How I Ensure My Clients Have a Proven Offer + What to Do if it isn't Proven YET | 123
If you’ve listened to any of my other podcast episodes, you might have heard this from me already, but it’s worth repeating: you should only run Facebook Ads to a proven offer. But what exactly is a proven offer? How do you know if your offer is performing well with organic traffic?
Let’s dive into the signs of a proven offer, and what to do if your offer is struggling to perform organically.
What Is An Offer?
First, let’s be clear on what an offer is. An offer is anything you are pitching to other people. This can be a free or paid item. For example, a course, membership, mastermind, 1:1 services, coaching, training, workshop, and lead magnet are all offers.
How Do You Know It’s A Proven Offer?
Understanding if something is a proven offer is going to take a bit of a gut feeling, but there are also some signs that your offer is performing well with organic traffic.
To start, you want to make sure your offer has been sold or downloaded in the past. If it hasn’t, ask yourself why? Is it because you haven't promoted it enough or that the promotions aren’t going as expected? Does it have to do with your audience size?
Often, I find that it’s because people aren’t actually promoting it as often as they need to OR they have expectations that aren’t inline with the industry standards.
But, if you are truly spending lots of time marketing the offer with limited to no takers, there may be an actual issue. We’ll dive into that below…
A few great ways to know if you have a proven offer is if you are getting feedback, testimonials, or referrals. If people are recommending the offer to others, that’s a great sign.
What To Do If It Isn’t Proven?
However, if your offer is not performing well with organic traffic, what should you do? The good news is that you don’t need to ditch the offer. It may not be that the offer is wrong, in fact I would even go as far as to say it probably isn’t the offer… but something else is missing. Here are a few quick things to consider:
Do you have an audience size problem? If you have a small list or audience, there may not be enough eyes on the offer.
Have you promoted it to new audiences? Try collabing or guesting to introduce the offer to new people.
Have you played with the messaging? Sometimes the way we talk about the offer isn’t registering with people. Try changing things up.
Do you have any testimonials? If so, make sure they are on your sales page, website, and social media.
Have you asked your audience what they want? If your offer is the problem, then asking your people what they want is great way to get started off on the right foot. Just remember, Henry Ford famously said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” And then we might now have cars yet… okay we’d probably still have cars by now, but you get my point.
On rare occasions, the offer is a total flop and you have to start from scratch. Typically, to get traction with organic traffic, you just have to play around with things. Marketing is all about the long game!
For more info on tracking a products success, check out episode 116 for the two types of metrics you should be watching in your business
Don't forget to follow me on Instagram @heyitsjenzaia and tune in next Saturday for more business tips and strategies!
xo, Jenzaia
Don’t Forget To SUBSCRIBE
&
REVIEW the podcast!
Thanks for listening to this week’s Saturday Strategy Session! If you found this podcast helpful for your teacherpreneur journey, then head over to iTunes, so you can subscribe and leave a review. Each and every review means the world to me and helps me continue to create valuable content while also reaching more fellow ambitious teacher business owners just like you!
Episode Transcript:
Hey there - I'm Jenzaia and this is Market Scale Grow - a podcast created for ambitious teacherpreneurs looking to have a bigger impact on the world, achieve freedom, flexibility, and ultimately make more money. With weekly strategy sessions and inspiring stories from fellow teachers just like you, my goal here is to help you create a customized marketing strategy so you can grow your teacher business beyond your wildest dreams.
Welcome to our Saturday strategy session happening live in the Facebook group…on a Thursday! Today we are gonna be talking about how I help my clients ensure that they have a proven offer before we start running Facebook ads.
What is an offer? We're gonna chat about that. Then we're gonna also talk about what makes something a proven offer, and then we will take some time to discuss what to do if your offer isn't proven. Or if you've checked and tried to figure it out, and what you realized is that it's not doing as well as you want.
So let's dive into what an offer is. And in my mind, it offers anything that you are offering to other people, whether it's a course or a membership or some sort of signature program, like a mastermind, a group coaching program, or something like that. It can also be one-to-one services or coaching packages that you do on a one-to-one basis.
And then it could be some sort of training or a workshop like this one that I'm doing, or it could also be a paid workshop. And then the final thing that it could be is a lead magnet or some sort of freebie. So when I talk about an offer, I'm not just talking about something paid, I am talking about something that's free or paid.
And really the distinguishing factor here is, do you need to sell this thing? Like do you need to take it and position it so that people want it? Do you need to spend some time on your messaging and really “selling”? Again, even if it's a free offer, you do still need to sell people on why it's worth it for them to give you their phone number or their email address. And if you're asking for my phone number, you better make that thing so valuable because I am very likely to just put 123456789!
So an offer again, is anything paid or free that you are offering to your audience that requires some sort of engagement on their part, like opt in. Or they need to give you their email address or their phone number, or sometimes both to get access to it.
And the reason is because we guard that information. I just told you that I will often put in (123) 456-7890 as my phone number because I just don't want people to have my number. I don't want text message sales. We had service done on our Mazda and it was like the annual oil change vehicle check. They were texting me… your vehicle's gone in, your vehicle's being worked on. And I was like, stop - I don't need these text message updates!
I didn't want my phone going off for a really, really, really long time. I didn't even have notifications turned on except for my husband. I had a concussion and so screens were really, really hard for me. And so I turned all of my notifications off on my phone except for the ringer. And if it's an emergency, like when my grandma passed away, my dad called me. I'm not getting text message emergencies.
My grandma, her passing wasn't an emergency, but it was sudden and unexpected. And for those kinds of things, people call and my ringer is always on. So that's a total tangent, but I don't give my phone number away. That's where I was going with all that.
My email address…I have two email addresses. I have my business one, and then I have my personal one. And I typically will opt in to things that I pay for. So if I purchase a course or a workshop or something like that, I use my business email address. And if it's a freebie, like I've joined some mailing lists…Monday Muffins is one of them. So that's more personal for my kids. Muffin recipes that I get every Monday. I use my personal email for a lot of those so that my business email isn't clogged up.
But even within my personal one I have two separate, because I don't know if you knew this, but with Gmail you can put a plus sign and then anything after the plus sign, and it allows you to filter your emails. I do this with my clients, so if they need me, like Kajabi for example, I already have a Kajabi thing, so when they try to add me to Kajabi, if they just put in support@jenzaiadimartile.com, then it says the accounts already exists. So then they'll put support+@jenzaiadimartile.com and that just creates like their own email address with their name in it.
So when I'm opting into things, I put my personal email address plus opt-in, and then it filters into an opt-in folder, right? So I can go get that freebie, but then all of those emails that come afterwards filter into that.
I'm so off course on my topic right now, but the point I was trying to make is that if it's something that somebody's exchanging something for with their money or an email address or a phone number, it needs to be really, really valuable. Or they're gonna do what I do and press stop or unsubscribe or give you their junk email address. So make it so valuable.
And that's what we're talking about. How do you know that that thing is proven? And so here's kind of my really quick checklist to know whether or not it is proven.
So first of all, has it sold or been downloaded in the past a handful of times? Especially for something that you're selling, depending on the price point, you want it to have sold a handful of times so that you know that there are people who are interested in it. That could be like five or six times.
If it's a more expensive program, it could be a hundred times. If it's a cheaper program, you're gonna kind of know in your gut whether or not having sold it would mean that it's proven in something that people want.
My first round of Dreamless Essentials was full of people that I was friends with or knew me or have been asking for a course again and again. This most recent launch that I did, I didn't know half of the people. Once you're starting to get these cool people that you've never heard of before into your doors, then I would consider that proven x10 or whatever.
For a freebie, you're gonna want that. It's been downloaded quite a few times, and the metrics that I like to look at are the page views. Have at least a hundred people looked at your landing page? And do you have at least a 30% conversion rate on that landing page, which means that at least 30% of people who land on the landing page say, yes, I want this? Now I've seen it as high as 80% and I have seen lower, but we really want it to be in that 30% range, if not higher. And even if you've hit the 30% mark, that doesn't mean you have to stop improving the landing page. It's just a starting point for you to go, okay, if at least 30% of people who see this landing page say, yes, I want it, then I can say, yes, it is proven.
And then another thing you wanna look at is customer feedback. And that's really, really important. And what goes with customer feedback is referrals. So if you're getting a lot of positive testimonials, our brains are hardwired to see the negative, to feel the negative, to wanna take the negative as more valuable, more important, more real. But we need to retrain our brain to look for the positive. We also need to make it as easy as possible for our clients, our customers, to give us that positive feedback by asking for testimonials, making sure that there's testimonial links available when you're offboarding people or as part of the process.
And then same with referrals. When I do a Facebook ad sprint, which is my six week experience designed for me to help you get 500 new subscribers onto your email list. So when I do a Facebook ad sprint as part of the onboarding process, it says, I love referrals. If you have anyone who also wants Facebook ads done for them, send them my name or send me their name, whichever way makes more sense.
And so making sure that we have those positive feedback loops easily accessible to our clients is really important because once you start to get that positive feedback, it helps you to go, yes, it's proven. And if people are referring their friends, business partners, or mastermind coworkers, then you know like, yes, this is good. People love it and they want more people to know about it.
So we've talked a little bit about what an offer is. We've also talked about how you know it's proven. So now let's dive into what to do if it isn't proven. If you don't have that information, the first thing you need to do is to work really, really hard to prove it organically.
In a minute, we're gonna talk about that, and I'm gonna do a full podcast episode on this later, but the organic badge of honor, if you will. But before you start running ads, it is important to prove it organically. And so that means launching your offer. Again, whether it's a freebie or paid, doing a launch to your email list where you do like a week of email promos or some sort of live experience just for your email list, potentially you can promote it on social media.
This is really, really great, especially for freebies. Pushing it out to your social media following. Trying to do that at least once a week so that there's regular reminders. And then another way that you can promote your offers, especially freebies, is through collaborations or guest podcasting. And the reason I say especially freebies is often I find with guest podcasting, the host will specifically request that you don't promote something paid. You're more than welcome to promote a freebie, but not your paid thing. But it's a really great way to get that freebie in front of someone else's audience.
If you didn't know this, guest podcasting is one of my most favorite strategies. It has been a focus of mine since quarter four of 2022. It was supposed to only be for about the fourth quarter of 2022. But it was just so successful and I found so much value from it. I just have continued trying to grow my business, growing my audience, growing my reach through collaborations that come my way, guest podcasting. I love it. I think everyone should do more of it.
Okay, so then the next question I want you to ask, if it's not proven organically, do you have an audience size problem? It can be really, really hard to convert thousands of people if you have a really, really small list. This is especially important if you have a smaller priced offer in that $47, $97, even $197 range. You're gonna need to sell a lot of those for it to be a profitable part of your business. And when you have a really small list, it's gonna get fatigued. You're going to have already done that email launch. You're already gonna have posted all over social media about it. You're gonna already have shared it out.
And so if your audience isn't growing, it's gonna be really hard to continue to prove your offer. And our smaller audience is usually really, really warm and we can saturate that really quickly, especially if it's an awesome offer. So if you feel like, okay, well people are buying and now they're not, I want you to look at your audience size and question, like, have all the people that are going to buy in my audience already purchased from me?
Now, if you realize that your offer is failing and it's not hitting those conversion rates that you're wanting, then your first step is to really look at the messaging. Always the messaging! Is there any way that you can make it more on point? Very, very direct of the benefits somebody is going to get from this offer. So the difference between a feature and a benefit is really important here. A feature is like six modules, three workbooks, two live calls, whereas a benefit is the 606 modules so that you can learn all about Facebook ads independently, on the right time for you and access that material in the future when you need it on demand. And those live calls so that you get the support that you need and that you can have direct one-to-one access to me, and I'm using my course as an example here. Dreamless Essentials. There's live calls as part of it. So the benefit of the live calls is that they can have my eyes on their Facebook ads, on their ad copy, on their images.
So that's the first thing is looking at your messaging and making sure that you're really highlighting the benefits and speaking directly to your audience. I also want you to focus on nurturing. In the digital era that we're in right now, people are taking a really long time to warm up. They're sitting on an email list for 3, 6, 9, 12 months before they're ready to buy.
They are really fearful and lacking trust. In other businesses because they've been burned or they've heard of their friends being burnt by people who are really, really good at selling but weren't delivering a great product. Focus on nurturing your audience, helping them grow relationships with you, building that trust and then also refining your customer experience so that the results just speak for themselves.
Something else I really love to do is add testimonials. So as I was talking about before, you want a way to collect that feedback, collect those testimonials, and so you can add those testimonials to your social media posts. You can add them to your emails, you can add them to the sales page or the landing page.
Adding testimonials is gonna really help people see, okay, other people had success, so I can too. The next thing that you wanna do is to work on evoking emotions. On a freebie, this might be a little bit harder because your landing page is probably just gonna be like small, or short, I guess is the real word I wanted to use.
Often landing pages for a freebie, you're not even scrolling anywhere. The form is just right there. There's a little blur, maybe a couple bullet points. But you still wanna be able to evoke emotions because emotions really, really help people feel the impact that whatever you're offering will have. And so on your sales page, on your landing pages, making sure that you're evoking emotions.
You're not gonna love this next one, but if your offer isn't going as well as you want and if you're not getting the sales or the opt-ins that you want, you may need to do some market research. Seems like nobody, including me, really enjoys doing market research, but it's so, so important.
Constantly having those conversations with your audience. Getting that feedback really is starting to understand what they're looking for, what their hopes are, their dreams. You really wanna get down to like, what problems are you struggling with? What have you already tried, what hasn't worked, or what worked best of the things that you've already tried? And then just know that it can take, with ads specifically, 45 to 90 days to get the messaging right.
And this is with lots and lots of tweaks and changes. So when I'm working with somebody, especially for something like a webinar or a video series, if we're going into a course launch, it can take 45 to 90 days of refining, tweaking, changing, updating the messaging. And so if you're gonna be doing this more organically, it's gonna take longer.
But don't give up and don't burn it all down. Messaging is the number one problem that I see. And if you try something and it doesn't work and you're just like, Ugh. It doesn't work, and then you burn it all down, then you're going to be taking more time to rebuild something new. So changes are gonna be much faster than rebuilding. And sometimes it's really just the angle that we're coming at something, right? You're not changing the interior, you're just changing the exterior, and you're just giving the house a fresh coat of paint instead of burning the entire house down.
Something else that's really important that I wrote down here in my notes is don't let your pride get in the way. We love the things that we're doing. We love our programs, and often we have this attachment to the messaging that we are using and because typically our audience is ourselves, but like three or four steps behind us because our audience is us. Like, well, I know how to speak to myself. I know what would resonate with me. But things change. People change. Messaging changes, and you really need to accept potentially if your offer isn't working, that messaging that you thought was just so amazing, maybe it's not. Trying something new and updating it is really what's gonna take your offer and prove it so that then you can run ads.
And so what's really important here is to remember to try and fix the messaging first. Come at it, from different angles, different pain points, different pleasure points, hopes, dreams. Do that market research. Figure out how to talk to your people and work on proving it organically. Now, I've said a couple times we're gonna come to this organic badge of honor, and I feel like teachers especially have this feeling and it's been put on us by mentors in the space, have been in programs where the, the person in charge of the program has really pushed this idea of ads are bad. And that's just not true.
Paid ads work and exist for a reason. Businesses both big and small continue to use paid advertisements because it works. It's a really, really great way to fast track getting visible, getting your message in front of more people.
And so yes, there is some requirement to organically prove your offer to make sure people actually want it. But there's no reason, especially with the way algorithms are. It's 2023. This is not 2016, not even 2019. It's just a different world. It's really, really hard to grow quickly, organically, unlike it was even three years ago, five years ago.
We're seeing some changes to even TikTok's algorithm where it's getting harder to grow. And this is true, like if you think back to when Reels came out, some of the people, the early adopters to reels grew so fast from reels and that's what's kind of happening on TikTok. Early adopters grew so quickly, and as the early adopter phase ends and we get into more mainstream adoption of these, it gets harder and harder and harder to grow organically with those methods. And so I just won't want you to lose sight of that.
And I don't want you to feel that like it's wrong or bad to run ads because they can be an extremely important, vital asset to your business to help you grow and it's besides your organic. Like it's in conjunction with. And I talk a lot about organic growth, collaborations to grow and paid advertisements all working together, and I think that that's something that's becoming more and more prevalent.
I had that organic growth even as a Facebook ads marketer. I had that organic growth badge of honor of like, I grew this without any ads. And then I found Facebook ads and I started to understand a little bit more about how they all work together. And I really do believe in the holistic marketing approach where you're doing all of the things, but you're working smarter, not harder. And right now, the way the algorithms are, the world is the people are growing exclusively, organically is just really, really hard.
That's my 10 cents. Thank you so much for joining me, and I hope that you have a wonderful Thursday / Saturday…whenever you're listening.
The link for the Facebook group will be in the show notes if you are listening to this on the podcast. So every Thursday I go live at 1:00 Eastern Standard time, so you can join the Facebook group to get access to those lives. And then when I do podcast episodes live like this, you will get early access to it. So thank you so much again for being here, and I'll be back in your ear next Saturday with another Saturday strategy session.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Market Scale Grow. I'm so thankful that you've taken some time out of your busy schedule to make me part of your journey. If you love this podcast, don't forget to share it with your friends. And then head to your favorite podcast app to subscribe so that you won't miss next week's episode or any of the upcoming ones. And if you loved it, be sure to leave a review on Apple Podcast so that other people can find this podcast and we can impact teachers and teacher business owners around the world!