Introduction
In this blog I'm going to share with you my thoughts on whether you should be utilising paid ads or going fully organic with your online marketing when you're just starting out with your online coaching business.

So if you've every tried to start an online business, chances are you've been using organic marketing methods such as social media, content creation, blogging, networking. But is that the right thing to do to help you get your business off the ground or should you be using paid ads right out of the gate!?

So I've spent a tone of time & money from my own journey and in this blog I want to give you my conclusions of what you should do and why, to help you scale your online coaching business as fast as possible.

At the end I'm also going to share with you a bonus tip that will allow you to attract your ideal clients with just 1 sentence so you can start getting paying clients in the fastest time possible.

Recently I watched a reel on Instagram and it was someone being interviewed who was recommending when you're just starting out in your business that you should not be running ads and you should be 100% organic to stop you wasting money on ads before you know what works.

Although this seems like a fantastic idea in principle and to new coaches it might be the news they were hoping to hear, that they should just focus on organic and save their money.

As I know, it can be very scary to invest your money without any guarantee that it will bring you back a positive return on investment. For many people it feels too much like gambling and not an investment.

The first thing you need to do before you do any type of marketing is get clear on your audience, your offer and your message.

You need to know what your big promise is to your potential clients and if you're not sure how to create your big promise headline, then subscribe to my YouTube channel to keep up to date with new content including how to create your big promise headline (coming soon).

ORGANIC MARKETING

So let's break down organic marketing and what it really means to your business.

If you're like most online coaches, your initial audience consists of friends and family as your only means of a following are what you have on social media.

So let's say you have 2000 people in your current audience across your different social media channels.

Now lets also take into account that Facebook only shows your content to less than 5% of your following, so out of the 2000 people that follow you, on average, 100 people might see your content that you share.

Do you think that in those 100 people who sees your content you can realistically scale your coaching business?

And then on-top of that, you've got to test your messaging to find out what works and what doesn't, but the issue is, are your ideal clients within that group of 100 people that are seeing your messaging?

Yes, you can utilise Facebook groups which is a realistic strategy for organic growth as there are some groups full of your ideal clients. The issue with this is that there are so many other people cold messaging and using this strategy too, because it's free, meaning you are competing against a huge pool of people all trying to get the attention of your ideal client.

It's now a lot harder to grow your following on social media as it's becoming more of a pay-to-play platform. So if your plan is to only use organic marketing to launch your coaching business then expect it to take you a very long time to get any traction.

If you use organic marketing, let's say it takes you 3 months to refine your messaging and your offer, and then on top of that you have to nail down the correct client acquisition strategy which could take another 3 months of trial and error. So during that time, you have to pay your bills, you have to find time to do other things outside of your business and you have to maintain the willpower and resilience to keep pushing forward with your organic marketing efforts.

So you're postponing your success by at least 6 months and who knows how much longer by only using organic marketing.

PAID ADS

Ok, so now what about paid ads...

Although with paid ads it will cost you money, the benefit of it is that you can get the important answers in a very fast time-frame. Days rather than months.

You see, let's say you are wanting to test your message, you create an ad and you tell Facebook who you want them to show your ad too.

You give Facebook $200 ($50 per day across 4 days) to test and Facebook shows your ad to 4000 people who maybe 20% of those people are the right fit for your program. So that's 800 ideal clients who are seeing your offer/message across 4 days. This means you are getting the information you need regarding your offer & message in only 4 days which could literally take you months and months of testing with organic marketing.

So would you rather invest $200 or 2-3 months & hundreds of hours of your time trying to come to the same conclusion?

And once you have your messaging nailed down via your ads, you now know you have a truly scalable business where you just keep increasing your ad spend to put your message in-front of more people, to attract more clients. You cannot say the same thing about organic marketing because you only ever have an infinite amount of time and audience you can show your message too.

But this isn't to say you don't keep producing content, as your content still plays a large part of building trust with your audience once you have their attention. You see, when people see your ad, if they like what you say, they will then come check you out on social media, which means you need to stay relevant and produce content that resonates with them so you can build know, like and trust with these people.

But what paid ads mean for you is that you don't need to be hustling on social media any more, you can just focus on producing content and your ads.

So the choice is yours, either you can spend months trying to make organic marketing work, or you can spend a few hundred $ to test your messaging and offer, and then use that information to amplify your organic marketing and your paid marketing.

BONUS

Earlier in the blog I said I was going to share with you a bonus tip that will allow you to attract your ideal clients with just 1 sentence so you can start getting paying clients in the fastest time possible.

So here's the secret sentence...

"I'm looking for 5 (ideal client) who want to (goal they want) without (thing they want to avoid) in just (timeframe). Guaranteed or I keep working with you for free until you do!"

This one sentence has been responsible for creating millions of dollars for many online coaches, so make sure you use it.

If you want to know about how to utilise this sentence and create your Big Promise Headline, then make sure you subscribe on YouTube and hit that notification bell because I'll be releasing a video on this topic very soon and sending out an email too as a reminder.

That's it from me, thanks for sticking around until the end. I'll see you next time.

Mark Nicholson

Systems & Scale Digital