Online Courses

The “product placement” secret of effective course marketing

Posted byIan Brodie on February 25th, 2022.

I'm sure you're well aware of the use of product placement to market things like fancy cars in James Bond films or Apple products in Ted Lasso.

But did you know that product placement actually goes back hundreds of years? Many people believe the very recognisable Bass beer bottles in Manet's “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” were an early example of artists being paid to include commercial products in their works to help with their sales.

Product placement has been around for an age because it works. And it's increased significantly in recent years because we've become rather blind to more overt forms of marketing.

We may go make a cup of tea when the ads come on during our favourite show (or fast forward through them on the DVR version), but when the good guys are all using Apple computers in the latest spy film it sinks unavoidably into our consciousness.

And using our own form of product placement is one of the best ways of getting across the messages I talked about in our last email that are needed before a potential customer will be ready to buy.

If you want to increase sales of a product through a movie, you don't make the plot of the movie about the product. That would be desperately uninteresting and far too blatant.

Instead you make the plot of the movie about something interesting and weave the product into the story.

James Bond needs to get somewhere fast, so he jumps into an Aston Martin. The product helps illustrate the story.

And it's the same with many of the marketing messages you want to get across about your course.

The “plot” of your marketing like emails, blog posts and videos should be about something your potential buyers are inherently interested in and would value – not about your product. But you weave your product in to illustrate that plot.

An example might make that a bit clearer:

Let's say you want to get across the message that your course teaching small businesses how to win corporate clients really does get results for them and is different to the traditional way they may have been taught sales.

That's an important message your potential customers need to hear to give them confidence to buy.

But if you tried sending an email that just overtly told them how great it was and sprinkled in a few testimonials, no one is going to pay much attention. They're going to do the email equivalent of making a cup of tea or fast-forwarding through the ads.

And certainly, no one is going to share a blog post or video that's just you making a sales pitch.

So instead, you need to make the “plot” (ie the topic) of your content more interesting and valuable. That means anything to do with a problem or challenge or goal or aspiration your potential client might have (in an area related to your course, obvs.)

In the case of your course on winning more corporate clients the problems might be getting leads, or keeping in touch with corporate contacts or navigating their way through a complex procurement process or dealing with corporate politics or negotiating a big deal or a whole host of things.

Once you've decided on your topic you weave in a “product placement” for the messages you want to get across.

So you might write an email about “How to negotiate your way to 20% more corporate sales”, or “How to reach real corporate decision makers”. Something that someone who wants to get more corporate sales would be interested in.

Now you need to share valuable content.

But rather than just sharing 5 tips about negotiation, or a new technique for getting through to decision-makers, illustrate it with a story that gets your sales message across.

So it might begin “I got an email from Sally recently with details of how she used the negotiation techniques taught in our Corporate Sales Mastery course to increase her average sale value by over 20%. Here are the 5 top tips she recommends…”.

Or perhaps “Did you know there's a reliable method for connecting with hard-to-reach corporate decision-makers without needing to cold call or send endless unanswered emails?

This is one of 5 powerful methods we teach in our Corporate Sales Mastery course. I've outlined the basics here to get you going but obviously there are more details and a sample script in the course itself…”

In both cases you go on to share valuable tips and ideas that will be of immediate benefit to your readers. But in passing you also mention that there's a lot more in your course should they buy it.

And obviously, the stories you use must be true. Real client feedback, not made up.

You can be more or less subtle in how you mention the course. The important thing is that they hear about it while getting value from your content.

So in other words, they won't mentally “fast forward” or “make a cup of tea”. They'll notice your message because it's embedded in something useful for them that they're voluntarily paying attention to.

You'll be able to get across those key messages they need to hear to get them ready to buy – while keeping them engaged and building credibility through your valuable content.

All by simply being a bit more thoughtful about how to structure and illustrate the useful ideas y0u share with them.

There's an art to it of course. And a few pitfalls to avoid if you want your message to have a real impact on sales. Those details are something I teach in my upcoming “valuable content that sells” course…

…only joking. There is no course :)

But you see what I mean. You can easily take any useful content and structure it to generate demand for your course with just a little thought and planning.

It's how you sell without being (overtly) salesy.

Online Courses

Valuable content is not enough…here’s what else you need

Posted byIan Brodie on February 23rd, 2022.

Last post I made the relatively bold statement that “giving value” isn't enough to get your potential clients to buy from you.

That's because, on its own, “giving value” doesn't hit all the key hot buttons needed for someone to be ready to buy.

What are those hot buttons?

I'm sure they're different for different people. And different for different situations. And different for different products.

But in my experience, there's a lot of commonality.

So let's play 80:20 and focus on the key things that almost always need to be in place before someone will be ready to buy.

• Firstly, they need to have a big (and ideally urgent) problem or goal.
• Next, they need to believe that their problem or goal is actually worth solving (given that it's likely to take time, effort and money to do so).
• They need to believe that solving that problem or achieving that goal is actually possible and achievable for them.
• They need to believe that just doing more of what they're doing today isn't going to solve that problem (otherwise why would they bother buying your course if they can solve it themselves).
• They need to believe that you understand them (so that your course will be a good fit or them) and that you're on their side (so they can trust you and your course to deliver).
• They need to believe that your solution is new and different to anything they've tried before (so it has a chance of working even if they've tried to solve their problems before and failed).
• They need to believe that now is the right time to do this – rather than waiting…and waiting…and waiting.

I'm sure you could think of other ones that are typical for your clients. But from my experience, almost all these factors need to be in play to some degree for someone to be ready to buy an online course. Particularly a high-value one.

And that means that if you want people to buy your online course, you need to make sure these factors are in place. Not just hope they are.

But there's a challenge.

Few of these factors are inherently interesting or valuable to your course buyers in and of themselves.

Try sending out an email that basically says “Hey, I understand you. And I have a new solution for you. And now is the best time for you to do something blah blah blah”.

These are very seller-centric messages.

You have to get them across. But you can't just lead with them because on their own they'll just bore or annoy your course-buying prospects.

You need to be a bit smarter than that.

I'll talk about how in our next post.

Online Courses

Should I give value – or push for the sale?

Posted byIan Brodie on February 16th, 2022.

Hopefully you made it through last week's post on course maths relatively unscathed :)

But hopefully, it also showed how important it is that your post-launch marketing is able to bring on board new customers profitably. Not just “build awareness” or “get the word out”.

To get customers profitably on an ongoing basis you need two systems to be up and running in your business.

The first brings new contacts into your world – usually onto your email list. The second nurtures your relationship with those contacts so they're ready to buy (and actually do buy).

I'm going to talk about the second system first. Because unless you can reliably convert your contacts into paying customers there's no point in trying to get more of them.

Often when people like me talk about nurturing relationships we bad mouth nasty old aggressive marketers who hit their email list with promotion after promotion and deadline after deadline. And we eulogise lovely fluffy marketers who give value to their subscribers through useful content instead.

Of course, the world is not that simple.

Pushy, aggressive marketing can and does work at times.

In fact, it seems particularly effective for selling marketing training and services – which is why you probably see it so much ;)

But it's not the kind of marketing I want to do and it's probably not the kind of marketing you want to do either. And it's much less effective for products and services that are a bigger, more complex, more thoughtful decision to buy.

That doesn't mean that all you have to do is share valuable content with your contacts and suddenly they'll be lining up to buy from you though.

The problem with a lot of the “give value” thinking on marketing is that it flies in the face of what we know are the real drivers of buying behaviour. It's necessary, but not sufficient.

Sharing valuable content with potential customers can build your credibility (if it's the right content). And it can create a sense of reciprocation and liking because you've done them a favour.

But there's a lot more goes into making a sale.

You can't just send out valuable content hoping it will do the trick. You need to be a bit more thoughtful about it and make sure your content is not just valuable but hits the right buttons to move people closer to being ready to buy,

We'll talk about what those buttons are dans mon prochain mél.

– Ian

PS writing in Franglais isn't one of those hot buttons, but I wish it was. The two things that had me in hysterics more than any other as a child were Miles Kington's Franglais books and Geoffrey Willans' tales of Molesworth's adventures at St Custards.

Online Courses

The mathematics of successful courses

Posted byIan Brodie on February 9th, 2022.

Here's a simple rule for success in life:

If something's working well, do more of it. If it's not, stop it. If it's marginal, tweak it until it works well. And if you can't tweak it to work well, stop it.

Obviously it's a simplification. But it works.

The big problem is if you can't actually tell if something is working well, if it's not, or if it's marginal.

And that's the case with most marketing for online courses.

The way most people market their course post-launch is to do “a bit of this, a bit of that”.

A Linkedin post. A YouTube video. Blogging. Maybe some ads for a while. Maybe another mini-launch to their email list or social media contacts.

Or maybe you try the latest technique your favourite guru says is “crushing it” (before they sell you another course on another technique that's crushing it next month). We've all been there.

We know consistency is important. But it's difficult to be consistent if you don't know whether something is working or not.

And the key to knowing whether something is working is to understand your numbers.

For online courses (and memberships and other online businesses) the key numbers are your customer lifetime value (LTV) and customer acquisition cost (CAC)

In other words, how much money you make in total from a customer from all the products and services you sell them, and how much it costs you to get them as a customer in the first place.

If you only sell one course, then the lifetime value is the price of that course. If you have upsells, other courses they can buy later or other services they can buy, then the lifetime value is the price of the initial course plus the price of the others times the percentage who “upgrade” and buy them.

How do you figure out those numbers?

If you've been selling your courses for a while you should have some historical data on conversion rates. If not, you'll have to make some estimates.

But the good news is your numbers don't have to be all that accurate.  Many people make the mistake of giving up on calculating LTV and CAC because they can't get it 100% accurate. But all you need to know is a rough estimate of what your LTV is at least and what your CAC is at most.

You're going to use those numbers to decide whether to do more of what you're doing, stop it, or tweak it. So as long as you're in the right ball park, you'll make the right decision.

In his book The Automatic Customer, John Warrillow suggests that the “magic formula” for successful subscription based businesses is where LTV > 3 x CAC.

I've found that formula works well for course business too. It gives a decent margin for error and for ongoing “cost of doing business” expenses.

So what you do in practice is calculate the average value of your customers. Then calculate your marketing costs per customer.

If you're using paid advertising, your tracking should tell you that. For more organic marketing, work out how much it costs you (in terms of your time and any out-of-pocket expenses) and divide by the number of customers it brings you.

Of course, there'll be time lags. You'll do marketing and some people won't buy straight away but may buy later. But if you use a long enough time period of, say, a few months, then for a product with a reasonably short sales cycle like an online course, the numbers will be good enough. Certainly, if your lifetime value is nowhere near your cost of acquisition after a few months it's unlikely to ever rise to more than 3x.

You really want to be able to do this for your different marketing channels, so you'll need to have some tracking that tells you which channel a customer came from.

Again, it won't be super accurate. Some people will click on a Linkedin post and then a Facebook ad for example.

But it's good enough.

When you know those numbers – even just roughly – you can make sensible decisions about whether your ads are working. Or whether all that posting on Twitter is worth your time. Or whether you're better off spending time doing YouTube videos.

It tells you what to do more of, what to stop, and what you might be able to tweak to get working.

Without those numbers you're stuck in “a bit of this, a bit of that” land, hoping that something is working but not really knowing what – and so not being able to stop anything and not being able to double-down on anything.

Now I'm going to be honest here: I don't have all these numbers on tap for my business.

I wish I did. But the truth is I have to dive into a few systems as a one-off exercise when I want to see them. And make a few approximations and informed guesses.

But even then, the results are hugely helpful.

You can do the same.

– Ian

PS Don't forget, there are tons of great case studies and tutorials for you to learn from for free on the Course Builders Hub – including lots of examples of tried and tested approaches to marketing your courses (which, of course, you'd want to measure the LTV and CAC for :) ) 

Online Courses

So you’ve launched your course…what next?

Posted byIan Brodie on February 4th, 2022.

It may not feel like it right now, but creating and launching your online course is the “easy” part.

It's easy in the sense that it's a known quantity that everyone can do.

It may be a bit of a slog at times. You might get stuck. You might need to get help.

But it's 100% doable.

You can even lower the risk like many of our Course Builders TV interviewees have done by doing interviews and surveys to check demand, pre-selling the course, and building it as they deliver it through live sessions.

But once you've launched the real work begins: getting new customers week in, week out.

This is where the vast majority of successful course builders make their money.

And where the vast majority of people struggle.

Many course builders have confessed to me privately that they got stuck after the razzamatazz of their launch. They didn't know what to do to bring in new buyers consistently without having to go through the huge pressure of a launch.

So our next emails are going to focus on just that: how to get a steady stream of customers for your online course post-launch.

To do that, you'll need to switch from event-based thinking to evergreen-based thinking. Away from “what activities and tasks can I do to drum up business” to “what systems and processes can I put in place to generate business for me with less of my intervention”.

Without evergreen thinking you'll never realise the promise of online courses to deliver scalable income and time freedom. You'll be stuck on the treadmill of one-off activity after one-off activity, event after event.

And there are two evergreen systems you need to put in place for an online course:

• A system for nurturing relationships so you convert your existing contacts into customers on a regular basis.
• A system for profitably attracting new contacts into your world so you can start nurturing them.

But we're going to start in the next post with some maths (why do Brits call it “maths” and Americans call it “math” by the way?).

That probably doesn't sound super exciting. But it is super important.

Online Courses

Making corporate outreach easy

Posted byIan Brodie on January 26th, 2022.

This is the last in our short series of posts about selling online courses to corporates.

Corporates are a great place to start if you already have good contacts.

You can chat to them informally to get an idea of what they're looking for. You already know who to speak to and who makes decisions. They already trust you so there's less risk.

But what if you don't have an existing contact base in corporates but you still want to focus on them?

That's much harder.

Cold outreach is really difficult for most of us.

There are some people who are perfectly happy to pick up the phone or shoot off an email or Linkedin message to someone they don't know to try initiate a connection to talk about their products and services.

For most of us though, it's really difficult psychologically.

We hate the idea of being seen as pushy or salesy or desperate so we're hesitant to reach out. If we do, it's only after agonising over it for ages. And the inevitable high percentage of rejection really gets us down and we quickly abandon the whole process.

Of course, someone who's naturally comfortable at cold outreach will be reading that and thinking “oh come on Ian, get over yourself. Just do it, what's the worst that can happen?”

But to those of us for whom cold outreach is difficult, that advice is about as much use as Bob Newhart's psychiatrist.

But what does work are a couple of approaches to cold outreach that bypass all those feelings of angst and fear of what people might think. And the people you reach out to actually appreciate them.

The first is to lead with value. In other words when you contact people cold, instead of trying to pitch at them or quiz them with questions to “get to know them”, you offer them something valuable for free with no strings attached. 

Usually that's a free report or video but it can be anything and I've written about this approach many times under the heading of Value Based Marketing.

But today I want to talk about the second way to make contact that is psychologically easier and is actually appreciated by the people you reach out to.

It's to ask for help.

Normally you'd ask for help and feedback from people you know. But if you're in the early stages of creating an online course there's absolutely no reason why you can't reach out to people you don't know to get their feedback on your course ideas.

I need to be really clear here: your primary goal is to get actual feedback. You're not pretending to get feedback in order to make contact and then at some point offer your course.  You're making contact to genuinely get feedback to help shape your course – and as a side effect you'll now have a contact who might be interested in buying it downstream.

Why would someone you don't know be willing to give up their time to help you and give you feedback?

I really don't know for sure – we're strange creatures we humans. But for some reason many people are. 

My guess is that many of us naturally like to help others (which is a good thing and probably one reason our species has survived so long). And being asked for advice is a bit flattering too.

So as long as you keep your request modest – a 15-minute call or 20 minutes over coffee for example – many people will say yes and help.

You can watch my Course Builders TV video on how to validate your course ideas to find out what to ask to get good feedback here. 

After you've got your feedback they'll have got to know you a little through the process. Some will voluntarily ask about the course you're planning.

With others you can ask them if they'd like you to send details when you've consolidated your feedback. Some will say yes, some will say no.

The point is that none of it is embarrassing. None of it feels like you're being pushy. Or that you're desperate.

All of it feels like a proper conversation between two grown ups.

Which means even the most reserved of us can feel comfortable doing it. We don't have to “get over ourselves” or “just do it” or even “stop it” (thank you Bob).