A few days ago, I finished a five-day challenge all about paid ads. I went in as a complete beginner, right at the very start, knowing almost nothing, and I came out with a notebook full of scribbles and one thought that has been sitting with me ever since.
At the start of this year, I set myself three things to learn. AI, which is the big one, and which I’ll be working quietly away at for months yet. Talking a little more naturally on camera, which is still to come. And ads, which, as it turned out, I couldn’t quite leave alone.
So I threw myself in. And what I learnt surprised me, though perhaps not quite in the way I’d expected.
There’s a quiet pressure that sits over so many of us when it comes to marketing a creative business. The sense that there’s a right way to be doing all of this, and that everyone else has already worked it out. Post more. Show up more. And now, for a great many people, ads sitting on top of everything else too. Another thing you’re apparently meant to be doing, and probably aren’t doing enough of.
I think you might recognise that feeling. I certainly do.
Two businesses, two completely different approaches
A good part of the week, I simply spent looking. Studying how different businesses actually use ads, properly, with my notebook open beside me.
And the range was quite something. There were huge businesses pouring serious money into ads and growing very quickly indeed. That was the picture I’d half expected. But then there were far smaller businesses doing something I hadn’t expected at all. Rather than keeping up a constant, consistent presence on social media, they were using ads in its place. Quietly, and with really lovely, ethical marketing. No shouting about it. It simply meant they didn’t have to show up on Instagram every other day, if that wasn’t where their energy wanted to go.
Two completely different businesses. Two completely different approaches. Both of them working.
A few things took me by surprise along the way, and I’ll share them, because I think they’re worth knowing.
The first, and the one I keep coming back to, is that ads are a long game. A really long game. I’d half assumed you put an ad out into the world and it either works or it doesn’t, but it isn’t like that at all. The early stage is all testing and refining, and there’s a stretch where it can feel as though nothing much is happening. The work is to keep going, to keep adjusting, and to let it build slowly over time.
The second, which I found rather freeing, is that most of your ads simply won’t work. You might run a whole batch, and it’s one, perhaps two, that carry the whole thing. Once I understood that, a great deal of the pressure fell away.
And the third is that the words matter far more than the mechanics. Not the budgets and the buttons, but what you actually say, and who you say it to. Which, when you sit with it, is just good marketing. The same work I talk about all the time, only in a slightly different room.
The question worth sitting with
But here is where it all settled for me.
There is no single right way to grow a creative business. There really isn’t.
There’s the person who would look at my business and tell me, with complete conviction, that I should be putting everything into ads. There’s the person who would look at exactly the same business and tell me, with just as much conviction, that organic marketing is the only honest route. And in their own world, both of them would be right.
What matters far more than either of them is you. What fits your focus. What works alongside the way you actually want to run things, and live.
And this, I think, is the part that’s so easy to skip when something new comes along. Especially something that seems to be working beautifully for everyone else. The instinct is to reach for it quickly, before you miss out. But the real work is to sit quietly and calmly with it first, and ask… is this aligned? Does it fit the business I’m building, and the way I want to build it?
For me, the honest answer right now is that ads have a real place, and I will use them in time. But not yet. I’d rather become really comfortable with my organic visibility and my strategic outreach first, and bring ads in later as a gentle top-up rather than the main event. That has always been the way I’ve grown my business. It’s the way I understand best, and the way that feels most like mine.
(I did test three small ads along the way, and they did exactly what I’d hoped they would. So this isn’t a case of ads not working for me. It’s me choosing the order, deliberately.)
And there’s one thing I keep seeing, again and again, that I don’t think is said often enough. The most effective way I know to grow a creative business, the easiest and quietly the quickest, isn’t ads at all. It’s strategic outreach, and collaboration. Real relationships with the right people. I watch it work for creative business after creative business.
There is no one right way. There never has been. The freedom in that is quietly enormous, once you let yourself feel it. You get to choose. And the only real work, in the end, is sitting still enough to hear which way is actually yours.
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