Salome Schillack:

Hello, and welcome to episode 114 of the Shine Show. Today's episode is called, How to Know Exactly Where to Find Your Most Profitable Buyer. And today's episode is brought to you by my brand new masterclass called The Three Secrets to Profitable Online Course Launches Only The Best Facebook Ads Managers Know. And I'm willing to bet it is not what you think. So no more throwing spaghetti on the wall, crossing your fingers, hoping your next launch will somehow bring you better results. Learn how to take control of your course launches and scale your business beyond belief without wasting money along the way. And you can sign up for one of the two classes. Yes, we're only doing two classes by going to shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. Now let's jump into the episode.

Giving up your time and freedom to make money is so 2009. Hi, I'm your host Salome Schillack and I help online course creators launch, grow and scale their businesses with Facebook and Instagram ads so that they can make more money and have an even bigger impact in the world. If you're ready to be inspired, to dream bigger, launch sooner and grow your online business faster, then tune in because you are ready to shine and this is the Shine Show.

Have you ever bought an online course? Something that is somebody else's signature program? Something that is somebody else's, "I'm going to teach you step by step how to launch an online course or how to make money online," thing, and you followed the instructions carefully and it still didn't work? Hands up if that has happened to you. In today's episode, I'm going to tell you why it didn't work. There's another thing I want to ask you. Hands up if you've hired ads managers to run your ads for you for your launch, and at the end of your launch you were no closer to rubbing $2 together. Hands up if that's happened to you. That breaks my heart when that happens. I've seen it happen a million times. It has happened to me because it just kind of causes this ridiculous, like whose fault is it really that there's no money here at the ads managers or the client.

And it's just a really crappy situation that I guess it happens to all ads managers. I'm hoping it doesn't happen to all online course launchers because I have a solution for that. But the only way I found that solution was because when this did happen, when I did have clients, when we had clients in the agency who hired us to run ads for them, for their launches and at the end of their launches, they didn't make a profit or they were in the hole, that just broke my heart. And whilst most of my clients have always been very gracious when things like this happened, it still feels kind of shitty when that happens to anybody. You don't want to be part of that. So one of the things that I know about myself is I am insanely stubborn. I am very stubborn. My mother always tells me that too. She says, "You're just like your dad, just as stubborn as your dad." Which I take as a complete compliment. My dad was insanely stubborn, but he was also very smart.

So I lean in when things like that happen. And it is in a leaning in to the question of why sometimes when people follow these signature methods, these step-by-step launch instructions, and sometimes when they hire even the best ads managers, they still end up with a big fat dud. So I really engaged with that. And I just really asked myself, what is happening here? Why does this happen to good people? And what can we do about this? Because I cannot live in a world where this is the norm. And I did discover something that I'm going to share with you today in this episode. And I call this something, this something that I discovered, this thing, I call into the lasagna. It's different from the [Joey 00:05:19]. It's different from the Joey where you say, "How're you doing?" It's not the Joey. If you've heard me teach engagement ads, you know what the Joey is.

This is the lasagna. It's a whole different Italian dish. Yeah, Joey's an Italian dish too. All my 40 year olds are chuckling now. Okay. So let's talk about the lasagna and how the lasagna is going to get you out of this one size fits all signature launch method that you've tried that hasn't worked for you, or how we're going to get you out of hiring ads managers to run ads for you, and then coming up short. Here's the lasagna in short. I'm going to try to keep this short, but this is a whole like big training. I can keep talking about this for days. To make a lasagna, you need three core ingredients. To make a successful launch, you need three core ingredients. To build a lasagna dish, you layer your three core ingredients on top of one another over and over and over. To scale an online course's business, you layer your three key ingredients on top of each other over and over and over. And as you get better at these layers, your ingredients become more sophisticated.

Okay. Now what do I mean with my crazy metaphor? Here's what I mean. Lasagna has three things in it. It has that white saucy thing that some people would say is a [inaudible 00:07:14] sauce. I'm just going to call it the white sauce. You have minced meat, which you can pretty much pick up a packet of pre-made lasagna mince from the local daily, or you can make it days in advance in all sorts of fancy ways, and then you have the lasagna sheets. So there's your three core ingredients. When we are launching online courses, we have three core ingredients. We have an audience. You always need an audience. When you are building an online courses business, you need an audience. You need an offer. You need to make that audience an offer. The offer is the exchange that happens when you say, "You want all these amazing things? Click here to go and get it," and they actually click and they get it. That's an offer that converts.

You can also make offers that don't convert. That's a whole another conversation. And the third ingredient that every online course launch has is a sales mechanism. A sales mechanism is any thing you use, any process you use to create excitement anticipation, and to communicate your offer. So a sales mechanism can be a webinar. It can be a video series. It can be three emails. In its simplest form, it's usually a few emails. And its most complex form, it could have videos and webinars and live broadcasts and you can add to it as much complexity as you want. But if you're just starting out and you're brand new, you need these three things. You need an audience, an offer and a sales mechanism. And when you're just starting out, your audience is probably fairly small. Your offer is probably a lower dollar offer. And your sales mechanism is probably fairly simple. When you grow and you get bigger and bigger and bigger, and you start adding affiliates and all sorts of things, your audience becomes bigger and bigger and bigger, and they come from a lot of different places.

So that adds complexity to that audience. Your offers, you create multiple offers and you might even have paid plans and full pays and upsells and down sells, and a course and a membership. So you have multiple offers that people can buy at multiple different points in their journey with you. And your sales mechanism probably also becomes more complex because that three-part email series you synced out when you just started out, might not work when you're trying to make $10 million in your next launch. You're going to need a little bit of a bigger sales mechanism, a more complex sales mechanism. So you can see how in this lasagna of building online courses, where our three key ingredients are audience, offer and sales mechanism, we can start fairly simply, simple, [inaudible 00:10:56]. You can start in a very simple way. And it is just those key ingredients that gets more and more and more complex, but it's still just key ingredients. And so the way I like to think of it is you get... You build it in layers and when you're just starting out, your layers are fairly basic.

And then as you get better and better at it, now you're making your own white sauce at home. You're not buying it in a bottle from the shop. Now, you're dry aging your meat. And I don't know, I don't cook clearly. You can say I don't cook, but I don't know what they do with the lasagna, but you cook it at least a week in advance and let it sit and let it soak and let it juicify and do all the yummy things. And of course, you're going to make your lasagna sheets at home. My husband actually makes a really good homemade pasta. So you're going to make it at home. So I have an idea of the time and the effort that goes into homemade pasta. Not that I've ever done it, but these things get more and more complex. So you see the problem with signature courses or signature online courses that teach you one step by step [inaudible 00:12:17] numbers way of launching. The problem with it is it does not take into consideration all the variables that you're working with inside your audience, inside your offer and inside your sales mechanism.

That is the problem with signature courses or signature methods. The problem with the ads manager piece is, ads managers can only bring you audiences. That is literally all we can do. We can amplify your offer, but if your offer doesn't convert, we can't do anything about it. We can't do anything about your sales mechanism. We have no control over that. So when an ads manager gets paid to bring massive audiences to offers that have not been proven to convert, or that has been proven to convert to warm audiences, for example, people who've been on your email list for a long time or affiliates, they're warm audiences too. And now you expect the exact same result from a cold audience that was bought with ads, and you end up being disappointed, it's kind of because you were comparing apples with pears. Or if your sales mechanism is not the right mechanism for what you're selling for the price point you're selling. The higher, your price point is, the bigger mechanism you need. If you're selling anything under $200, you can use an email sequence. Super easy.

You just get them in on a lead magnet, sell it to them with a email sequence. But when it gets to $400, $500, now maybe you need a workshop or a challenge. When it gets to $1,000 or $3,000. Now you need a video series or a webinar. When it gets to $10,000, now you need a video series and a webinar, and maybe even to book a call with you. And when it gets to $30,000 $40,000, $50,000 now you're like, "I'm only selling to people who've already spanked $10,000 with me, and they have to book a call and apply." So you see how your sales mechanism also changes according to the value of your offer? Are you guys seeing where the problem is with all these one size fits all signature methods, and with hiring an ads manager, expecting that ads manager who can only bring you more people to make you money? I hope you see problem. That is the gap. That is the big black hole that I identified that made me go, "Oh, this is why people launch and then bawl their eyes out because it didn't work."

So the problem is, all three of these things need to work together in order to produce a favorable outcome. The solution is you need to know how to build your lasagna. You need to know how to measure the impact of each of your lasagna ingredients. So you need to know where your audience came from. You need to know which offers they took you up on, which ones did they say yes to. And you need to know how they moved through your sales mechanism. And whether you're just starting out, or whether you're scaling from a million dollars to $10 million, that is pretty much the basics of what you need to know. You need the information about those things. And I've given that a name. I call that your most profitable customer journey. And what we want to do is we want to use tagging, which I'm going to go into in a second.

We're going to use tagging to identify how your audience behaves when you make them an offer inside your sales mechanism. There's your three ingredients. That's your lasagna. Your audience, your offer and your sales mechanism. So we use a very, very simple tool called tagging that all of us have inside of our email CRM. And this is something that is so easy to do and so simple. And if you start doing it right from the beginning, you're going to save yourself a lot of headaches because the more your business grows, the more complex this is going to get. And the more you go back and look at this data and identify your most profitable customer journey, the more you're going to be able to manage this complexity and actually simplify it. So how do we set ourselves up to know exactly where our most profitable students or members are coming from?

The answer is, in tagging inside our CRMs, our email service providers, I'm talking about ActiveCampaign or MailChimp or Infusionsoft or Kartra or Kajabi. Those are called email CRMs. It's wherever you host your email list. When ever you create a lead magnet or a new offer. That gets linked to your email CRM. Now don't ask me how to do that. I don't do that in my business. It's fairly straightforward. I used to do it a long time ago. I haven't done it in a while, but every time you create an offer and every time you create a lead magnet, they have to give you some information, and then it links to your CRM, which can trigger a tag to be added to their names. In the most simplest of forms, it happens on the form. So when you are creating a lead magnet, the little form piece, the little piece, it used to be called in a box, a light box. Now it's called a form.

It's that little bit where they enter their first name and their email address. That middle piece is called a form, and it's linked to your email CRM. And when you set up that form, you tell your CRM which tags to add to anyone who opts in using that form. Now you're going to do the same thing for each one of your offers. And then you are going to tag these people according to what they opt in for. Tags or in very simple form identifiers inside of your CRM. It identifies specific actions people took. In other words, they downloaded your lead magnet, they signed up for your webinar, they purchased your course, they purchased the upsell on your course, they then downloaded your next lead magnet. They signed up for your coaching. Every time someone converts either to a lead or to a sale in your business, you want to make sure you have a tag set up that identifies them as a conversion in that point in your business.

Because remember, what we're trying to do is we're trying to identify how audiences move through our offers and through our sales mechanisms so that we can see what their most... What our most profitable customer journey is, which means we can then put our money in the places where we know when we put our money in these places, these people actually result in sales. Let me give you an example. You're running two lead magnets. You're running ads to two lead magnets. Some people have 7, 8, 9, 10 lead magnets, and it gives me complete overwhelm. I want to go and sit in the corner and rock when I hear someone has seven or eight lead magnets. You start with one or two, right? One or two. You have to ask yourself, how is this lead magnet solving a small enough problem for my ideal customer to show them that I am the right person to help them, but also to show them that once I've solved this small problem, I can also solve much bigger problems?

And of course then, your bigger problem solving happens inside of your course. Now you go into launch mode and you are running a webinar. So you've run some ads for these two lead magnets, you've promoted these two lead magnets on your social media, and you have these two lead magnets on your website. Now you're going to launch mode and you are running a ton of ads to a webinar. You're running those ads to all of the people who already opted in for your lead magnets, your warm audience, because you want to make sure they sign up for your webinar, but you're also spending a whole lot of money running webinar ads to people who've never ever heard your name. And then you sell your course to them. So here's the tags you'll have. You'll have a tag for lead magnet number one, you'll have a tag, the lead magnet number two, you'll have a tag for webinar registrations, and you'll have a tag for sales.

Now, at the end of your launch, you download the list of all the people who got the sales tag. In other words, your complete buyers list. Download the list of all of your buyers with all of their associated tags. And now, you want to start sorting these stacks. You want to see what percentage of these buyers opted in for lead magnet number one. You want to see what percentage of the buyers opted in for lead magnet number two. You also want to see what percentage of people of these buyers opted in for the webinar. And you might want to say, "Well, how many of the people that opted in... That ended up buying my course, opted in for lead magnet number one, and the webinar? How many people opted in for lead magnet number two and the webinar?"

And those numbers could look very, very different. But if you spot a trend, if you see that out of all of the buyers, 90% of the buyers opted in for the webinar and then there might be 10% that never opted in for the webinar, didn't even watch the webinar. They were on your list, they got the emails and they also signed up. If you know that 90% of your buyers opted in for the webinar that tells you that in order for people to purchase this course, they need to be on the webinar. The webinar is the important conversion mechanism, because most of the people that purchased were on the webinar. So that gives you a clue, right? Now you can look at purchasers to lead magnets. Now, remember, some people can be on both lead magnets, right?

But let's say you go, "Okay. How many of the people that purchased my course also downloaded lead magnet number one?" And let's say that's 20%. And then you go, "How many of the people that purchased my course also downloaded lead magnet number one?" And you see that that is 5%. That gives you a clue as to which lead magnet you're going to run ads to the next time before you launch. Because if you have two lead magnets and 5% of the people who downloaded one of those lead magnets resulted in sales, but 20% of the other one resulted in sales, where are you going to put your money? You're going to put it in the lead magnet that is going to result in sales for you. Now, what if the lead magnet that only converted at 5% gets you leads for $2, but the lead magnet that converted at 20% costs $5 a lead.

Where are you going to put your money? You're still going to put your money into the expensive lead because the expensive lead is now proven to be your more profitable lead down the track. And that is a game changer for most people. Now you know where to put your ad money when you're building your audience. In other words, when you're running ads to your lead magnets. You know where to put your money when you are creating your conversion mechanism, and you can look at your sales results and decide if you're happy with how your offer converted or not. If you're not happy with how your offer converted, then you just need to rinse and repeat it and make a change to that offer, and then run all these numbers again and see if it worked, until your offer converts. But here's the thing. If you're armed with this knowledge, you're not going to go out and spend a bunch of money building audiences for a webinar or for any launch.

If you don't already have data that shows you that your offer is going to convert at least first to your warm people, at least first to the people on your... I mean on your email list and then to your cold people. So, whew, that was a lot of numbers. Are you still with me? Are you following? I hope you're with me. So what this helps us see is where our most profitable customer journey is so that we can put our money into the places where we know if we put our money in there, it is more likely for us to get a sale three levels down, three actions down. It also indicates to us whether our audience needs a lot of warming up before we can launch to them or whether we're ready to run this launch to a cold audience.

So let's take the webinar number again. If 90% of the buyers were on the webinar, and we break it down and we say, "Okay, what percentage of the people, of that 90% had the webinar as their first point of contact with us?" And if that number is high, let's say 75% of those people had their first point of contact as the webinar, now we know that the webinar works really well to a cold audience. Are you going to be running list building ads next time? Probably not because your webinar converts to a cold audience. Are you getting closer to evergreening things? Yes, you are. So you see how this lasagna works? This lasagna works because you're looking at the three key ingredients and you start very simply. You start super simple. Where's my audience? What's my conversion mechanism, and what is my offer?

And then you add complexity to it and you layer it. And as your audience grows and you get multiple lead magnets or multiple sources of leads, maybe you have affiliates that brings in leads. Maybe you use social media, your Instagram explodes, all of a sudden you have 100,000 followers and they're downloading your lead magnet like bananas. You want to know where they come from. So you want to make sure you have that tagging setup, but now your lasagna is quite complex because you have multiple places where those audience is coming from. And then when you have multiple offers, you want to break down these offers so that you can see, if someone buys this little thing over here, they're probably more likely to then buy the big thing over there. That is knowledge that you can be armed with. And then of course, you want to look at your offer and how your offer converts.

When you know these numbers and you use tagging to track your most profitable customer journey, you're able to put your money into what's already working well, which means you get to free up your energy to do the thing that made you want to impact people's lives and make a difference to all of your students in the first place. Frees up your energy to hire people like ads managers, and arm them with the right data so that they can find you the right audience because your offers already convert well. And hire an integrator and a VA and a social media manager and all the people that you can then be the CEO of, and just show up for your team and show up for your tribe, for your community. That is my wish for you. If you have loved today's episode, you are going to love the launch lounge. In the launch lounge, I teach to in depth, how to build your most profitable customer value journey.

This is all new stuff. Even the launch lounge students who are in there now are excited to see all this new stuff. It is coming your way in the brand new launch lounge. And right now, you can register for the master class called the three secrets to profitable online course launches. Only the best Facebook ads managers know. And it's probably not what you think. You can register for that now by going to shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. There will only be two classes available. Two classes only. So come and join me on that masterclass because I would love to show you more of what I've shared. Just a tiny bit with you today. So that's shineandsucceed.com/readytolaunch. I will see you next week, hear you, talk to you next week, and I hope to see you on the class. Take care my friends. Bye.

Thank you so much for listening. If you had fun, please come back next week and remember to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing.