Hey there, lovely listeners! Welcome to an exciting episode of the Art of Online Business podcast. I’m your host, Brittany McBean, a funnel and launch strategist, conversion copywriter and a dear friend of Rick! I am beyond thrilled to be taking the reins today! Have you noticed a decline in your conversion rates, engagement, or revenue over the past year? You’re not alone. Many business owners have experienced these challenges, but fear not, because I’m here to help you turn things around.

Get ready for an eye-opening journey into the world of launches, funnels, and all things online marketing. If you’ve been puzzled by declining conversion rates and engagement, fret not, because we’re diving headfirst into solutions that can turn the tide for your business!

In this episode you’ll hear:

• Understanding the current landscape of launches, funnels, and online marketing 
• Diagnosing specific problems and finding tailored solutions
• Real-world launch strategies that achieved record-breaking numbers in 2023
• Fixing audience and offer problems for better results
• Creating compelling copy and the power of storytelling in marketing

So, are you ready to turn the tide on your online marketing journey? We’ve got an episode packed with insights and strategies that will elevate your conversion rates and supercharge your business results. Get your notepads ready, folks, because this is a treasure trove of actionable advice you won’t want to miss. Tune in now and unleash the full potential of your business! Remember, your success story starts here.

Timestamps:
00:01 – Introduction and overview of the episode
03:12 – Understanding the current landscape of launches, funnels, and online marketing
10:45 – Diagnosing specific problems and finding tailored solutions
18:20 – Real-world launch strategies that achieved record-breaking numbers in 2023
27:55 – Fixing audience and offer problems for better results
35:10 – Creating compelling copy and the power of storytelling in marketing
42:30 – Client case studies: Success stories and outcomes achieved
50:15 – Conclusion and call to action

Links & Resources:

• The Art of Online Business website
• DM me on Instagram
• Visit my YouTube channel
• The Art of Online Business clips on YouTube
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube
• The Art of Online Business Podcast website
• Check out my Accelerator coaching program

Brittany McBean’s Links:

• Visit Brittany’s website
• Contact Brittany here
• Check out Brittany’s YouTube channel
• Follow Brittany on Instagram
• Learn more about Brittany on LinkedIn

Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!

Hi everyone, it’s Brittany. Rick asked me to take over today to share some helpful intel with you about what’s working right now in launches, funnels, and just online marketing strategy in general. If you’ve noticed a dip in your conversion rates, your engagement and your revenue over the last year and nothing you’re trying is getting your numbers back to where they used to be and where you want them to be.

This episode is for you. Now if you tuned in to listen to Rick and you’re like, who is this woman? Fair question. I’ll keep this intro brief because we have a lot of good stuff to dive into, but if we haven’t met yet, hello, my name is Brittany McBean. I am a launch and funnel strategist and conversion copywriter.

Rick is a dear friend of mine, but I’ve also had the privilege of writing most of the sales words in his business over the last few years. I do have an online education part of my business where I have a YouTube channel. I have some programs and products that I live launch myself, but. You will never hear me say that I wanna scale out of one-on-one client work.

That is what I do day in and day out, year round. I work with online educators and experts like you on their live launches and evergreen funnels of every shape and size. We do custom strategy, messaging, and copy for our clients, and there is no one size fits all funnel going out the door. If you can imagine it, we’ve done it.

I love staying in the trenches, studying and watching trends develop and move in real time because you know as well as I do, our industry moves. Fast. And the truth is our industry has shifted a lot over the last three years, and I think a lot of business owners have felt really overwhelmed knowing what to adjust and how to keep up with the changing landscape and their changing audience.

And in some ways, I’m gonna encourage you to put down the old playbook and think a little bit more critically and strategically about what your business is actively doing to sell right now, since the second half of 2022. A lot of online business. Learners have seen numbers declining. So if you have found yourself struggling, it’s not just you, but it’s also not something a lot of people are talking about right now because it’s not really the sexiest message in the world.

But the good news is there is a lot of good news. Once you understand how to optimize and improve your marketing right now, you will have the tools that you need to improve conversions on every single thing your business touches for now and forever. Amen. Because right now there are people still buying and there are businesses still thriving.

And it’s not because those businesses have something you don’t. There is something you can do about it. And we’re going to dive into that today. So we’re gonna talk about what’s actually going on right now, why things have changed so drastically, how to diagnose your specific problem, what solutions you.

Could be looking at based on what your marketing needs. ’cause it’s not a one size fits all solution. And then we are going to dive into three real world launch strategies that hit record breaking numbers this year in 2023. So hold onto your butts because this episode is loaded. So come back with me three years.

Remember 2020, it was a wild ride. We all had our own difficulties. Of course, the pandemic was a horrible time for many people. But in the online business sphere, It was kind of a gold rush. A lot of us saw soaring conversion rates, ballooning sales and revenue. If you were in business three years ago, you probably know what I’m talking about, and those glory days may not necessarily be a realistic benchmark for us anymore.

Using the same strategy copy and even goals that we were working with back then could lead us down a really frustrating path. Right now there was a reason for the 2020 boom. Global Lockdowns created time and disposable income, add stimulus checks into the mix, and we have consumers and our clients treating online shopping like a trip to Vegas and the confinement, the work from home, and unfortunately, loss of jobs spurt an explosion in new online businesses.

4.4 million businesses were filed in 2020 in the us. Which was an all-time high. In fact, it was a 52% increase in the entire decade before it, and then 5.4 million businesses were created in 2021 in the US alone. Bottom line, our industry was one big money booth and the cash was flying around for us to grab, and now three years later, people are no longer confined.

They’re busier with less disposable income, thank you to good old inflation. Our audiences who went through that explosion of online businesses are more experienced, more skeptical. They’re weary of seeing the same old cookie cutter marketing scripts. They’re jaded by broken promises that they may have bought into before they encountered your offer.

Their trust is hard won, and the FOMO and the scarcity just doesn’t pack the punch that it used to. And so here we are with an economically strained. Skeptical savvy audience and a landscape that is moving past old marketing gimmicks. And I don’t necessarily think this is bad news. I don’t really want my customers or your customers buying because they’re susceptible.

I want them buying because they know without a doubt that your offer is the best possible solution for them, and that they’re going to get the best possible transformation. But it’s now time to evolve and bring fresh, empathetic, and authentic marketing to our brands, and more importantly, to our people in marketing.

There are three core pillars at the heart of any end. Every successful strategy audience. Offer and copy these three aspects function as an ecosystem in your marketing where one affects the others and they’re all intertwined. If your funnel or your campaign isn’t performing as expected, it is highly probable that the issue lies within one or more of these three factors.

However, it is important to tackle these issues sequentially and in that order rather than all at once. So let’s dive into audience offer and copy and help you figure out what’s going on with your funnel so that you can fix it. And make some more money. When you’re experiencing a slowdown in your business, the first place to look is your audience.

When I say audience, just to be super clear, I don’t mean followers, okay? In this case, audience is synonymous with list. So these are your leads. A very targeted engage list. These could be the people on your email list. These could be the people you’re targeting your paid ads to. These could be the people following you on social, but we are speaking more specifically than just all of your followers who may or may not be right for your offer and may or may not be seeing all of your launch or promotion or your campaign.

This is a targeted, engaged leads list. So if you have an audience problem or if audience is one of your problems, this could mean one of three things. Number one, you have the wrong audience. Number two. Your audience isn’t right or ready yet, or three, your audience is burnt out. So number one, the wrong audience just happens if your offer does not match the needs or interest of the people actively on your list.

Basically, you’re trying to sell steak to a vegan. This is the most obvious and least nuanced of all the options. It is less likely that you are dealing with a completely mismatched audience. Instead, it’s more likely that you’re encountering an audience that isn’t right and ready or is burnt out. An audience that isn’t ready for your offer or isn’t right for your offer indicates that they might just not be at the right stage of their journey of awareness or like they might just not be ready for the transformation that you’re offering, or they’re in your niche, but they’re just not your people.

So if this is the case, you’d be seeing a high refund request because people are, Buying because of your marketing, but then they’re realizing after the fact they don’t actually want this product. You’d be seeing a lot of complaints in your inbox, your support inbox. You’d be seeing pretty low student success rates ’cause they’re just not taking advantage of the transformation.

They’re just not ready for it. You’d probably see a sudden drop in middle of the funnel conversions because they love the idea of what you’re offering. But they’re just not ready to make the jump. So like once it starts getting serious, they back out. All of these things are signs that your audience isn’t prepared or capable of committing to your offer.

So this is different ’cause you could be seeing signs in the middle of your funnel, at the bottom of your funnel or post buying. So you really need to keep your antennas up to figure out what’s going on here. Just a super quick example of like an audience that wouldn’t be right and ready. Just to demonstrate this for you.

We had a client who came to us with a course that taught YouTube to real estate agents. Her name’s Karen Carr. Check her out. She’s been on this podcast. She’s incredible, and her funnel is actually converting, but she had a lot of students inside it that were not really willing to figure out. The tech of YouTube and their support inbox was filling up with complaints and people needing a lot more support than they really offered inside this program.

So we figured out the message, rewrote the copy and the. Sales page conversions actually tripled. But even more than that, they all of a sudden have the right people inside. People who are ready to sit down, buckle up, figure out the tech, and just do the hard work. All of a sudden, the support request significantly decrease their student success significantly increased, and of course, conversions increase, which is always a win-win.

And then if you have a burned out audience, this occurs if you have an audience that isn’t growing, it’s just been exposed to the same content and offers over and over again. They’ve seen it all. They’re tired of the same message. In this case, your audience needs fresh content and your business needs a continuous influx of new leads.

So if you suspect you’ve got an audience problem, your solution lies in carefully segmenting your list so that you are selling to the people at the right stage of their journey when they are ready for their transformation, and not too early. Making sure that you have a really strong brand voice at the top of your funnel to repel the wrong people right away, so they really never even make their way on your list.

To begin with, and a strong lead generator for continuous audience growth year round. And then nurturing your new leads and letting your older leads breathe a little bit if they just need more time or if your offer isn’t right for them. So if this sounds familiar, you can’t really fix audience in a bubble.

You’ll likely have to figure out the audiences you’re going for and then dive in and adjust your offer and your copy to attract the right audience. But you need to do those two things through the lens of the right audience. To make sure that you’re working towards the correct objective. But if that didn’t really apply to you and you know that you have a list of the right people and you are continuously growing your list with the right people, you might be dealing with offer or copy as your problem.

So let’s keep going ’cause we have to address these issues to get you back on track and get you where you want to be. So your offer that precious, beautiful thing that you birth. From your own brain, if it is having a tough time out there in the wild right now, let’s figure out what’s going on. Your offer is intertwined with your audience.

You cannot separate the two. You need the right audience for your offer, and you need the right offer for your audience. Seth Godin told us to not find customers for our products, but to make products for our customers. There is not a more important phrase in marketing. You’re always going to have a harder time if you start out with a Shark Tank idea and then have to go find a massive volume of buyers from scratch.

But if you create or tailor an offer for the people who have already raised their hand to learn from you and follow you, it is a whole lot easier and a whole lot more profitable. The same thing is true when it comes to optimizing and adjusting your offer, and if we optimize our offer based on what we think people need, we’re probably gonna get it wrong.

If you have a validated offer that’s, Been around for a while. It is time to check back in, take the pulse, and make sure it’s still serving people where they are right now in terms of delivery, mechanism, promise, outcome, value, and pricing. If you’ve noticed more people reaching out for an extended payment plan, if you noticed more emails and complaints about your prices, and these are coming from the right people, like people you actually want to be working with, if you’ve noticed your churn rate increasing, Those are all signs that you might need to reevaluate core components of your offer.

If your top of funnel and mid funnel conversions are still smooth sailing and your engagement is still up, but those bottom of funnel conversions are starting to sink, that could mean that people still very much want the transformation, but the perceived value and actual value or pricing may not be there for them right now if people are still very much resonating with you.

You and your brand and engaging with your brand, but there seems to be a lack of engagement or desire or excitement around the transformation, or maybe even a lack of clarity around the transformation. That is a big sign that maybe some optimization needs to happen. Your offering needs to stand out. It needs to be fundamentally different and not just different, but able to deliver.

It has to cater to the wallets of your audience, which might be feeling a bit tighter right now. So what does it look like to jazz up and optimize your offer? Number one is risk reduction. Can we build out a longer or better guarantee? Can you possibly optimize a smaller version of your program? For less money or less time commitments.

We’re adjusting scope, not necessarily adjusting the price. Could we offer an easier or a longer payment plan as long as we’re still able to reach the right student and not necessarily reaching people who can’t actually afford your offer, but also let’s bump up that value. We do not have to jump to lowering prices or changing the price.

Can you add more support? Can you add more access? Can you add more coaching? This is what people are asking for right now. Maybe it’s time to bring in an expert and fine tune your curriculum. Can you optimize for your success? Can you make your content as accessible as possible with transcripts, audios, PDFs, whatever you can do to help your students navigate through your content.

Guide them, handhold them, optimize your onboarding to optimize student success and testimonials and case studies. Or maybe it is time to go big or go home and overhaul the whole shebang and take that hefty long-term program and turn it into an easy peasy monthly membership. That’s super drastic, but it might be what your people need right now.

Think about how you can rearrange, repackage, and reposition your offer for clarity, consistency, and value based on what they’re needing right now. More is not always more, but clear is always more. But the most important thing is to not do this in a bubble. Run a survey to your list. Get on the phone with people.

Deep dive and really figure out what they need so that you are not just guessing. Optimizing your offer is fundamental. It will impact your business. It is important that you take the time and the resources to do this, right? Don’t just throw spaghetti at the wall. And finally, the crucial role of copy and online marketing and sales, your audience and your offer, when combined, create your message.

And your message is a blueprint for your copy. The messages you put on your page and the order in which you do so will make or break your conversions. Basically, if your emphasis is on the wrong sable, you’ll miss the mark. Reducing copy to mere words is oversimplification. In order to get your copy, you need your market positioning, your unique value prop, the hierarchy of your messaging.

Which lays out the order of problems, objections, and solutions that you are addressing. You need your hook, that big idea for your launch or your funnel. That thing that even the best marketers stay up late at night wrestling with an agonizing over. And when you have a well-designed messaging strategy, then you just layer in those copy formulas, throw on that voice of customer and your brand voice, and all of a sudden you have something that converts like.

Gangbusters, and this is why businesses that just simply use AI to write their copy are going to experience low conversions. I love chat. G P T I use it. I love using ai, my business, and it is never, I repeat never the starting place for copy. Just a side note, I never use it for final copy because you cannot copyright it on the internet without the messaging, the research, the voice of customer.

Without that input at first, anything that you generate will lack the nuance and the complexity and the messaging that your people will need to see to make a buying decision. But as a business owner, if you’re armed with research, empathy, nuance, voice of customer data, and a thorough understanding of your audience’s lived experience, you can use these tools to draft your copy, incorporating your brand voice, your offer, your positioning, but you will need a discerning eye to know what is good copy and what should not ever go on your page.

And. AI can give you a workable first draft. The process of finding your message can be simplified, but that doesn’t always make it easy. This is the most important work you will ever do in your marketing. It is worth diving in and worth getting right? Even if you hire a professional copywriter, someone is still doing the hard work of crafting the right message.

It cannot be sidestepped. If you’re still using the same copy from 2019 or 2020, that message might not exist anymore because that audience doesn’t exist anymore. People are in a fundamentally different place right now. Another place I see a lot of business owners getting in trouble is the Franken funnel, which is where we’ve made so many small tweaks over time that now we’ve created a really chaotic and fractured experience because our funnel no longer has a consistent message and a consistent buying journey.

There’s a lot of ways this can show up in your funnel. So one way is. When you launch, you just get crickets, like people just don’t respond ’cause they don’t really know what they’re responding to or maybe there’s a lot of confusion. You just get a lot of questions. A lot of, is this for me, what’s in this?

People just are not clear about what it is that you’re actually communicating to them. There could just be high on subscribe rates or low conversions and engagement across your entire funnel, or you’ve just experienced a significant dip across that lead to sale conversion or on your sales page or your.

Click through rates. Something has just drastically shifted that shows us that there has been a big shift in your market and that the message is no longer hitting the mark. From an internal perspective, if you’re struggling to articulate clear specific messages or big ideas in your marketing, you’re not super clear on who your offer is for your position in the market, your value prop that might indicate that there’s a messaging problem there if you can’t clearly identify the most valuable and effective features and the benefits that they offer inside your product.

You may not be clear on your messaging in your copy. The promise must be true for every single person reading the page. That’s what makes it so hard to nail Sometimes. You’ve gotta be able to demonstrate compassion and empathy in highlighting the problems, clarity in presenting the solutions, and relevancy and timeliness in your message.

Your audience should feel respected and not tricked. You must be able to back up your claims with real life examples and social proof, believable, relevant, and diverse. Social proof is gonna win the game going forward. So that in a nutshell is audience offer copy. It’s very rare that you’ll be able to isolate only one, put it on an island, and then fix everything.

It’s likely that you’ll have to look at all three, but you have to do it in that order. Make a hundred percent sure that you have the right list and people first, then talk to that list. Do the research and adjust and optimize your offer to give them exactly what they want and need right now in terms of value, security, delivery, and transformation, and then craft the message and write the copy that says, here you go.

I made you that thing that you told me you needed. So much easier said than done. Right. Okay. I wanna share three recent client stories with you of launch and funnel strategies where audience offer and copy were all optimized to have record breaking results. In 2023 this year, so you can see what this looks like in real life businesses just like yours.

The first case study I wanna get into is my client, Amanda Walsh. She is the c e O of Astrology Hub, which is really interesting ’cause it’s not a personal brand and it’s not B two B, it is a B two C astrology educational organization. I. Now, I could get really nerdy on this launch for a lot of reasons.

We did so many cool, exciting, creative things with this strategy. This is an offer. They have launched again and again and again, and everything from the timing to the launch style to the strategy was completely different. In case you’re not a super nerd like me, I’m gonna stick to the high level and give you all of the juicy launch details so that you could maybe replicate some of this in your own launch.

So Astrology Hub has a ton of offers, but their core offer is this membership called the Inner Circle. It’s a $37 a month membership. It runs for a full year, and it’s not for everyone in their audience, but it is for the largest group of people in their audience. So that’s one important thing to note about their audience.

Astrology Hub has a huge email list. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of people, but not everyone on that email list is right for this offer. So in studying the audience, we have to be very careful to only study the people that are right for this audience in order to get the right market research and to get clean data.

So when you are looking to fix or optimize a funnel, you go audience offer copy. That is the exact same order of operations that we work when we are writing and strategizing a launch or a funnel from scratch. So with all of our clients, we start with the audience, we dive deep into the market research.

This is not some surface level Amazon book reviews, Facebook groups, Reddit reviews, market research. We are diving. Deep, deep, deep into their audience, collecting data through surveys, getting critical mass, hundreds of responses, doing one-on-one interviews. And then yes, of course that data mining through the internet, but we are collecting that to get an entire picture of what the audience looks like.

So when we study their audience specifically for this offer, we learned a couple key things. We learned that these people had a significant problem with other solutions that they had tried when they tried to learn astrology. See, the people that are right for this offer are people that don’t just wanna know how astrology impacts their lives, but they wanna learn how to interpret this art and this science that is studying the planets and the stars.

And when they had tried to do this in the past, they found the information completely overwhelming and they always left with more questions than answers. We also found that while these people really loved learning from a diverse range of voices and perspectives, they were really reluctant. To trust just any astrologer.

In the past few years, they have seen an increase in social media astrologers and though astrologers who lacked real credentials popping up left and right claiming to have the one and only perspective, and they had grown increasingly skeptical. These people also lacked time and money to invest in exploring astrology on such a deep level, and they felt really lonely and isolated when they tried to discuss their passion with people in their lives who just didn’t get it.

Bottom line, they sought trustworthiness, affordability, and community that shared their passion while still being able to dive deep into an endless amount of information. So then we went and optimized the offer. That is always the next step is offer optimization. Because of the overwhelming confusion expressed by the students when they tried to consume other resources.

We started by optimizing the onboarding experience, helping them consume the vast amount of resources in the most simple and straightforward way possible. We also magnified the community, helping them find these little pockets of people where they could fit the most comfortably so that they could go and find their people right away.

While also finding the wonderful, diverse range of communities and forums and topics being discussed and found within this one central hub. And most importantly, we were considering raising the price and we decided not to because of what was being expressed by these students. We kept the price the exact same and instead of increasing it for this launch, but most of the optimization was done in the positioning and the messaging.

So let’s move on to what we did in the copy and the marketing strategy. With the copy and the messaging, we really shifted focus. We knew that the learning experience and the quality and the credibility of the information and the teachers teaching the information was everything. We highlighted the journey and the experience within the inner circle.

Not just what they would learn, but how it would feel and how they would learn inside this membership. We emphasize the guidance provided by trusted, vetted, incredible astrologers and the various and diverse resources available so that they were never alone and that they were never without expertise.

We showed them why this time it would be different, why, where they might have failed before they would be able to succeed with these resources, these people, and this information. And we demonstrated that throughout the launch, having a mid cart event, which was typically a behind the paywall event that they got once a month, once they were in the membership, we demonstrated that in the middle of the launch, middle of the cart, we held an event where they could come get a feel for the expertise, get a feel for the experience, and get a feel for the community so that they got to see behind the paywall in front of the paywall so that we were showing instead of telling.

That actually prevented that significant mid cart slump. We could see the numbers starting to decline, and then we held that event and then those numbers boosted right back up and stayed up all the way to the end of the cart. We underscored the community aspect of the Inner Circle, emphasizing the opportunity for like mind astrology fans to connect.

We made sure that potential members understood they would be joining a community, not just a course or information, and then because our word. Will never be as powerful as their peers. We leveraged social proof and testimonials to assure potential members about the authenticity of the experts and the value of the membership.

We had testimonials all over that page about the value, about the information alone being worth the cost of admission, about the classes, about the expertise, about the experience inside, so that our word did not have to speak for itself. The social proof spoke for itself. Their old copy did a great job of highlighting the benefits, but it didn’t focus on the features and their use cases, and it didn’t address hesitations.

The old copy worked well when the economy was booming, but it didn’t hold up once the economy started to dip, and once the hesitations were a little bit more significant. So what were the results? Well, in comparing the 2023 campaign, so this launch happened in spring of 2023, end of March, beginning of April.

In comparing that to a 2022 launch, we as we observed, 151 increase in conversion rates from the sales page to the completion of the checkout process and the conversion rate from visitors of the sales page to actual buyers. Increased bio whopping 798%. I actually wanna break that down for a minute. This is really important.

Get nerdy with me. This is gonna pay off. So in 2022, their sales page conversion rate was 16.01%. That’s actually a phenomenal sales page conversion rate. I would love to see around 5%. I want higher for my clients, but 5%, you’re doing incredible. So that means the number of people that saw the sales page clicked through and landed on the checkout cart.

16% of unique viewers. Landed on the checkout cart. That’s 16.01%. That was 2022. In 2023, that number was 40.19%. That is wild. That is completely unrealistic. Please do not expect that to see, to see that on your own sales page. I have never seen a number that high, not even in the boom. Okay, that is 151% increase, but here’s what is more interesting to me than that in 2022, even with that 16% conversion rate, the actual buyers, so the people that landed on the sales page, That actually converted into buyers was only 1.6%, which means we had a lot of people clicking and very few people buying, and I can almost guarantee you that that is because there was a call to action in the header.

Call to actions in your header on a sales page. Increased clicks and not conversions. Do not put a call to action. In the header of your sales page, unless it has proven to work for you in the past, it very rarely will increase conversions. Whereas in 2023, the number of sales page viewers that converted to buyers was 14.37%.

That is the 798% increase. That means our messaging was on point. Our call to actions were on point and our buttons were in the right place. Overall, the lead to sale conversion rate, which is the number I am looking at to understand the efficacy of the messaging and the strategy increased by 18.72% for a total of 5.2% for a lead to sale conversion rate for our 2023 launch.

That means that for all of the leads that entered at the top of the funnel, there were 14,320 leads at the top of the funnel. 5.2% of those converted, converted to buyers. Right now I am looking for about a 1% to 3% to even understand if we are hitting the mark with our messaging. I wanna see closer to 3% for my clients.

We hit 5.2% for this launch. This next client is a fabulous woman named Gloria Chow. She’s been on this podcast before and she has an incredible offer called the PR Starter Pack. She also has an incredible podcast called Small Business pr. Go listen to it. She teaches small businesses how to do their own PR, to drastically increase their visibility, their reach, and their revenue.

So Gloria’s product is a $1,500 offer, and she hired us to write her Evergreen funnel. When we dove into her audience, we noticed a couple key things right off the bat. Number one, she actually did have an audience problem, even though she had a super successful business, a validated brand, a validated offer.

What was happening was her messaging was bringing people in at the top of the funnel that could not necessarily afford or were not ready to buy her offer. Basically, she was just bringing in people not necessarily at the right stage of their journey. So we knew that was something we’d have to address.

We also learned that the people that were most attracted to her, her audience was primarily made up of Bipo woman founders, and about 75% of those women were black small business owners. This was someone who was already attracting a diverse audience because of her values, and we had to make sure that her message was matching that.

We also learned that her audience had a few misunderstandings when it came to pr. They saw PR as expensive and requiring an industry insider with paid ads or endless content creation being a more viable solution to expanding visibility and revenue. Essentially, they thought they either had to pay a lot of money for firm or spend all of their time creating free content or spending their money on ads.

So then we dove into offer optimization. So we did not lower the price of Gloria’s offer. That was not the right move. We had to bridge the value gap. We, yes, had to make sure we were bringing in the right people at the top of the funnel, but we had to raise both the perceived and actual value of her program because we knew that there was an increasing need for more support inside her community.

And we’re just seeing a decrease in the desire for D I Y programs in general. We added more support and q and a coaching calls to Gloria’s offer. Making sure that people knew that she was showing up and supporting them every single month to walk through this program with them in real time. We also just repositioned and repackaged up the training, not recreating, but moving things around so that her audience understood the training inside this offer was business strategy, not just extra content thrown in there, but these were business strategies being taught so that somebody could take their own PR and do it in-house.

And then Gloria has something inside her offer that you will not find anywhere else. This is truly her value prop. She has a proprietary list of over 70,000 media contacts within her program. This is a database and a piece of software that they have built out where you can go in and search based on your niche.

Based on your specialty, based on who you are, looking for, who you wanna reach, and you can come up with names and emails of journalists, podcast hosts, media contacts for you to send your pitch to. This would take thousands of hours of Googling, but Gloria has put all of this together for you, so we made sure that that was front and center.

So that people understood that they no longer had to rely on somebody else’s contacts and somebody else’s insider information, that they had everything they needed right at their fingertips. All right? For the copy and the messaging, we had a big revelation about the positioning for this product and how to communicate the value.

We leaned on three core truths. Number one, the whitewashed and privileged guarded world of media and entrepreneurship is now open to everyone. Gloria’s mission was to redefine the face of success by breaking down barriers. Number two, PR is an effective high R o I solution for scalable legion and revenue, and it should.

Always and forever be free. And number three, the PR starter pack is not a stepping stone on the way to hiring a firm, but is the leading resource empowering business owners to take their own PR in-house, to build visibility and publicity strategies as a business strategy. And the hard reality was, and Gloria will be the first to tell you this, her marketing did not reflect her values.

She was using traditional standard marketing strategies, gimmicks and practices that all of us have been taught, and they did not reflect who she was. Quite frankly, they were not marketing strategies that her audience responded to or even respected. So we stopped with marketing gimmicks and we let the messaging do the heavy lifting.

We avoided inflated value claims. We mentioned the product and the price early on in the webinars. We never tried to pretend like we were saying we were doing something that we weren’t. We focused unbelievable social proof, and we let Gloria’s students testify to her product’s value. So I said that Gloria hired us to work on her Evergreen funnel, but she was able to take our copy and do a live launch at the end of 2022 before she even installed all of this into her funnel and her ads manager said that she was the only client in 2022 that had a launch that outperformed her previous launch.

Before the economic downturn, the new copy and the new strategy led to a 51% increase in sales page conversions with an average time on the page of over nine minutes. Those people wanted to read that copy. They spent almost 10 minutes just sitting there reading that sales page. She saw a 13% increase in revenue despite an industry-wide economic downturn.

And an increased lead to sale conversion with fewer refund requests. She had a six figure launch before she even plugged it into Evergreen, but what did her Evergreen funnel look like? So the first four months of 2023, I. We observed 137% increase in sales page conversion rates over her 2022 sales page, conversion rates for her Evergreen funnel for an average of 12.3%.

Sales page conversions for a $1,500 offer on Evergreen. One to 3% would’ve been good. At one point that Evergreen Funnel to a cold audience reached an impressive 18.37% conversion rate on her sales page, and at its highest point, the lead to sale conversion for that funnel was 3.3%, which was a 31% increase in a lead to sale conversion since 2022.

All right, the third and final case study, we’re gonna wrap it up with my friend Kendra Perry, who teaches the Health Coach Accelerator. Which is a $2,000 six month coaching program that teaches health coaches in the earlier stages of their online business, how to build the foundation for a six-figure health coaching business by building a signature program.

So in the market research, we learned that her audience was made up of individuals who had previously been let down by other solutions. Does that ring a bell? That has been almost all of the people we’ve talked about today. Specifically their certification programs promised they would have everything they needed to run a business, but when they get out, all they had was their certification, and many of them had hired other business coaches from outside niches or just generalist coaches that gave them irrelevant advice that did not apply, that they were not able to use.

Although not necessarily broke these time and cash strapped people could not afford to make another wrong investment. And while making an impact was important to them, their primary concerns revolved around money, time exhaustion, and the fear of pursuing the wrong strategies. So if we went all in with messaging on like impacting their people, we really would be missing the mark.

All right, so our first move was to reposition Kendra’s offer. Her existing message was largely focused on how to build a six figure business. [00:35:00] Instead, we focused on gaining the emotional buy-in to Kendra and her strategies and methodologies, and then emphasized the unique value prop of creating a signature program.

We also removed all bonuses, all bonuses from the emails, all bonuses from the sales page, and instead replace those with the most exciting features that we wanted to call forward. So we positioned everything as part of the core offer, but pulled out parts of the core offer that we really wanted people to notice, and that we wanted to, quite frankly, put more copy around and used where you would typically put a bonus.

We used that copy and that real estate to. Call out these features that we knew would make the biggest difference for these students. And on the sales page, we only listed features that provided quick shortcuts or easy wins to make the offer more relevant and actionable. Making sure that they knew this was created by a health coach for a health coach, and that this had features in it that they have never seen before that would get them things that they’ve never had before.

Now for the copy and the marketing and the messaging, The old copy really spoke towards getting a 10 K month, but we felt that that was quite frankly, too far out of reach for these people. That just didn’t feel possible, so we targeted a more realistic $5,000 month. We refreshed the messaging to align with Kendra’s no nonsense.

Bold approach and authenticity, showing her ability to simplify complex concepts, and we also underscored that health is a polarizing subject and people need to take a stand. We wanted to weeded out people who just weren’t ready to do the work and who weren’t ready to be as bold as Kendra is encouraging them to be.

We made sure to address their hesitations head on with timely, relevant message. Not trying to gaslight them and pretend that things aren’t hard and things are not the way that they are right now. We made sure they knew the copy was written today and not six months ago, and Kendra is ready to show up and serve them exactly where they are.

We show them that the program offers enough support and tailored solutions to meet their needs, and we heavily leverage social proof using testimonials and success stories to demonstrate the effectiveness of the program. Yes, we use screenshots for believability, but we also use micro case studies to help illustrate the transformative stories of past clients.

So Kendra came to us needing an evergreen funnel. She was tired and exhausted with live launching. She’s currently installing this funnel. She’s one of our most recent clients. But like many of our clients, she was able to take our copy and live launch with it because why not get that cash injection and get all of your money back from working with us right away?

So in 2022, she actually did a live launch of this program right off the back of a summit. The program was actually $500 less than it is right now. The lead to sale conversion from that launch was 4.7. Amazing. But this year, just a few months ago, she did the same type of launch off the backend of a summit with her optimized funnel, the optimized copy, and an increased price point.

So $500 more than it was last year. The lead to sale conversion grew to 5.68%. That’s a 21% increase, and her sales page conversion hit 10.49%. She generated more revenue this year with fewer leads. At a higher price point, and she recouped her investment before she even turned on her evergreen funnel.

Her offer showcases the impact of an audience-centric approach, the effective use of social proof, and the strategic repositioning of an offer. What I want you to see with all three of these examples is that we studied their people, we listened to them closely, we listened to them deeply, and we listened for nuance.

We did not make any assumptions, and then we optimized the offer. And the positioning and the value prop of the offer based on what they needed and where they were right now. And then we changed the messaging and the positioning of the funnel and the strategy and the copy based on what they needed and the offer that they needed.

In all of these, we threw out traditional cortisol, anxiety, raising marketing strategies. If we approached people with honesty and in return, they gained their trust. The respect and ultimately the sale. I know this was a packed episode. I know this was a lot of information and a lot of action steps. If you could do one thing next week, I want you to send out a survey to your audience.

I want you to hop on a call with a couple people, but then you have to use that information. You have to take that data and you cannot lean on confirmation bias. You cannot take out a couple sentences or a couple snippets or the thing that offended you the most, or excited you the most. You have to look at the data, what is being said the most, and use that lens to look at your offer.

Optimize your offer, whether it is big or small, whether it is a few tweaks or a complete overhaul. Optimize your offer through that lens. Find your message and write your copy in light of that new offer and your understanding of your audience. Take it one step at a time and if you’d like some support with this and you wanna know what it looks like to work together.

Go ahead and reach out Brittany mcbean.com/contact. I’d love to chat with you and see if it would make sense for us to work together and see if we can do some of this and get you some of these results with your funnel this year. All right, y’all, I’ll talk to you next time. Bye.