Caitlin Bacher:
What started about a year ago as my initial idea to just kind of close the group for a few weeks turned into something a whole lot longer.
So I wanted to go ahead and have a little chit chat about that.
So what I’m going to do is I wrote some notes here because I just want to make sure that I cover everything and I want this to be, not just me sharing things that I’ve been going through in my business, but I also wanted you to be able to have some takeaways for yourself and some things that you could think about and apply to your own business.
So today we’re going to be talking all about why I closed my Facebook group and why I’m back.
Today I want to really talk about everything, the good, the bad, the ugly. So let’s get into it.
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.
The first reason why I decided to close my group is different than the reason why I decided to keep it closed for so long.
And complete transparency, the reason why I initially closed my group was because I just wanted a break.
So at the time my team was going through a reorganization, it was a time of transition.
We were onboarding new employees, we were off boarding employees, and so my initial plan was to just pause it for a few weeks to kind of decide who was going to do what.
Then what happened is the turning the free group back on just kept getting pushed down the priority list and other initiatives started to take its place.
And before I knew it, it had been months since my Facebook group was open.
Now, at the time, I was really spending a lot of time coaching and training my new employees. I had a brand new leadership team.
And because of all of that, I really just took my attention off of the group.
And luckily for us, we had lots of organic and paid strategies that were going in place. So our company revenue wasn’t directly tied to what we did or didn’t do inside of the Facebook group.
So here’s what happened, the good, the bad, the ugly, the not so ugly, whatever you want to call it.
So after a few weeks, after a few weeks, after a few months went by eventually of having the group closed, I was kind of curious, this is a little bit weird, but I was actually kind of curious to see what would happen if we kept it closed.
And the reason is because I was really questioning how effective our Facebook group was inside of our business.
So we’ve always had difficulty measuring the effectiveness of the group in terms of our overall marketing strategy.
It’s easy to say, “Oh yes, I went live and I made a sale.” Great, yes, that kind of attribution is easy to track.
But when it comes to a big overall marketing strategy, one of the things that’s really hard about running an online course business is that you have to be really choosy about how you’re spending your time.
So each platform that you choose to publish content on takes time, money, people, lots of resources.
And so we were spending, as a company, a considerable amount of time and money keeping this free group up and running, but we didn’t really have cold hard data to show that it was working.
And yes, we had some manual workarounds and different things in order to track what was working and what wasn’t and different attribution and things like that. But those weren’t things that we could really grow into at scale. It wasn’t something that I could foresee us continue to do as business doubled, tripled, et cetera.
And one of the really tricky things about online marketing, especially now, is that sometimes you can’t track direct attribution.
So the only way to know for sure is to stop doing something and then just see what happens.
And although even if you stop doing the thing that you’re doing, the free Facebook group or whatever to see what happens, even then you actually may not know for sure, because whatever happens as a result of closing the Facebook group, it might not be directly linked to closing the group.
So again, there’s lots of gray over here.
So the good part was that it was kind of … I don’t know, it was kind of interesting to say, “Well, let’s see what happens. Let’s just close the group and see what happens.”
So we were able to do that.
The bad part is I still don’t know.
I still do not know if it helped or hurt to actually close this group.
One of the things that I did notice that was not in the numbers but that was just kind of in my heart, in my feelings, is that I started to feel a little bit less connected to our audience.
Now, again, I don’t know if that was directly attributed to the Facebook group because I know that I personally was spending a lot more time off of social media over the last year.
So it’s possible that maybe I was feeling disconnected for some other reason.
But out of all the social platforms that are out there, I still think that a Facebook group is really the most intimate other than DMs, because obviously you’re just talking one on one with someone in a closed container.
But I feel like Facebook group, out of everything from YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever, a Facebook group is really to me the most intimate.
Now for the ugly.
So I like to make decisions in my business that are based on numbers. I’m very by the numbers. I’m very much a data person.
If the numbers say that something is not working, we don’t do it.
If numbers say that something is working, we do more of it.
But what about this in between space where we don’t know really for sure if something is working or not?
I mean, I guess in that instance you just kind of have to go with your gut, which is exactly what I’m doing.
And my gut tells me that now more than ever, audiences really want to feel connected to the brand that they’re buying from.
And we still as a company want to of course amplify that connection with paid advertising, other organic strategies.
But I really liked the idea.
What I kind of wanted to do differently inside of the Facebook group is that I really liked the idea of being able to host these free events in here just from time to time, some things that we can get together, we can learn something new, I can put together some really great content and we can just come together as a community and have some fun.
When I had this initial idea to do this, I was kind of unsure. I was like, “Oh gosh, if I tell the team that I want to do this thing, are they going to say, ‘Oh, Caitlin, you’re changing your mind again‘, da da, whatever.”
Which does happen sometimes.
But I knew that when I wanted to open it up, I wanted to do it with a bang.
I wanted to do it with something really fun.
And when I told my team this idea to kind of reopen it with a free challenge, they were really excited about it.
And that’s pretty much the reason why I’m here right now.
So doing this free challenge is really an opportunity to reconnect with my community, to share some of the strategies that are working best for us and for our clients to generate revenue inside of your online course.
Now, as some of you guys know, in our program Scale With Success®, we show people how to leverage automated webinars as a tool to transform their course into a six or seven figure business.
But in addition to that, we also have some super low tech organic strategies that we teach inside Scale With Success® that are incredibly effective.
And I think a lot of times when people hear the word evergreen … so evergreen basically means that if you have an evergreen course, it means that it’s open for enrollment all year round.
So if you sell an evergreen course, it means people can enroll 24/7, any time of the day. It’s not like a launch where you have just a set open and closed time to buy. People can buy all year round.
And I think when people hear the word evergreen, a lot of times people think that it has to mean something that is very complex.
But the reality is that’s just not true.
There’s loads and loads of simple things that you can do to sell your course if you have an Evergreen course, if things are open year round for you.
So I’m really excited to be able to share just a handful of those sales and marketing strategies with you during this upcoming challenge, which if you haven’t registered by the way, you’re going to want to do that, caitlinbacher.com/challenge.
I want you to sign up so you don’t miss out on anything.
Now, of course, if you like what you see when it comes to evergreen, I’d love for you to apply to our best selling program, Scale With Success®.
But either way, we’re going to have a lot of fun and you’ll have the opportunity to add some new sales and marketing techniques into your tool belt.
So again, thank you guys for being here.
I really appreciate you.
If you have not signed up for our free challenge, please do so.
➡️➡️➡️ Click the link around the video, and I’m really excited to be here.
I appreciate you guys so much. Let’s do this. Let’s have some fun. Thanks guys.
Are you struggling to scale your online course business to your first six or even seven figures?
- You hate launching, but right now it’s the only way your course actually makes money.
- You can’t sleep through the night without waking up in a cold sweat, worrying about all the things you think you should be doing.
- All the sales and marketing strategies that used to work for you are completely failing. Maybe you’re feeling stuck, stressed, and confused about how to get things back on track.
- You wonder how in the world so many other course creators are able to generate predictable revenue month after month?!
It doesn’t have to be so hard.
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So go ahead, click over to caitlinbacher.com and sign up for my free masterclass to learn how you can turn your online course into a profitable six or seven figure business. See you there.
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