get data and traction and feedback? And then what’s the resource that you’re willing to spend? Is it time or is it money? And that’s how I would weigh getting support. And if you’re looking at it like I can create some cash flow to do this, to make this progress much faster than I would with me trying to do it all by myself, it may be a good time to explore getting support. So I know I kind of went in a few different directions with that question, but I think it’s really worth it for you to reflect on how much you could potentially be holding your business back by not getting support.

Because I’ve seen this with hundreds of entrepreneurs, like when I go to an event, this is a huge problem that have is they try to do everything themselves and their business doesn’t grow. And I can tell you guys one of my keys to my success in my business was how fast I got support in my home, in my business, I’m constantly and still putting money back into my business and back, you know, resources back in to support me to get to the next level, to invest in the next level. Sometimes it doesn’t pan out. Sometimes I waste quote, waste money on, on investment or support that was not the right fit and it didn’t provide the results I wanted, but I was a learning lesson and I won’t do it again. And I can refine from there. And how fast you’re willing to do that and execute that without fear in that scarcity mindset is honestly one of the contributing factors to successful entrepreneurs compared to not, is like, are you willing to take some risks?

Are you willing to move fast on that? And what questions are you asking yourself? Are you very black and white on just, oh nope, I can’t afford this, there’s no way. Or is there actually a way? What if you didn’t have an option but to come up with that solution? And then finally, if you truly cannot get support and you are in that place, then it’s simple, you find the top needle movers and you block the time off in your calendar even if it’s late at night. Because when you are in that solopreneur place, you have to hustle. That is the way that business is. It is messy. You’re gonna work weekends, you’re gonna work at night. I mean you don’t have to, but if you want your business to grow, you might need to do that. And that is okay. That is normal for the beginning stages of business.

You have to earn the right to be able to afford support in a team. And then when you get that, you get to change your lifestyle. But everybody starts out at that place. All right, you guys, thank you so much for tuning into today’s episode. I will be back tomorrow with the fifth day of your questions answered, and I might throw a loop in here tomorrow is actually not a marketing question because I got this three times plus another time in my Instagram dms. So I’m gonna give you guys a more personal inside look into my life because you guys are asking for it. So I will see you tomorrow.

Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing, head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level no matter where you’re at today. We help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel, experiment with new creative marketing strategies, and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible. Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.

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