Caitlin Bacher:
My name is Caitlin Bacher, founder and CEO of Scale with Success® and I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. We are sharing revealing conversations about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join us here to discover the tough decisions we’ve had to make, the biggest failures we’ve had to bounce back from, and the learnings that emerged every step of the way. We are so grateful that we have the chance to share it all with you right here on Scale with Success®: The Podcast Built for Course Creators. Let’s get started.
When Facebook ads aren’t working, how do I get more people into my funnel? So, there’s two things that I want to talk about. The first is if they’re not working, create a plan to make them work. And I just want to say that because I think a lot of times what happens is we just start to come up with, like, workarounds. Well, my ads don’t work, so I’m just going to be doing these other things. And ideally, you want to be able to pinpoint where are you now in terms of ROAS and ad spend, right? So, if you have a, let’s say you currently have a 5x ROAS, and you’re spending $30K per month, okay? But let’s say to get to where you want to go, you need to maintain that 5x ROAS, but you need to spend $60K a month. Well, now you know where you are and where you want to go and you can start to scale spend, and then be like, “Oh, what falls apart?”
As I’m scaling spend and I’m monitoring it every week, now I’m going to go back into the KPIs and see what is not working with my funnel, what needs to be improved. And even like within the ad itself, what’s happening? Are people seeing the ad too frequently? Is this a particular audience just exhausted? If something is not working, ideally, we just want to fix that one thing without having to throw everything out.
The simple way of thinking about it for… The way that I think about it is where am I now? So, like in terms of ROAS and ad spend, where am I right now? Where do I want to be? And then, coming up with what is the plan of action to get there? Whether it’s me coming up with a plan or someone else coming up with a plan, I just want to see the actual words on the paper. Like, show me what your plan is.
And I also need to know who’s going to help because I’m not doing this all by myself. So, who on the team is helping me do this? What’s the plan? What are the check-in points? If something’s not working, let’s go back to the plan. What do we need to change? All of that. And then, the second piece of that is there’s a lot that we can do regarding organic foundation. And then, what really happens is that we find ourselves start to get busy and we’re letting certain things go because we don’t have the time to do those things and we haven’t hired someone else to do those things for us, or we are doing something and we’re just waiting to feel creatively inspired to do it. And the reality is that the momentum comes from repetition and consistency and kind of being boring, right?
And so, making sure that you have a process in place to produce consistent content. What is the weekly core content? Is it a blog post? Is it a podcast? Is it a live stream? Whatever it is. And that there’s also a process to just repurpose that. So, who on your team, or maybe it’s you for now, is going to take that one blog post or that one live stream and break it up and then make content for all the different social media channels, whichever ones that you’re on. And then also, what are the regular, if you’re doing guest blogs, or if you’re going to be a podcast guest spots, you should have a year filled up with what’s on the calendar. Like, “Oh, I see that next quarter, I’m going to be on four different podcasts and I have two guest blogging opportunities”, and it’s already on the calendar scheduled.
So, what you don’t want to happen is wait until you’re in a spot where you’re in a tight spot and you’re like, “Oh man, the ROAS is really starting to dip. Now I got to scrounge something together.” Put these things in place so that you have that foundational layer. So, you’re consistently just showing up to stuff. I can’t remember who it was, I think it was Denise Duffield-Thomas, who, she’s like a money coach, and she said that her first year of business, she was on one podcast every single week. And that was like her primary thing. She was just like, “I’m going to be on someone else’s podcast every single week to just build that authority and visibility by leveraging time and relationships, not money, because it doesn’t cost you money to do that, but time and relationships.” And the third one here is prescheduled affiliate partnership.
So, just like you have the calendar booked out with, “Oh, I know I’m going to do a guest blog on this month here and this one there and a podcast guest here”, you also want to have those affiliate partnerships. So, if you didn’t get a chance to watch the profitable partnership training that we did earlier this afternoon, make sure you watch the recording. That’ll be up by Friday. And that’s another great thing about partnerships is that you don’t pay for the leads upfront. It’s not like ads where you’re paying upfront for the leads and then you’re hoping they’ll convert and you’ll see a return. A partnership, you don’t pay unless someone buys. And even if they don’t buy, you just got like hundreds or thousands of people on your list that month for free, totally for free. And they all went down your funnel. So, a lot of times people think of…
We talked a little bit about on that training earlier today of the concept of three ways to grow your audience or to get people through your funnel. It’s either time, which is posting organically, which is good, but then money. So, like paying for ads. And then, the third one is relationships. It’s important to have all three going so that it’s just about risk mitigation. You don’t ever want to be in a place where you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I had all my revenue relying on this specific thing happening. And so now I’m screwed, but this way, and if you have it all booked out just like when your kids start school and you have a calendar of events for like, “Oh, I have this day off. And this day is the field trip or whatever.” Like planning your business calendar in that same way so that you know in advance like, “Oh, I need to have two affiliate partnerships happening in quarter three so what are those going to be?” And then, you’re planning those out for quarter three, but you’re doing it in quarter two.
And then, the last thing is a live event. If you, I mean, I guess now with COVID a lot of people, obviously aren’t doing those as much or maybe, I think they’re starting to again, I don’t know, but it could be like a live in person event or it could be a live event. Maybe you want to do a live challenge or you want to host a summit or I don’t know, you want to do something live, then that’s always an option, but you shouldn’t need to do you live events if all of these things are happening, but having something like this could be a boost just to have it in the books like in advance so that you’re running it, not from a place of, “Oh my gosh, I’m behind in revenue. I need to generate some revenue fast”, but more like, “Oh, I have this healthy stuff working. And I see on the schedule, there’s a live event.” So, that’s going to be like icing on the cake or whatever.
Are you ready to scale your online course business so you can impact the lives of more people and create real change in the world? Join us inside our signature program, Scale with Success®, where you’ll get the content, coaching, and community you need to successfully implement our proven process to help you scale so you can start reaping the rewards of running a highly profitable online course business. Scale with Success® is a multi-year group coaching experience built for online course creators who are ready to scale their business to and through $1 million with certainty as a result of having the right support at the right time. What are you waiting for? Click over to scalewithsuccess.com and apply now.
Today’s episode is brought to you by Scale With Success® Accelerator — an online course designed to help you generate launch-sized revenue without lanching. If you want to learn MORE about our proven method for success, click here to watch my free masterclass. See you in there!