Episode 066 | 2024: The Ultimate Marketing Platform To Boost Your Sales!

Online coaches and course creators. Enrollment targets are the lifeblood of your business because they're the difference between making or not making your sales goals and targets for that month, which in turn reflects in your revenue and the cash within your business. So if you're struggling to hit your enrollment targets, let's dive into three of the reasons that this this could be happening for you. Hi, I'm Viv guy, seven figure business owner turned online mentor on a mission to help online course creators like you to navigate the roller coaster that is business so that you can attract dream clients and hit your enrollment and sales targets every single month to reach six figures and beyond. If you're ready to create a thriving and profitable podcast to accelerate your audience growth, engagement and sales in a way that's fun, makes you money, and allows you the freedom to thrive, join me here every week on podcast sales made easy. All right, welcome. Welcome to this episode everybody. So let's dive straight in. Why are you struggling to hit your enrollment targets month on month? I see this happening so, so many times. We're now in an era with our online businesses, especially within the coaching and course creating niche, where moving to a one to many model is what's recommended by everybody. And why not? Because it is saying this is a way to make more time and to stop trading time for money. So to give you more free time, more available time whilst making more money, I mean, it's a win win. Why wouldn't you want that? Why wouldn't you want to do that? Which leads a lot of people to go down and become online course creators, which is awesome because I want everyone to have lots of money and lots of free time. But what I see so frequently is course creators who are not hitting their enrollment targets. And this can also happen if you are a one to one coach and offer one to one services as well. So it depends where you're at within your business. But if you are affected, if you are impacted by low Enrollment figures and you are not meeting your goals month on month, then this episode is just for you. You see, what I see happening is people decide to launch a group program, for example, and it's really exciting, isn't it? It's new. It's like, wow, I'm going to save myself 10 hours. If I take ten clients, that's 10 hours a week or 5 hours a week if it's fortnightly one to one sessions that I now don't have to do, I'm going to be doing like 1 hour a week. It's going to be amazing. And in principle, in theory it is. And if you can get this model to work, fantastic. I am not poo pooing the model, but what I am saying is I see a lot of people struggling. What happens is they launch cohort number one, their first iteration of the group program. They put it out to their existing audience. Hey, I'm running a beta. Who wants to be part of this? They get people raising their hands, lots of excitement, lots of energy. They take ten people on or however many they start with. It's amazing. So it went so well because you're amazing at what you do. So you launch again. I'm going to promote this and run it again. So I'm going to take on more people or you decide to run an evergreen model, I'm going to take five people on every month, or three people or ten people every month, whatever that looks like. And so let's talk, though, as though we're doing a cohort. So you get three months down the line, you finish your twelve week program, I'm ready to launch again. You put it out to your audience, to your email list, to your socials. Hey, everyone, this was amazing. Look at all these fantastic results we got. And you get your ten people. But my God, it was an uphill struggle. Like it was a battle. This time you really had to kind of be doing like personal reach out videos and messages. You had to send extra emails. It was right to the wire, like getting that extra, that final 10th person in. It was right to the wire from when you started delivering or day one of the course began. So that's number two, round number two. You get to round number three, another twelve weeks later. So we're six months in now and more people have got amazing results. It was fantastic. So you say, oh, I'm going to do this again. This is brilliant. You put it out to your list, to your email, to your socials, you ask people to share it, maybe, and you don't hit your enrollment targets. In fact, you get three people sign up. And this makes it really difficult, energetically, for your group calls. I mean, three people, one person doesn't show up, two people don't show up. It's really not the energy that you want. Trust me, I have been there. And the reason this happens with your enrollment targets is because you don't have enough people in your audience, for starters. So this is where often we talk about, you will hear me talk time and time and time again about ways in which to be growing your audience and the three types of content and why so often when you launch a program and you fill the first cohort, or maybe you get through the second one, but you struggle by the third is because you're only producing one type of content and that is nurture content. So that is one of the first problems that I see is we're just creating too much of one type of content. So we get so focused on, well, we've got people I need to send emails, we're busy. We're busy entrepreneurs. So when we look at our week, we've got clients to serve, we've got websites to update, we've got whatever else going on admin to do. So when we look at our content, we go, right, well, I've got to write an email this week. Okay. That's one thing. I need to create some social posts. That's some more. If you're podcasting, I need to create a podcast episode. If you're blogging, blogging a YouTube video, whatever that might be, maybe it is just socials and email. But if you're on five different social platforms, you're creating a TikTok video, you're doing some reels or some Instagram stories, you're doing Facebook live, you've suddenly got a lot of content to create. So what happens is you get stuck in nurture, creating content just for your existing audience because you have to serve them. You've made a commitment, so you keep producing nurture content. And this segues us very nicely into number two, where you are posting your content. The reality is, if you are struggling with your enrollment targets, if you have not hit your targets for at least the past three months, if your sales have plateaued or declined over the past three months, if you are creating three plus pieces of content every week for social media, short form content, so a reel story, captions, Facebook post, TikTok videos, LinkedIn posts, whatever platforms you're looking at or using, if you're putting that out three times a week and you're not hitting your enrollment targets, then I want you to look and consider that it's the platform that you are using. So it's not what you have to offer, it's not necessarily your content, it is the platform. Because the reality is most of us build our businesses from the off on social media on short form content. And why wouldn't we? Why wouldn't we? Because when most of us start our businesses and come to business, where have we been using that's familiar to us socially? Social media, Facebook, Instagram. So what happens is we start a business, we start searching or finding business coaches, mentors, whatever people within our niche, experts within our niche, authorities within our niche, and we look to them as role models. We look to see what they're doing. And there are a lot of big names out there who are on social media, rightly so. They're on social media. It's a great place to be for a lot, a lot of people. But here's the thing. If we look at the big names in our industry that are out there, Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, James Wentmore, Tim Ferris, Brandon Buchard. Here's the thing. They are not just creating content for social media because they know that short form content is not the most effective way to grow a multi six and seven figure business. In fact, Amy Paulsfield, in one of her interviews, she was interviewed or interviewing I'm not sure which, Janet Kutcher and she was asked, if she was to start a business from scratch today, what would she do for her marketing? She said the number one thing she would do is she would start a podcast and she would release at least one episode, ideally two episodes per week. That would be her primary focus to enable her to grow her email list to create a podcast, not create a social channel. Here's the reason. Short form content, it does not allow you to pack the same punch as you can with content that is longer form. And when I talk about longer form content, I don't mean you have to create really long like hour long episodes on a podcast or epic 5000 word blogs or anything like that. When I talk about longer form content, I'm talking about the different platforms. So yes, blogging, podcasting, obviously. And the reason is the way people consume these types of content is different. The psychology behind people listening to a podcast versus those scrolling on social media. The behaviors are different. The intentions are different. For example, somebody who finds a blog or podcast via Google search, their intention is I am looking for a solution. So for example, someone who clicks on Amy Portsfield's online marketing made easy may be looking for a simple solution to their marketing problem. Someone who lands on and hits a podcast for weight loss during menopause is looking for a solution versus people who are consuming content on social media. Social media is an entertainment platform. Short form content. It's short form because it is an entertainment space. Think about how you consume content on social media. Now, you may be different because you're a business owner. So you obviously will be looking for tips and people to follow who are leaders within your industry. You're quite intentional. But if you think about how your friends who maybe aren't business owners, utilize social media and people who, for example, the menopausal 50 year old who can't lose weight and wants to lose weight, she's not a business owner. She uses social media to look for recipes and cuddly cats and like me, good news movement, because it cheers her up. Why and how people are using and searching for content is really something we need to consider here. And this is why the platform is really, really important. Because actually those people who are looking for blogs, looking for podcast episodes, searching on Google, so on and so forth, for blogs, YouTubes, da da da, they have an intention that they are looking for a solution to their problem. They are seeking out some form of support and help versus those people on social media where we just appear in feeds and we get scrolled past, yes, they like us. Maybe they're interested in what we do. And I am not saying don't have social media. There is definitely a reason to have presence. However, like Amy P. Said, if you have one thing, because when you start out in business, your time, well, your time is always limited. We all have the same amount of time. But the activities, the actions, the activities that you are spending your time on, you have to be very intentional, because you only have a finite amount of time. Think about Amy Portsfield, Brenda Prichard, all these people, Mel Robbins, they have huge teams running their marketing for them. They will have an Instagram team and social media managers and ads managers, and they will have multiple teams of people, teams within teams running these things for them. So what do you want to do? You want to choose the most impactful thing and the thing that is going to get you most widely seen by your audience. Now, if we think about short form content, social media, it's less than 6% of your audience who are going to see your content, less than 6% of your existing audience are going to see your content. That is crazy low. That means if you've got 100 people in your audience, only six people at most, and I'm being very generous here with my 6%, are going to see that content. Crazy, right? So why would you choose a place where you are competing on a daily basis with an algorithm that is designed to not work in your favor? It is designed to not work in your favor. Why would you spend your time creating content that disappears within 48 hours? It goes to the content graveyard, never to be seen again, never to really be consumed again, unless you reshare or repost versus something like your podcast or YouTube. And Amy P. Does say YouTube would be another option. But like me, she doesn't want to have to put makeup on. She wants to rock up. And actually, there is something very, very intimate that is proven in all the stats around how we as humans like to consume things. And audio is a really, really key thing. Like, it's more memorable and it elicits stronger emotions than any other type of media. That's why audio is so, so powerful. So I'm just going to say that again, audio is more memorable and elicits a stronger emotional change than any other type of media. Our brains are wired to retain audio messages. So this is why podcasting is just the most transformational or platform that you could be creating content for. It is a game changer. So stop competing. Stop being in a field that you are competing against so many other people. Podcasting is so much less competitive than social media. There are only around 720,000 active podcasts right now in the world worldwide, okay? Because 88% of podcasts, as we know, head straight to the Apple graveyard within their first ten episodes. Like, they don't make it beyond ten episodes. And there are only 146,000 podcasts releasing a weekly episode. So I just want you to think about in your niche, how many people, how much competition that is in terms of shows. Now, you might be thinking, yeah, but are there many people actually listening to podcasts? 464.7 million podcast listeners worldwide. And that is projected to increase to 504.9 million worldwide in 2024. I mean, that's just crazy. So you think it is much less competitive. And I also want you to consider this. The attention span of an Instagram user is around 2.7 seconds. 2.7 seconds. But 80% of podcast and listeners will finish an entire episode once they hit play. That means that when you guest on a podcast that speaks to your dream clients, you're tapping into a highly targeted and captivated audience who's leaning in to hear what you have to say. And not just that, but 60% of listeners of podcasts have purchased something from a podcast ad. Hello, action takers. So if you haven't launched your podcast yet, why not, guys? Because it is crazy to be missing out on this. Okay, let's talk now about the third thing. How surface level our content is when we're posting short form content. And this is the short form versus long form debate. If you've only got a 250 word caption, or you've got a 15 or 32nd reel, or a short TikTok video, what can you actually create in that time, content wise, that is going to be pivotal and transformational for someone? So what happens is the type of content we put out is we create snippets of small how to content, like how to content, how to do this, how to get your kids to listen. And it registers like a blip on our radars. Because remember, we're on social media because we want to be entertained. We want to look at knitting patterns, we want to look at cooking. We want to look at good news stories and fluffy kittens. So how to content? It just doesn't register. People don't implement it. I was talking to someone just yesterday on a call who said, yeah, I'm posting on, oh my gosh, like five different platforms. He was exhausted. I post on five different platforms. I had not had a client in months. I give like how to content. I'll generally put something like my opinion or something and ask for comments on a poll. And he just wasn't seeing the conversions. Why? Because how to and the type of content you can create is so small, we can't get deep. And the thing is how to content, people are not going to go away from their social media post and implement your how to content. Maybe once, maybe how to get your kids to listen. You might try it once, but you don't go back every day thinking, I'm building myself up a whole library about how to be a better parent and not scream at my kids. So this how to content, this surface level, small kind of sharing of snippets of things, it just does not convert. Why? Because we have developed as humans throughout our lives, throughout our experiences, we develop beliefs. Again, we talked about psychology in previous episodes and automations and how we automate so many things in our lives. Well, a lot of the things we learn is we just learn to automate. We don't consider whether it's true or not true because we have been led to believe potentially through the experiences, through the information we've been fed, through our upbringings and things for that to be true. So here's an example. I was raised to believe that the way you brush your teeth, squirt your toothpaste on your toothbrush, brush your teeth, and then at the end you rinse and spit with water to clear all the toothpaste out of your mouth. So there is no thinking about how I brush my teeth and that process. And yet, this is wrong. This is not the correct way to brush my teeth because my friend is a dentist and I learned this seven years ago when we met and I was chatting to her husband, who also had the same belief about how to brush your teeth as I did. But actually, what we now know to be true is that that's not a good way to brush your teeth in terms of the rinse and spit at the end. But it was a belief. It was something that happened automatically, subconsciously, without me thinking about it. And so now I have to very intentionally consider, don't spread, don't rinse with water, just leave it, or use mouthwash, one or the other. It's really hard for me to change that, please. But because it was explained to me, like, why this thing? Why have I got. Because the whole story came from, I've got very, very sensitive teeth. If you ever meet me, you'll know I cannot switch from sensidine toothpaste. I should definitely be an affiliate or something for them. But sensine is literally the only way I can ever tolerate ice creams. And you will find I do not like ice in my drinks. So if anyone ever buys me a drink, I'm literally like, can I have one cube of ice? That's it. That's my maximum tolerance of icing things, because I have really sensitive teeth. So this is how the whole toothbrush thing came about, and the rinse and spit and all of that. Now, the thing is, I'd been led to believe, like, one way of doing things was the right way, but actually only when someone suggested, like, the reason you've got this problem is because you're doing this. So here's how to do it differently that's going to change things. Only when there was that understanding of why this original way of doing things was causing my problems was I able to really take on board and implement and get on board with this new way of doing things. So when we just post, hey, here's how to connect with your kids, or here's how to stop screaming at your kids, that's really difficult because what you need to know is, like, what are you doing wrong in the first place? What is that mistake? What is the problem? What is the mistake? What are you doing? And what's the belief that you've had that's been keeping you stuck in making that mistake? Like, what do you need to change? What do you need to shift in order to make that happen? So we need to get away from this surface level. Crappy content that's not doing much. And, my goodness, sharing a picture of your lunch. Oh, I don't really want to see it once in a while you go to a fancy restaurant, fine, but we don't need to see your food pictures, like on a daily basis. And again, hands up, yes, I have been there, done that in those early Instagram days because I thought that's what you needed to do. We've all done it. And if you haven't, good for you. So we need to think about the type of content, because if someone is going to ever buy from you, they need to buy into your way of thinking, your philosophy, like I did with my friend, and why I should brush my teeth in a certain way. And we can only create that. We can only shift people's perspective and their point of view about why doing things in a certain way, their beliefs, when we have that opportunity to go deeper, to dig in and create content that packs a punch. So if you have been struggling to hit your enrollment target, there's just a few of my top three reasons that you may be struggling. And there are so many more. And this whole podcast is all about making more sales, increasing your conversions, hitting those targets every single month. But I just wanted to share with you three things that you might want to consider right now. Close.