Reverse Engineer Your Goals for Teacherpreneurs | 25

It's so important to start with the end in mind when you're planning a launch and an ad campaign. All too often we just throw money at a launch and hope everything goes well. But then we question how successful it actually was… This planning will allow you to have more confidence in your campaign (whether or not it's actually doing well) because you'll have targets you're trying to hit. With a metric tied to each step of the customer journey, it becomes much easier to determine exactly what is (and isn’t working) quickly.

This three-step process will help you determine your sales goal, the number of leads you need and the ad budget required.

Grab the FREE spreadsheet to help walk you through these calculations

Step 1: Course Launch Sales Goal

Start by determining your sales goal. How much money do you want to make for this launch?

Example: $10,000

Next, write down the cost of your course or lifetime value (LTV) for your membership. (The LTV is calculated by knowing how long people typically stay in the membership. If you don’t know start with 4-6 months).

Example: a $500 course

Last, determine how many new people you’ll need to hit your sales goal.

Example: $10,000 ÷ $500 = 20 new members

*Gut Check* - How do you feel about this number of new members? Is it too high? Too low? Consider adjusting your sales goal if necessary

Step 2: Leads

These are the people who register for your launch event (i.e., webinar, challenge, video series, etc.)

To determine how many leads you’ll need, we’ll use the conversion rate. The conversion rate is the percentage of people who register for your launch event and then buy your program. There are two major factors that influence conversion rate: (1) the cost of the program and (2) how warm the audience is.

Higher priced programs generally have a lower conversion rate and warmer audiences generally convert better. If you’ve launched before, use the data from that launch in this calculation. Otherwise, most programs convert between 1-5%.

Example: 2%

Use the number of new members you need and the conversion rate to determine how many leads you need registered for the event.

Example: 20 new members ÷ 2% = 1000 leads

*Gut Check* - How do you feel about this number of leads? Play around with the conversion rates to find a good, better, best number of leads you can expect. If it still doesn’t feel right then adjust your sales goal.

Step 3: Ad Budget

The final step is only required if you’ll be using FB ads as part of your launch strategy.

For this, we’ll use the cost/lead to figure out the launch budget required to hit your sales goal. Generally speaking, webinar leads cost $5-15 depending on your niche and how refined your messaging is. If you’ve previously run ads then you can use the cost/lead from that campaign to help with this step.

Example: $7.50/lead

Use the cost per lead to figure out your ad spend budget.

Example: 1000 leads X $7.50 = $7,500

*Gut Check* - How do you feel about this ad spend budget? Would you be profitable? How can you increase your conversion rate and/or lower your cost per lead? (Hint: nurture, nurture, nurture)

Don’t forget to grab your FREE spreadsheet to help with these calculations.

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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.

Okay, so before we jump into the episode, I am super excited to share a brand new freebie with you. It's my targeting ideas for Facebook ads. If you've dabbled in Facebook ads or you've done them and you've tried them, and you're just looking for some fresh inspiration for your audiences, this freebie is for you. I share my top Facebook ad targeting groups for you so that you can have inspiration and find those people that are perfect for what you have to offer. From warm audiences to cool lookalike audiences, to cold interest-based audiences. I cover all three in this freebie. Head to marketscalegrow.com/audiences to grab your copy today.

Hello, and welcome to Market Scale Grow. My name's Jenzaia and I'm your host. I am so thankful that you have joined me for yet another Saturday strategy session. Today we are going to be talking about reverse engineering, our goals, and it's a bit math heavy. So I want to apologize up front for that, but to make it a little bit easier, I have created a spreadsheet that you can use. So head to marketscalegrow.com/goals, that's G O A L S goals where you can grab that spreadsheet and follow along. So hit pause on the episode, go get it, and then come back and I will walk you through reverse engineering your goals.

So this is specifically for a course or membership launch, and we'll be talking about how to figure out reasonable expectations. So when I first did my course launch, I kind of just threw a number out there that I had heard someone say, I think it was about $500, that's a good amount for your first launch, and just see what happens. I DO NOT recommend that. I had no idea what that $500 was to do for me. After it was done, I had no idea what it had done and if I'd hit any targets and if it had been worth it or not. So it totally, totally felt like wasted money. If you don't have an idea and reasonable expectations in your mind before you start, then it's really, really hard to know if the campaign is on target as it's happening. Then afterwards, was it even successful? What did your money do for you? Was it a success or was a total failure? Was it money well spent or was it money wasted? So that's why I highly recommend for all my clients to play with the numbers that we're going to talk about today and to you figure out beforehand what a 'good, better, best' launch is going to look like, and what their money will likely do for them based on industry standards and past performance. So if you've launched before, then use those numbers that we're going to talk about to help you figure this out. If not, I'm going to give you some benchmarks that you can use and plug in to give you at least a sort of idea.

So there are three steps to this. The first one is to start with the end in mind. What is your sales goal? How much money do you want to make from this for launch? For easy calculation sake, I'm going with $10,000. You can pick any number that feels right to you. And there's going to be a couple of points in this process that we're going to do a bit of a gut check and figure out if we need to readjust any of the numbers. So again, that first number is what is your sales goal? How much money do you want to make from this launch? I would say before anything else is taken off, don't factor in expenses or anything, just what is your sales goal?

Next, this piece of information you should have easily available, is what is the cost of the program? If this is a course, then it likely is pretty easy to figure out how much are people going to pay. If it's a membership, then I recommend you calculate the lifetime value of a member. That means are they going to stay in your membership for three months, six months, nine months a year, figuring out how long people generally stay and then using that amount for this calculation. So if your membership is $27 a month and people generally stay for about six months, then the lifetime value of someone would be $162. So that's what I would plug in here. For this example, I'm using a course that's $500.

The final part of this first step is to figure out how many new people you need to welcome into your program to hit your sales goal. So to do that, you're going to take your sales goal, the $10,000 for me, divided by the cost of the program, mine is $500, and that will tell you how many new people you need. So I need to welcome 20 new people into my course to make $10,000. I'm going to give you a second to figure it out and what you need now is the number of new members you'll be welcoming.

Okay, so step two is figuring out how many leads you need. A lead for a launch is someone who is registered for your launch event. So thinking back to my previous episode about launch events, those can be webinars, video series, challenges, you can do a secret podcast, you can do an Instagram tips or tricks series, you can do an email launch, whatever your launch event is, how many people do you need to be signed up for it to get that 20 people or however many people you will be welcoming into your program.

To do that, you need to know the conversion rate. Of those people who have signed up for your webinar, how many of them will buy? Industry standards are, there's a bit of variety, but I would say generally it's 1-5% of people who register for your event, will go on to purchase your product. They can vary for many different reasons, but two main ones. The first one is what is the cost of the program? The more expensive a program is the lower the conversion rate is. It's easier to get someone to buy a $27 product than it is to get them to buy a $100 or $500 or a $1,000 program. So the higher the price, the lower the conversion rate. The second point that often factors in is how warm is the audience. If you are launching to your email list and your social media following only, so this is a very warm launch, the conversion rate will be higher. If you were relying more heavily on Facebook ads and you're launching to a cold audience, people who have never heard of you before, the conversion rate will be lower. So for my example, because I, in the example, will be running Facebook ads, and it is a bit of a higher priced product at $500, I'm going to put my conversion rate at 2%. So of all of the people who register for my webinar, 2% of them will buy the program and I need 20 people to buy. So how many people do I need to be registered? To do this, I take my new members. So 20 divided by the percentage so in my case 2%. So what I put into my calculator is 20 divided by 0.02. and that gives me 1000 new people. Not new people, but 1000 people signed up for my webinar.

So this is our second gut check. The first gut check was the number of new people you're welcoming in. Does that feel reasonable? Have you never launched before and you're really just hoping that five people will sign up? Or have you launched 50 times and you know that you're going to get over a hundred new members into your program? So that was our first gut check. Our second gut check is here, with the number of people you need to be signed up for your launch event. You may say, "Hey, I only have 500 people on my email list and 10,000 followers on Instagram. I really don't think I can get a thousand people signed up for my webinar." That's fine. You need to shift your sales goal, shift the numbers, and find something that does feel reasonable. Not something that feels safe, I still want you to push yourself, but not something that feels impossible either. Or you might be saying, "I have 100,000 people on my email list, I have 100,000 Instagram followers. I could get 1,000 people signed up on the first day. This is no problem." Then you need to go back to that sales goal and make it bigger, make it scarier. Find that spot that is a push. Again, not impossible though.

Okay. So this last step is only if you are going to be running Facebook ads for this launch. We need to figure out the budget. To do that, we consider what the cost per lead is. So the cost to get somebody on to your webinar or into your launch event. This can range anywhere from I would say $5 to $15. Now I have seen it as low as 40 cents, which I was mind-boggled at how cheap that was, and I have seen it more expensive than $15. But I would say generally speaking $5 to $15 is reasonable depending on your niche. If you're targeting consumers, so teachers, moms, workout enthusiasts, then you're going to be on the lower end. If you're targeting other businesses or other entrepreneurs, so this would be teacherpreneurs or coaches, small businesses, if that's your target market, then you're looking at the higher end of the cost per lead, closer to that $15. So for me, I picked $7.50 as my cost per lead. Again, this is another place that you can go back and look at historical data. If you previously ran ads for a webinar, then you can say, how much did it cost me last time? To figure out what your budget is, you're going to take that number of leads you need, so for me, that's 1,000, times the cost per lead that you've picked, so for me, $7.50, equals $7,500. That is my approximate budget for this launch.

This is our final gut check. Does that feel reasonable? You might end up with a budget for your ads that is actually more expensive than what you think you're going to be making. So if you come out with saying, my sales goal is $10,000, I need to spend $12,000 on ads that probably isn't reasonable, and you need to do a few things. Play with the conversion rates. So you need to convert more people which would mean most likely warming people up more. How can you do more nurturing, more warming up to increase the conversion rate? You could also do some things to lower the cost per lead, which means working on your messaging, making sure that your images are scroll stopping, and ensuring that your offer is amazing and so, so, so needed and on point.

So this is how we reverse engineer goals. We start with that goal, the sales goal, figure out how many new people we need to bring in, use the conversion rate to figure out how many people we need in our launch event, and then use our cost per lead to figure out the budget. I highly recommend that you play with those numbers. What does it look like if you get a good cost per lead? What is it like if you get a better cost per lead? What is it like if you get your best cost per lead? Same with the conversion rate. What's a good conversion rate for you? What's a better conversion rate? What's the best one? So that you have a bit of a range so you kind of again have those realistic expectations for what's going to happen on the launch and what's going to happen with your money and what it looks like to be spending this money well, so that in the middle of the launch, if your good goal was $7.50 and the leads are costing you $20 and you can say right away no, no, no, this isn't good. This is super, super bad. But let's just say your cost per lead, your goal, was $15 and you're spending $20. That's not as bad. That's closer to a realistic expectation. So having these numbers that you figured out ahead of time really helps to keep on track and ensure that you feel more confident in your ad spend and more confident in how your launch goes so that you can feel confident that it was good. Or if it wasn't a good one, you can narrow it down and say, okay, here in my funnel, based on the goals that I set before we started, this is where things went wrong. That's why it's so important beforehand, that you really sit down and think about these numbers.

If you want that spreadsheet, head to marketscalegrow.com/goals. You can download it. It'll tell you exactly where to input the different pieces of information that you need and there are formulas in there already, of course, so that you can figure out exactly what those expectations are and that you can play around with it so that when it's time for your launch, you are ready.

I would love to hear what your goals for your launch are. So take a screenshot of this episode and tag me on Instagram. I'm @heyitsjenzaia and I will be back in your ear next week for another Saturday strategy session. Until then, see you later.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Today was brought to you by Dubsado, my absolute favourite customer management tool. If you're looking to streamline and systematize your service-based business, I highly recommend Dubsado. For 20% off of your first month. Head to marketscalegrow.com/dubsado that's D U B S A D O and use the code Jenzaia at checkout. And don't forget to head to our community at marketscalegrow.com/community where you'll find inspiring, ambitious teacherpreneurs who are looking to grow and scale their businesses just like you... See you soon.