Ever wondered why marketing experts teach opposite strategies, like organic marketing vs. paid ads?

In this episode, I break down why both approaches can work, how to choose what’s right for you, and the critical role of strong foundations.

Tune in for a clear, no-nonsense take on choosing the best path for your business growth!

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Happy Thursday. My four year old brought home the second cold in like two weeks into our house. And as you know, if you have multiple kids, it just like goes from one person to the next for the next like 10 days. And you’re as a parent, lucky if you don’t get it, I unfortunately did. So I don’t sound amazing. I don’t feel terrible. But I don’t feel amazing and I sound like I’m sick, so I’m sorry for that. Man, the preschool germs are real. And also I am of the belief so important that our kids do get sick to build their immune system naturally, but it is like something every week or every other week going around this time of year, quick update for you guys. 

So I’m super excited going into next year. And I think I might do a podcast about this and what we’ve been doing internally, but I have so many thoughts and takeaways to share just on this year and the things that I did internally in my company, kind of behind the scenes, but 2024 really was a year of like not burn it down but reset and rebuild for me internally. Simplify, kind of reset, look at what’s working, what’s not working and and boil it down to only doing the most important things and focuses. So we have spent the last six weeks myself and two of my direct reports leadership team really working on overhauling and refining and defining our 2025 plan. We revamped our core values, we revamped our mission, clarity on our own ideal customers, just kind of like looked at everything and overturned it and just questioned it and reset it.

And then created an entire 2025 plan, financial plan, goals, you know team goals. And so today we just had what we called our town hall meeting where we got to share that with the entire team. so I am so excited and really so grateful for the things that happened this year that were really challenging that caused me to look at things deeper and question things and make shifts. And I know I shared on the podcast like a couple, maybe four months ago, uh, a challenging season. and We went through when my right hand of three years quit suddenly and just, it was a very challenging for me and a whole thing that happened on the team. But the person that came in in her you know to replace her, but also I shifted the role a little bit. Had that not happened, we wouldn’t have had her come in who has been such a positive experience and just growth for the company and our leadership, which impacts everybody in the company. And so I’m just really grateful for that.

And it’s such a lesson in that those hard seasons and those challenges and those things that really stretch you and push you and make you uncomfortable and make you question like, why is this happening? And this sucks so much. There is a bigger reason. And without those, we can’t get to the other side because we would never question something or even improve something if there wasn’t challenges that forced us to do that, that put us in that mindset. So I feel more hopeful around 2025 and the direction we’re going and the clarity we have and the team that I have right now and the goals that we have that I probably have felt in like five years. So that’s really cool. And I also feel very hopeful for our economy and just business in general, I think is is going to really improve. so Alright, before I dive into today’s topic, which was inspired after I taught a training on Tuesday, I do want to share a quick announcement, which is for a super limited time between now and end of day Sunday.

If you book your call, the call can happen after, but the call has to be booked within that timeframe. We are offering our biggest sale of the year for our Expand Done With You program. $500 off the program. I’ve never offered a discount this big. It will most likely, if not for sure, never be this price again. It’s an insane discount. The program itself is $3,000 with payment plans available. So $500 off that is crazy. And if you book your call just to explore joining Expand, you will qualify for that discount. And if you don’t know what our Expand program is, this is my Done With You program that has Done For You components to it. and I know I’m biased, but it truly is the best program out there when it comes to supporting somebody to go from where they are right now to a marketing strategy created, executed, and working bringing in leads, bringing in sales. Our team actually develops the entire strategy for you, the funnel strategy, the email marketing, the messaging, the offer positioning, all of it. 

We develop it for you, we deliver the strategy to you, and then we support you in executing it between trainings, all of the templates I have, copy templates, design templates, and coaching. We have daily coaching options to support with your messaging your strategy your ads it’s it’s truly such an incredible program I sent out an email yesterday because I asked my team to share some wins with me from the program and it was like overwhelming the amount of success like you you cannot fail in this program and so If you’re somebody who’s not ready for full done for you support, but you’re done trying to do all this on your own. And if you had a blueprint and we create milestones for your business, like literally a step by step plan, that’s like, here’s where you are. And you’re going to do this, this, this, and this. And that’s going to get you to this end.

That’s what Expand is. So if you go to embodied marketing.com/expand, you can read a little bit more about the program and you can book your call and qualify for that $500 off. All right. Let’s dive into today’s content. So I was asked this question on my training on Tuesday and I thought it was a really, really good question, which someone said, how come experts in the this industry can teach two different things, like who is right. Because my training and the way that I teach, a lot of it is around paid ads. I believe that as long as you have a solid foundation, you have solid messaging, solid offer, solid offer positioning, and a strategy that you should run paid ads because I believe, and like yes, it’s a belief, yes, it’s an opinion, but have seen this be true over and over again, it is way faster than relying on organic marketing only. Now, there are people out there and experts who teach the opposite, who teach organic marketing and here’s how you do it and and you should do all of this before you run paid ads. And so my training obviously teaches paid ads. It teaches here’s the formula, what you need, what you need before paid ads, but then you use paid ads to grow your audience, generate leads and convert sales. That’s my process.

So this person on my training asked what I think is a great question, which is how are people teaching the opposite? Like which one is right? And I think this is such a present thing for so many of you is like you can get two different messages and it’s so confusing. Like which direction do I go to grow my business? And I think this is true in many different industries. I think this is for sure true with health and wellness. You’ll get people who will say do this and then you’ll get somebody else who says do the opposite. What one is right? My answer to this person was, well, here’s the reality. There is no one right way to grow your business. So both are right, right? Both experts, myself and somebody else who’s saying the opposite, which is use organic, don’t use paid ads, here’s organic marketing strategies. They’re also right because you can grow your business that way. It’s not impossible.

You have to weigh and have the discernment and the ability to decide for yourself which one you feel is the best option for you because both have pros and cons. Both are a use of resources. So here’s how I look at it. Organic is very much a resource of time. If you have time and you have no money to spend on ads, you probably don’t have another option, but to use organic marketing because how else will you grow your business? When you use organic marketing, It is a lot of work with little return, especially in the beginning. It’s also very much out of your control because you are depending on the algorithm to put your posts in front of new people.

And you don’t really have control over who those new people are, how many of them. And most of the time what happens is when you post on social media and you use organic marketing, less than 10% of your followers will actually see the content and a very, very small percentage of new people will see it. So you really don’t have control. That’s why a lot of times for people when they do organic marketing, it feels like you’re doing a lot of work and you’re actually very busy. But nothing’s happening. You’re spinning your wheels. Now, are some people successful with organic only? Yes. Like I have a member in my mastermind who she lives in Finland and it’s a very small country and she serves people in Finland and Sweden and it’s very niche. And so she’s been actually very successful organically because she doesn’t have any competition.

And her reels have kind of taken off and she’s also very good at content creation. It is her art. I have somebody else in my mastermind and I find this so fascinating who is in a very similar niche and they’re both in health and wellness. And she has used 100% paid ads to grow her business. Like she barely posts on social media. She hates it. There’s a lot of great content. She doesn’t care. She doesn’t think it moves in the needle. 100% of her leads and her sales come through paid ads. So you have these two people in very similar industries, these two entrepreneurs who have done completely different strategies and are both successful. Because yes, there is no one right way. Now, the mastermind member who’s in Finland has also branched out to paid ads because she needed to increase even more her reach. But my point is, yes, it can be successful. However, I think gaining momentum organically and really being able to reach a lot of new people at a fast pace is very rare. Like being able to go viral or get a lot of traction just through content. You are having to feed that machine of organic and the algorithm a lot and put a lot into that content creation.

And typically, my view is to not use organic as a growth strategy or at least a major growth strategy. You could use it as a small growth strategy where you get a little bit of your growth, but if you are depending on it for a majority of your growth, I feel it will be very slow and it will feel very frustrating. Whereas with paid ads, number one, it’s really fast because if you can spend more money and you don’t have to spend a ton, you can start paid ads with a low budget. But if you can spend more money, then you’re going to reach more people. It’s a game. And so you also can reach people very fast and you can make sure that you’re exact right people through the targeting. The reality is Instagram, Facebook, all of these social platforms are set up as a business. So the founders and the company wants you to run ads. Therefore, you will be more successful if you run ads in terms of your reach and the quality and quantity of your reach.

Again, organic can work, but it’s almost like, it’s like a game, it’s like a gambling game. It’s like one in a hundred, right? Have a viral video. I don’t know if that’s the actual stat. It’s probably less. So you have a 1% or less chance that your video will go viral and get all this traction. And while you try to have that happen, you’re spending so much time on your organic content. And spinning and spinning and spinning. Can it work? Yes. Is it the best option for you? I don’t know. Organic takes the resource of time. It’s a big time commitment. It’s less in your control what happens. And it also takes longer for something for the move for the needle to move, for results to start. Paid ads is the investment of money. You have to obviously have money to invest in paid ads.

It will take hardly any time, especially if you get support. But once you have the paid ads set up, your content, your lead gen, your visibility is shown to people every hour of the day without you having to be on social media. You also have full control in the targeting, who you’re showing it to and the volume. Like if you want to reach more people, if you want to get more leads, you simply increase your budget. So that’s why I love paid ads is because I don’t want to be on social media all the time. I also want control over how quickly I grow. I want to know when I have a webinar, if I spend X amount, I will get this many leads and I can plan for that. So now I’m in the driver’s seat.

Now, where paid ads gets a bad rap, I think, is only when people try to use paid ads without having the foundation. And I’m telling you, even as someone who loves paid ads, if you have terrible messaging or terrible offer positioning or an offer that’s really not clear what it is and what the outcomes are, or you have a strategy that’s not great, it’s not for your ideal customer, it’s not clear what the outcome is of your lead gen, then yeah, paid ads aren’t gonna work. The problem is not the paid ads. The problem is your foundation. And you’re amplifying a broken foundation which is why whenever we work with a client, whether it’s our done with you or our done for you, the first thing that we do, the first step in our process, the first thing I teach in every single one of my webinars, so much so that this last series I taught that was two days, the entire first day was dedicated to this, it’s the foundation. It’s the messaging, the connection to the ideal customer, the ability to define their emotions, the offer and the way the offer is talked about in a way that it connects to those emotions and then the actual strategy. This is why even when you come and are done with your program, the first thing we do is not teach you ads. The first thing we do is make your strategy that ads are going to run to and then we help you with all the messaging and then creating the strategy and then you run ads. Ads is like step three out of five.

Not step one, and that’s where I believe people get it confused. Now back to the original point of this, organic versus ads. Both can work, but you have to weigh for your business when you look at the next three months, six months, 12 months. What resource do you have more of? Do you have a lot of time to pour into content creation and spend creating content every day posting reels multiple times a day sometimes to get the traction? Or can you find some investment to save you the time to speed up the progress of your results, but also make sure you have that foundation? And which one is the right one for you? And if you’re like, well, there’s absolutely no way I could spend money on ads, well, then organic is your only option.

Will it work? Maybe, eventually, yes, it can work. It’s gonna take a lot of time and it’s really out of your control. You can do your best to create good content and honestly, the marketing foundation still matters with organic as well because again, if you don’t have good messaging or you don’t have good offer positioning, it’s also not gonna work on organic but you have to weigh which one is right for you. Both can work. I think another piece here is what are you naturally good at? So there’s definitely a percentage of people who are very good at content creation. My mastermind member from Finland, she is incredible at content creation. Like I tell her it’s her art creating her reels that she makes with recipes and food and the way she records them and it creates them, it’s incredible. Like I could not do it. I don’t think a lot of people could do it. So it makes sense that she’s had so much success doing that because there’s so much authenticity and uniqueness that goes into her content creation. Everybody doesn’t have that. Or you have these influencers on TikTok or Instagram who are like hilarious, right?

And they have these massive followings because they’ve created these videos. Okay. Again, 1% of us are going to fall in that category. Most business owners, CEOs don’t want to be and can’t be and shouldn’t be full-time content creators. And in this case with my girl in my mastermind, I actually told her, don’t outsource your content creation. Like a lot of people will tell you to do that because it’s taking you time, but like that is your art. Just like I would not outsource the creation of my webinar or my podcast. Like that is your art. So another factor in this is what are you naturally good at and how can you leverage that? And if creating a bunch of reels and social media content sounds terrible to you and you hate doing that, you probably shouldn’t have a strategy where that’s required. My client in the mastermind who’s the opposite hates social media, hates content creation who uses all ads for her business growth and has, will hit a million dollars this year. She hates content creation. She hates recording video. She has a serious resistance to it. Like for us to get ad videos from her, it sometimes takes months because she doesn’t want to record them. So if she had a strategy that required her to make a bunch of content every day, she would not do it. She wouldn’t be successful. So all of that to say both work.

And to answer the question of why are there experts who say two different things? What is the right answer? Both. Both can be right. I never teach my strategies and say this is the only way. I believe through proving it over and over again in my own experience that it is one of the best ways to get to success quickly, but it’s not the only way. It’s not the right way. There is no right way. Everybody’s got a unique business and a unique path to success, but I teach what I teach and I deliver how I deliver in my company because I believe it is the fastest and best way. One last thing I want to say is sometimes I see people like put it as if they’re showing off and they’re like, I grew my business to XYZ without ads. Like I did it organically. I didn’t even spend money on ads. I just saw this the other day. And while cool that you grew your business to that level without ads, number one, how long ago was that? A lot has changed in the last five to 10 years. Number two. What if you used ads wouldn’t have been even better? Like I don’t get why that’s like a brag to be like, I grew my business organically. I’ve never spent money on ads. Okay. But if you spent money on ads and you are making sales that you could put into ads, wouldn’t your business grow more? So that’s kind of, in my opinion, not a good decision.

And also why my client who has massive success organically expanded out to paid ads and she got like five times the leads. Then she would have been able to get organically with her ads. I think she got 3000 total signed up for her challenge. And I don’t know the exact number, but less than a thousand came from organic. I might be a little off on that, but still a very small ish, not small, but a smaller percentage came from organic.

And that’s what somebody who’s crushing it with organic with a 50,000 plus Instagram following. Even when I run my promotions, the percentage of leads that come from ads is like 80%. And the other 20% is from my email list and my organic. It’s just so much smaller. Organic should be seen as a nurture strategy. You are consistent. You create content that makes you feel inspired. It’s aligned. It nurtures the people in your audience who are following you and came through your lead gen and they’re in your world, but it’s not your number one growth strategy. That’s not what it’s intended to be for most of us in my opinion.

So when somebody tells you like this is the strategy, this is the only way to do it, I would say that’s number one or red flag. But number two, understand the pros and cons of every suggestion that an expert gives you. Because you have to be the one who decides what’s right for you. The resources you have, the business you have, the unique strengths that you have and what is going to give you the most leverage to create that success. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. I will talk to you next week.