Hey, it’s Vlad.
Here’s an advanced tip for marketing your courses, memberships, and coaching programs (aka info products):
- When generating traffic, beginners tend to focus on the cost per click (CPC) and cost per lead (CPL).
- Experts focus on the overall return on ad spend (ROAS) – both front-end and back-end combined, and disregard all other metrics. And experts at high scale focus on quarterly profit growth (not even ROAS).
However, taking the expert approach requires “spending confidence,” which is hard to do comfortably at the early stages of a campaign.
Plus, chances are your budget is in the hundreds or single thousands of dollars rather than 5-6 figures/month, so you have to play it smart.
The key is to find a happy medium: focus on keeping the CPL as low as possible but as high as necessary to generate quality leads.
It’s important to realize that cheap leads are often crappy leads – you want leads who will actually buy your offer.
(That’s if you do paid ads, but I’ll talk about organic marketing too.)
👉 The primary thing that determines traffic and lead quality is the audience’s intent.
Ask yourself: “What does someone who I’m trying to convert into my offer want or need right now?”
Your high-intent target audience consists of individuals who want to achieve a specific goal that your offer helps them accomplish.
Intent is key. Not the CPC, CPL, OMG, and BRB (the last 2 are not real metrics, haha).
It’s tempting to buy cheap traffic, such as solo ads. But solo ads are generally best for broad and hypey make-money-online offers. Most courses, memberships, and coaching offers are not a good fit.
Again, intent is key, regardless of the traffic source – any ad medium can work well as long as the audience’s intent aligns with your offer.
Here’s how to optimize your campaign for optimal audience intent 👇
1. Target people based on specific behaviors or interests via the platform of your choice (such as Google Ads and Meta).
- For instance, if you promote a course about affiliate marketing, target people who are actively searching for affiliate marketing programs or asking specific questions about affiliate marketing, such as “How do I get traffic in affiliate marketing?”.
That is the first step, but it’s just the beginning.
The next step is extremely important, whether you are using paid ads, posting on social media, or sending emails…
2. Strategically communicate your message to the marketplace via ads and content.
You want to attract people who will most resonate with the offer. For instance, if you’re selling a course about affiliate marketing, you want to target existing affiliates, network marketers, online coaches, and community builders.
To attract your target audience, you need to have clarity on what challenges they experience that your offer will solve for them.
👉 And you want to describe those challenges to your target audience so that they feel understood. This makes them pay attention to what you have to say.
Hook your target audience by consistently putting out messages into the marketplace about the challenges they face.
- For instance, if you’re targeting affiliate marketers, talk about how it made YOU feel when you spent X amount of dollars buying affiliate offers without seeing any results. How you felt excited but let down numerous times. How you thought you’ve found the right opportunity many times, only to be disappointed over and over again. How you got into debt chasing the dream for all those years with nothing to show for it…
Get it? THE PAIN.
Understand your target audience and empathize with their needs while communicating your message. This is crucial.
Then, offer quick tips to build rapport. This is the value component.
You must lead with value.
Nobody cares about your opportunity or that you have the best XYZ if they don’t have any rapport with you…
Nobody cares about your fascination with your topic.
Nobody cares about you and what you offer more than they care about themselves and what they want or need.
So, don’t promote anything immediately. Don’t post a link. And don’t sound like a billboard. ❌
Just be human and express your raw emotions, opinions, and experiences. Throw in the F word into your messaging if that’s how you feel about the subject matter – be authentic. ✔️
Most people don’t understand this, but the strongest business relationships are built on authenticity and trust – not professionalism or pretty words. Be genuine and politically incorrect to connect, and then be helpful and deliver results to build long-lasting trust.
It’s okay to repel some people to build stronger relationships with your target audience.
Don’t mention your offer in your content. It won’t serve you unless you have a warm audience that already trusts you (or you’re speaking with someone who is already in-market for the thing you sell).
Promoting your offer directly is a bottom-of-the-funnel objective – you must start at the top and work your way down.
Simply talk about the various problems your target audience experiences, offer quick-win solutions, connect with people, and only then invite them to access a valuable resource via your lead magnet.
👉 You will not be good at communicating your message from the get-go, even if you feel “good enough.” That’s okay – do it anyway.
Communication is an art form. Practice daily, and you will improve over time. This is perhaps the most crucial aspect of marketing.
As you practice, you will learn to empathize with your target audience and deliver your message more eloquently and effectively.
Furthermore, as you build authority, you will be able to shorten the path from the introduction to the conversion.
Eventually, you will be able to create highly effective ads and presentations, and that’s when you can scale very quickly. 🚀
Initially, all you want to do is connect with people 1-on-1. You want to live in the comments, DMs, emails, and so on. Talk to people.
Quick case study:
One of my good friends runs an online community, and they sell memberships to their paid community.
Wanna know how they generate north of $300k/month consistently like clockwork?
This will blow your mind…
One person in that company alone brings in $10k/day constantly like clockwork by DMing their free group members on Facebook all day long. And not just a few people – hundreds of people daily!
And it’s not some “sales bro” bringing in the sales; it’s a young woman who is extremely consistent with DMing and following up with people.
Think about that. 🤯
I hope this article has given you something to think about, and I hope that you will step out of your comfort zone and take action today and every day moving forward.
As an agency owner, I work with coaches and community builders, and I can tell you with certainty that everything I shared in this article is crucial to your success.
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Have a great January!
– Vlad