There are 7 P's to online course marketing... and in this episode, host Julie Hood explains the first two and how to use them: Problem and Promise. You'll sell more courses when you work out these two items to describe your online course.
There are 7 P's to online course marketing... and in this episode, host Julie Hood explains the first two and how to use them: Problem and Promise. You'll sell more courses when you work out these two items to describe your online course.
LINKS MENTIONED
Listen to Episode 6 to hear about all 7 P's.
Get your copy of the training, Is My Course Idea Any Good? here:
https://www.CourseCreatorsHQ.com/idea
Find out more about the 24 Hour Course Creator program at:
https://www.24HourCourseCreator.com
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Let’s start by recapping the 7 P’s of online course marketing:
This episode explains how to create and use a Problem Statement and a Promise Statement to reach your ideal student.
For example, for Julie's 24 Hour Course Creator program, her Problem Statement is:
Her Promise Statement is:
COME VISIT!
Connect with me on Clubhouse for FREE masterclasses at @JulieHood
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To have a really great course that sells well. There are two main things you need to start with the problem you solve and the promise you're making today. Let's talk about how to use both of these to make your course marketing much, much easier. Welcome to the course creators, HQ podcast, helping you navigate the latest techniques for creating and marketing online courses.
And now here's your host Julie Hood. Hey there. Welcome. Let's start today by recapping the seven Ps of online course marketing number one is the problem that you solve. Number two is the promise that you're making to your students. Three is the pricing of your course. Four is positivity, which is how positive are your potential students that you can solve.
Their problem. Five is patience with marketing. Six is the sales page that you're using and then seven is making it all into a party for your students. So this is actually an extension of episode six of the podcast, where I introduced these seven PS. So if you want to hear all about all of them, you can go to coursecreatorshq.com/6,
to listen to that episode. But today I want to talk about one and two, the problem and the promise. So let's dig into those and see how those can help you sell more of your courses and make your marketing a whole lot easier. So the problem and the promise are really essential keys to success with your course, and they're intertwined together. And it's important to know these,
to determine whether or not your course will actually sell. So the first thing I want you to come up with is a problem statement and a promise statement. The problem statement is one sentence that describes the problem that your students have. So for me, for my 24 hour course creator problem program, the problem is that experts don't think they have enough time to create a course.
So that's my problem. Statement. Experts don't think they have enough time to create a course. Your promise statement is one sentence that describes the result and the promise that you're making with your course. So my promise statement is at the end of 24 hours, you will have a completed course. That's what I'm promising when you put in the work. So if you're having trouble getting down to the single sentences with your course,
then your course idea might be too big, or it might be unfocused. So you can break it apart, you know, create, create two, three or four different, and you might even end up making more money that way. So your students get started with you with the first course, they get a result. And then when they're ready to jump into the next step,
they jump into your next course. So rather than one having one, a huge course, that's probably more pricey. They can get started with a smaller level course, get a result. You do have to give them a result with the first course, but then you can progress them through your different courses. So I have a freebie that I'm giving away to help you figure out your problem statement.
It's a $37 training about is my idea any good. And it's a quick way to sort of evaluate your concept and get some more details about the problems that your students are having. So you can get it at coursecreatorshq.com/idea that's coursecreatorshq.com/idea. And this will help you flush out the problem statement that you are putting together. And one of the secrets of a really good problem statement is that you're using the language of your students.
You use the words and images that appeal to them, and it's not often how you are most used to speaking. And I see this a lot with my students that are in very high technical or maybe medical fields, where there's a lot of jargon and acronyms. And your goal, honestly, as the instructor, is that you have to step out of your normal role and the normal way you talk about your topic and explain it in real world language that your audience can understand.
So, for example, let's say your doctor came to you and said you had a myocardial infarction and would you know what that means? Do you know that that's actually a heart attack? So remember when you're speaking to your students, you want to use the phrase, heart attack, not myocardial infarction. So as you're working on this, go where your students are,
Facebook groups, Amazon book reviews, clubhouse rooms, and notice the language and the phrasing and the wording that they're using, jot down some of these phrases and, and use them to make your problem statement and pull it together. And then I want you to craft your statement and try it out in a few Facebook groups that let you do research and just see,
does this resonate with your audience? Do they agree that it's a problem? If they don't either the course isn't relevant for them, or you may need to restate your problem statement. Okay. So now let's go on to the promise statement and getting this right, is one of the keys to knowing whether or not your course is going to sell. So remember a potential student,
if they're confused, they just say no and click away. So let's make it super clear and super simple for them. So you want a very clear promise statement that says exactly what they will experience or maybe what they know or what they'll be able to do at the end of your course. And that is essential here with the problems, promise statement. We are focusing very much on the result that they get after they've gone through your course,
we're not talking about what they do inside your course. The promise statement talks about when you're done, this is what will happen for you. So for my 24 hour course creators, it's the promise statement is that at the end of 24 hours, you will have a completed course. And so you see, I'm not talking about how we're going to do that.
I'm not talking about modules or lessons or any of that. I'm talking about the end result that they get from taking the course. So it's take this course and you will blank. And if you're having trouble filling in that blank, then your course either might be a little bit unfocused and you need to tighten it up a bit, or it could be too big.
And it's just, there's so much going on that it's too much to fill in for one sentence. So you might have to shorten it or break it up. So spend some time on this. And here's some questions to help you focus. Think about what solution is that you're offering, ask yourself, how will the students go from where they are to where I want to take them?
What kinds of things will they be doing? And what am I promising will happen at the end when they've done all the lessons, when they've done all the homework, what's my promise at the end. So write all this down, spend some time on it and keep refining and tweaking it until you feel really, really good about it. Second piece of the promise is that you do need to have done this before at a minimum for yourself,
but hopefully for some others too. So you may need to start with, what's called a beta version of your course, where you get some students and you help them get results. So that then you have a few testimonials that you can use in your marketing. You also want the promise to be as specific as you can be. Now, obviously don't make promises that you can't keep,
but keeping the result focused and clear will definitely help with the sales. And then another really important piece of this promise statement is that you, as the instructor, don't just dump everything, you know, into your course and leave your student kind of floundering through lesson after lesson, without really having a direction, your job as the teacher is you want to narrow the path for them and share what's absolutely necessary to get them to the promised result.
And your expertise is actually narrowing down the knowledge to what is essential. Yeah. We can all go out to YouTube and look at hours and hours of YouTube videos and maybe get to the answer. But where, what I'm paying you for is the instructor to have narrowed all that down for me into the shortest possible amount of information so that I don't have to waste my time.
You're going to save me time because you're going to tell me exactly what I need to know in the order. I need to know it. So I've seen way too many courses where the instructor just kind of throw out everything they know about a topic and turn it into a course. And that's a really bad idea. It wastes your students' time. It doesn't sell well.
So your job is to sort of be the, like the gold miners of the 18 hundreds, where they're sifting through the dirt and the sand and the gravel to pull out the gold. You want to sift through everything that your students could potentially do and sift out what are the lessons they actually must do in order to get this promised result. And you're just going to share that you won't share all the dirt and the sand and the gravel,
just the gold parts. So let me give you an example, and you may have heard this before, cause I use it a lot because it was so good. I was in a podcasting course and the instructor knew all about all of the different equipment that podcasters could use very knowledgeable, but they didn't give us an hour long lesson about all of the equipment.
They said, go buy this microphone, this boom arm, this pop filter to put on the front of your microphone. Here's the links to them. And Amazon order them today. If you have a prime account, they'll be on your doorstep in two days and we can get started on your podcast. And it was just so refreshing because I didn't have to make decisions and try to figure out,
well, do I want this microphone or do I want that microphone? It was very simple, very straightforward. So that's where I want you to go with your course. The other part of this is be very careful. If your statements use a lot of we and I statements, and very few you phrases, remember your focus is on your students and what's in it for them.
So I'll give you another example. I was pitched on Facebook like this. It was an a messenger message. And it said, we're doing this 14 day test and seeing how many videos we can generate in the given timeframe that gives you days of your time back. I was, I read that and I just kind of had this wrinkled forehead baffled look.
So here's why this was bad. First, the sentence was talking all about them and what they were doing. It didn't tell me what was in it. For me, it was something about videos, but I don't quite understand. And then it didn't give me a specific promise statement, something about giving me time, but I couldn't make that connection. So I wrote back and said,
Hey, I don't understand. Can you give me more details? And then they said, Hey, we want you to go dig in and find this video somewhere on their website. And then they could talk to me more. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. I shouldn't have to work this hard to understand what it is you're selling your job is to make it clear in a couple sentences with the problem and the promise that I have and how you're going to help me.
So if you hear potential students saying to you, things like, Hmm, I don't understand. Or they, they seem really confused. Then you may need to spend a little bit more time on these two statements. So I hope this episode helped you flesh out your marketing a little bit more and no worries. If you need to make some changes. One thing I've learned after all these years of doing this is that marketing is a series of testing things that don't work until you find the thing that does.
So it really takes a lot of stamina and patience to keep testing and trying and testing and trying when the things are not working, but you still keep going because, you know, you're eventually going to eliminate and narrow down to the things that are actually going to work. So good luck with this. Let me know how it goes. I really want to hear how it's going for you and I'll have more in future episodes about the other five Ps of course marketing.
So if you learned anything useful today, I'd really, really appreciate it. If you could leave us a five-star review on your podcast app and a big thank you to RAB550, who left us the following review, Julie has a friendly and practical approach to start your course. Great reminder on getting it done, just what I needed to hear today.
So thank you RAB550 so much for taking the time to leave us a review. I really, really appreciate it. And thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for reviewing. I appreciate your time and the fact that we make it into your podcast inbox each week. I can't wait to chat with you again next week.
Have a good one and I'll talk to you then take care.