It’s expensive. Very expensive. The most expensive – especially if you don’t have a thoroughly tried and tested offer and sales messaging.
You’ve got literally 0.25 seconds to pique the interest of someone hurtling through their social feed or, like many, scrolling straight past Google’s ads to get to the more trustworthy organic results.
What’s the most powerful and engaging sentence you can think of to get someone to stop scrolling and click on your ad?
The less of these you have:
- A proper Ideal customer profile (15+ attributes)
- Detailed lists of 10+ customer pain points
- Tried and tested cold outreach messaging
- Hyper concise no-brainer offers
- 20+ unique insights generated from sales calls
- A deep understanding of marketing/sales theory
- A genuinely unique and innovative offering
- A solid understanding of branding/design
The harder it’s going to be for you to get that click.
But let’s say you do get that click…
What are these clickers going to see? A beautifully crafted landing page optimised for marketing and sales, that effortlessly addresses all of their doubts, concerns and fears concisely and effectively, coupled with a frictionless sign-up/enquiry/checkout process?
Only you’ll know the answer to that, but if you’re just starting or still struggling with growth beyond word of mouth and referrals, you have a much greater chance of finding success with SEO or cold outreach.
Yes, you might initially fail at those too, that’s just part of the growth journey, but at least your credit cards won’t be driven to an early grave.
If you’re happy to take a lot of sales calls, I’d probably start with cold email/LinkedIn outreach.
If you’re as companionable as a cactus in the desert, and you’re happy to invest time into high quality content creation then SEO is probably a better starting point for you.
Just make sure that you do proper keyword research (high search volume, low keyword difficulty, high intent to purchase) as a one off project before signing up to any monthly or long term commitments or you’ll get a complimentary ride on the rollercoaster of rip-offs.
If they can’t convert SEO babble and communicate in plain English (in a believable way) about what new revenue you could expect, keep searching until you find someone capable of talking without bamboozling.
If you want to go down the cold outreach route, make sure you investigate the company’s processes. Ask them for some redacted scripts they’ve written for other clients. If they are long and waffly or only talk about services provided, and they don’t include strong first line hooks, references to big wins, address any pain points or sales objections – run.
Cold outreach doesn’t work when your strategy relies purely on spamming the masses.
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