#196: 3 Must Marketing Campaign Prompts

Welcome back to another edition of the Course Creation Incubator podcast. I’m your host, Gina Onativia, here to get you excited about your course creation and your marketing help you build up the online based business of your dreams and build whatever program you’re working on right now. Maybe it’s a legion course, maybe it’s a starter course or a signature program, maybe it’s a certification, and you’re going to teach others your expertise.

Whatever. It looks like we’ve got your back. And today I’m thinking about campaigns, marketing campaigns, quite a bit, because we are in the midst of three or four campaigns. As I record this and I want to talk about three questions that I always ask before I kick off a campaign to make sure it’s impactful, it’s effective, and let’s face it, it converts.

But before we get into that, let’s talk about last week’s episode. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, I had the pleasure of hosting my dear friend, master copywriter Megan O’Leary, and we tackled some of the biggest mistakes that we make as copywriters and course creators. When crafting copy and messaging. It’s a must listen. If you’re serious about creating messaging that really resonates and really connects with your audience.

And if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to sign up for the waitlist for our live conversion Copywriting Playbook course. It’s going to open up in a few weeks and O’Leary and I will teach you how to write truly persuasive copy. And by the way, this is the best way to sell your course. This can make or break your course if you don’t know how to connect with your person, the person who is just waiting to buy from you, but you’re not speaking their language or you don’t know the right call to action, then you might not sell.

So I want to teach you and O’Leary to how to be truly persuasive. So they have to pick up their credit card because they’re so bought in. And by the way, there’s a course marketing bonus in there as well. I’ll do a brand new training about the five elements I use when building out my course marketing campaigns. Today, we’re going to talk about three questions.

And during that bonus, I’m going to walk through the framework that I use whenever I build out marketing campaigns, whether they’re for courses or books or events. Now, spots are limited for our live course. We’re keeping the groups small, so save your spot on the waitlists course creation boutique e-comm slash copy wait list. Be one of the few a link to it in the show notes.

Now before we dive in, I haven’t been sharing personal stories while I’m on this podcast. It’s been a little while. I’ve been kind of diving into the workshops and the guest episodes, but I would be remiss to mention that it was the anniversary of my eye surgery recently, a life changing event, an event that had me put this podcast on pause, by the way, and we are celebrating that this podcast is back weekly.

I just wanted to mention that. So we went to a cadence that was every other week, and now as of this year, we are back baby. We are going weekly. Thank you to my husband Alejandro for pushing me and saying, Why aren’t you going weekly again? We are back. So I thought I would commemorate the week or two weeks that I was down in my recovery.

I essentially spent two weeks confined to my room and I wanted to commemorate and think about how I wanted to celebrate this week, that I was healthy, that I was beyond recovery. And one of the goals I set was to get back into running. Three months ago, I started small with a5k. I walked some of it there was a hill and a month later I tackled another five K, and then a month later I thought for the anniversary of my surgery.

Let’s really push ourselves and commit to a ten K. And you know what? I did it. I haven’t done a tank in a few years, probably two or three years, and I did it this past weekend. I jogged the whole thing. That was my goal, to not walk. And trust me, I did the tank shuffle, which but I didn’t walk.

I mention this because in the past I might have been more cautious and said to myself, You know what? I’m not really in shape for a ten K, I should stick to five KS where I belong, should stick to my comfort zone and get really good at those before I move on. But I’m really trying to adapt this new mindset of going for it, even if I’m not fully there yet, or I feel like I’m not fully there and getting out of my comfort zone and, you know, jumping into the cold waters, if you will.

And I encourage you to do the same. Now, specifically with your course or your program or whatever offers you’re putting out, I want you to go for it. I want you to put out a marketing campaign or put out that course you’ve been talking about or go live. And some of us have been grappling with why need to do new and bigger things this year?

And maybe we’re starting too big. Maybe we’re just trying to say, Hey, I’m going to go for the whole well, and really you just need to improve on what you’ve already started. Like me, starting with those five KS a few months ago and saying, Okay, now I can go to the tank because it’s not like I just decided to go for the ten K Right.

By the way, I started a couple of months ago and I built myself up. Sometimes, though, you do have to take a leap after you get some momentum going. So I don’t want you holding back on, launching your course, refining your program or running that big campaign. I really want you to take that first step to the big leap.

And sometimes you’re not going to be fully in shape for it, and that’s okay. I want to encourage you to do it because it feels good, feels good to push yourself out of your comfort zone. And trust me, it felt so good on that. Chris. San Diego morning. The sun was out. There was hundreds of people surrounding me.

It felt awesome. So I wanted to share that and encourage you to put yourself out there. And that’s why we’re going to talk about marketing campaigns today. And hopefully these three questions get you excited about what’s possible and what you can put out there. And by the way, just a preface to this episode, Marketing Campaign is a organized effort.

You’re going to send out some emails, you’re gonna do some social media, maybe you do some partnerships. It’s not just a whisper of an announcement, right? Like I talked about early on in this podcast, it’s more of a fully organized, intentional effort to put an offer out there. Think about it like this. If you’re offering a six week course with self-paced videos and life coaching plus bonuses, you’ve got to have a plan to effectively communicate that value.

So I’m assuming that one, you’ve got to organize campaign. And then two, you know, your offer when you listen to this, I’m going to assume you have both of those things in place. If you don’t just take notes for now and then you can think about your offer later. And by the way, I mentioned that I have a couple of campaigns that we’re working on right now.

So this is perfect timing. The first campaign is, of course, our Conversion Copywriting Playbook campaign, which is a little meta, right? We’re building the plane and we’re flying it, whatever that metaphor is. So we’ve got a lot of different aspects of the campaign working right now, and I just want to share it as we build it. Plus, we’re working on a certification program, so it’s a little bit of a different animal.

Then we’ve got an education client that’s got some deadlines coming up. So it’s a very different kind of campaign because it’s an ongoing offer obviously to go to a university. But some of the core principles I’ll share today apply across the board. And whatever your thinking, by the way, just think out of the box, right. And think about how maybe you can apply a couple of different ways or questions to your own campaign that you want to put out to your own promotion.

Okay, So let’s dive into these three questions that I think drive any truly successful marketing promotion. And the first question is how do I begin? Where do I start to really capture the attention of my audience? Because how you begin really sets the tone and piece for everything that follows. For example, are you thinking you’re going to do more of a slow burn because you’ve got six months to kind of plant the seeds for what’s to come?

For example, I do a lot of book launches for a client, and sometimes we have five, six months leading up to the book being published, which is awesome, because then we get to plant the seeds of the thought leadership that leads up to the book. We get to start talking about some of the themes that we’re going to examine in a deeper way in the book.

When you have that luxury of time and I call that the slow burn, another way that you can start and really connect with your audience is making more of a big announcement or a splash. Hey, this is coming up in a few weeks and we’ve kind of done this and made a splash with the conversion copywriting course. We came out seven weeks or so with the announcement and we went out with, I would say like a pretty nice splash because that’s what we intended to be.

First is the slow burn, and then there are campaigns with an ongoing cycle like I mentioned, the educational institution, they never go dark, right? They’re recruiting all the time. So there’s never a pause. They’re always marketing themselves in some way. Their marketing is evergreen. Now, when you have an ongoing promotion or an ongoing marketing campaign, where do you start?

Is going to be more about specific campaigns that you’re pushing. So say you’re doing a holiday campaign, so then you might make a splash with your holiday campaign. Maybe you’re doing welcoming new students and you’re showing them arriving on campus and doing a campaign that starts when they arrive on campus. So you’re starting with a bang with that.

So you want to decide how are you going to begin? By the way, this also came up, this idea of where do I start? I was talking to someone today who’s interested in a certification course as part of our Done for You program, we offer building out certification courses. And he was saying that he already has an idea of who he would market to.

But how do I get them to know that this is what they need? Which is such a great question, right? That’s the question for us. How do we get them to know this is what you need? Right? So it dawns on them, oh, wait, this exactly what I need for my practice. This is what I need for my coaching or my consulting.

And it’s a great question because you might have an idea of who you want to market to, but how do you get in front of them? How do you do it in a way that people are going to perk up and say, That might be right for me? Well, that’s why you have to get your expertise in your content, in your thought leadership out there early, like I said earlier, to start planting the seeds of what you want to market.

I’m talking one more example here. I was talking to someone who’s doing a book launch and they were asking me what the right lead magnet was. How do you plant the seed of your expertise and your thought leadership in order to ultimately sell a book or your course or whatever it looks like? So think about yourself. Where do you want to start?

Is it a slow burn? Is it pow? The big announcement? Is it maybe hit hard a few months out, then do a slow burn into its into three months or maybe it’s a start and 30 days out. Right. Or maybe you just decide today I’m going to announce tomorrow and then I’m going to all in two weeks. Okay, let’s go for it.

Think about your starting point and how it would determine your strategy moving forward. Okay. Question two What experience or event will best showcase your expertise and build trust with your audience? A.K.A How am I going to sell my offer? I’ve called this the selling system before on this podcast, and I do believe every successful campaign needs a selling event.

It could be an information session, it could be hot seats, webinars, it could be trend webinars, and by the way, that’s what O’Leary and I, we’re going to do a trend webinar for our copywriting class. It could be a challenge. It’s an opportunity for participants to get a feel for your approach and decide if your course or program is right for them.

And I do feel like you need to send people somewhere to get some value and a sense of what they’re going to get from you. How do you coach, how do you interact? How do you take questions? And it’s great for people to get a preview of what you have to offer. So it could be webinars. If you’re higher ed, it could be info session, ask me anything sessions.

So think through what that event is for You. Ask yourself what event makes sense for your offer. By the way, if you go to the webinar with O’Leary and I, you’ll get a sense of how we pitch in cash and that’s going to mirror what we do live inside our copywriting course. And by the way, this event doesn’t have to be elaborate.

It could just give people a taste of your expertise and how you can help them. I had a course creator who had a series of resumes. She just said, I’ll be on Zoom for the next three days. Pop in. If you have questions about my course, I’ll answer them for you. You can pop right out. I mean, it doesn’t get more laid back than that, but I think people appreciate that opportunity to ask questions in a laid back environment.

They didn’t have to register. They just popped in whenever they want. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It doesn’t have to be this big event. All right. Now it’s time for our third question. What powerful words do you want to use to close the deal, to really speak to your people? Now, that’s a very long question.

We could just short that to what do you want to say? We’re talking about messaging here and this has been a biggie for me, especially now that I’ve been going back and forth with O’Leary so much on our copywriting course. And in this case specifically, I want you to think about what are the top three messaging points you want to convey to your audience now.

Now, this isn’t about benefits or features, it’s about capturing attention and sparking interest. This is really what do you want to say to grab their attention today? How do you spin your promise in a way that’s top of mind for people? So, for example, let’s go back to our conversion copywriting class. Air is obviously what people are talking about today, so I’ll link to that episode that I recorded a couple of podcasts ago where I talk through how we love to use air in our course creation.

Plus, O’Leary and I talked about air last week in our copywriting mistakes. So either way, everywhere you go, air is top of mind. So of course we want to link up that big trending juggernaut when we talk up our copywriting course. So we also want to talk about why email is more important than ever and why social media might not be your best bet when it comes to selling your course.

So what is it for you? What’s trending? What are your big messaging pillars that you want to talk about? Your messaging pillars will guide everything from your sales page to your email and social posts. Make sure they are compelling enough to grab attention and persuasive enough to drive action. So these messaging pillars are so important. They’ve got to be juicy enough to grab people and stop them in their tracks and then eventually persuade them to put their credit card down for you.

Okay, so to recap the three questions to ask yourself, when planning a marketing campaign, one How do I start to What’s my ultimate selling event? Three What I want to say, What are my messaging pillars? Answering these questions will hopefully give you some clarity and focus to execute a successful campaign. And now I wouldn’t be a good marketer if I didn’t give you a quick plug at the end of this episode for the Conversion copywriting playbook.

So if you want to know how to capture your attention in a really busy world, we’re going to walk you through it. If you’re serious about mastering email, copy that converts the playbook is for you in this life class. O’Leary and I will teach you everything for writing persuasive emails to creating a campaign that sells. We’ll talk about some of the things I’ve talked about today and way more.

Check it out. Go and sign up for a spot on the waitlist. And thank you for tuning in. If you have enjoyed this episode and found it helpful, please make sure you’re subscribed. Leave me a review or rating. I would love it. Until then, go create be you and be brilliant and get it done.