Don’t use paid ads

Whoa, intense thumbnail.  Don't be fooled: I like how simply this video breaks down such a common frustration regarding the business use of social media.

Social media platforms have made it so easy and frictionless to buy ads, it’s super easy to fall into the trap of doing paid social media advertising just to “keep up with the Joneses”.

Everybody else is doing it, so it must be working, right?

Well, do you really know that paid social media ads are actually working out for most people? How do you know this?

Could this be yet another social media shell game?

My opinion: yes, it is! At least, in a large majority of situations.

What to do instead of paid ads

My rule of thumb: don’t even consider doing paid ads until you’re getting lots of regular, unsolicited positive feedback from real people, in the real world, on the free stuff that you’re already doing. Likes on a post don’t count; I’m talking people reaching out and contacting you directly with positive feedback. If that hasn’t happened to you yet, just keep working on your stuff until it does.

For most people, most of the time, dumping money into social ads is no better than lighting that money on fire, or spinning it on a roulette wheel. That’s because any paid advertising strategy can only move a ball that’s already moving a bit faster. It can’t start the ball rolling from nothing.

As the video above says: paid advertising is an accelerator, not an initiator. There are lots of other things you need to get right first, before any kind of paid marketing will start to work for you.

Paid ads are an advanced technique, and they are absolutely not something you should be doing in your very first experiments with marketing your creative work. I recommend it being one of the very last things you consider spending money on, actually.

Do I use paid ads myself? Sure, sometimes. But, never as a primary strategy, or the only strategy. And, I only pay when an ad is doing so well that it’s super obvious that it actually is working. My ad spend is extremely small and focused, compared to many.

There is an argument to be made that you can be quite successful with $0 in total ad spend, and that high quality organic content marketing is all that’s necessary.

Is there a place for paid ads for smaller artists?

My opinion: there is a time and a place to consider some amount of paid ad use, particularly because purely organic reach takes a lot of time to get going. But, the application of paid ads is super individually brand-specific, very technical, and probably not as necessary as you might think.

Don’t do what most people do, which is: run one $20-$40 ad on social media, with no way to track how effective their ad spend actually was. That’s a waste of money.

For most people, social ads are certainly not a “money button”. That’s where you spend money on ads, and then expect to make it all back immediately off of sales caused directly by those ads. Please be careful with that, it’s a very dangerous trap to fall into.

If the free content marketing side isn’t working for you yet, paid ads won’t change that. They’re just one tool in your marketing toolbelt, and not even the most powerful one.