Minimum Viable Marketing Strategy

In this post, I'm going to share our minimum viable marketing strategy for a brand new business. We recently launched a new course called RockStar Empires where we teach creative entrepreneurs how to create and sell their own online course. Yep – a course on how to make a course.

Online education is a huge market (valued at US$107Bn in 2015 by Forbes Magazine) and selling courses online has helped us grow to a seven figure a year company.

RockStar Empires is no ordinary course though. It includes over 36 high quality training videos with dozens of super-easy templates for our students to fill in so they can get their own course made quickly. The course is presented by myself and Kristina Romero from the US.

We launched RockStar Empires to a very small segment of our list in June, 2016 as a proof of concept. We had no website, no blog, no marketing strategy (except some Facebook ads) and three epic training videos we gave away for free as part of the launch.

Now we've proven this product is great and people want to buy it, it's time to build an audience. So here is my minimum viable marketing strategy.

The minimum viable marketing strategy includes the bare minimum I need to execute in order to start building a list of people who are interested in creating and selling their own online course.

This strategy will evolve and grow over time so I'll do my best to post updates here on my blog as we learn.

NB: Some links in this post are affiliate links, so if you buy any product through my links I will earn a small commission which I will use to pay for all the premium tools and software we use to run our business.

The Flowchart

The flowchart below (created with LucidChart) might help us all visualise how this strategy works.

Target Audience

First thing's first: who are we doing this for? The target audience for RockStar Empires is tech-savvy, creative service providers (consultants, coaches, authors, speakers, copywriters, photographers, designers) who have existing clients and want to productise their service so they can create leveraged income and not be so reliant on client services. Leveraged income is revenue you create by making something once and selling it over and over again.

Lead Generation

Blog Post

We need at least one blog post, (preferably six), which teaches something incredibly valuable to our target audience. This blog post will contain actionable advice and be linked to a complementary (and complimentary) download to allow the reader to take action.

The blog post will teach how to take some knowledge out of your head and write a lesson for your online course and will be posted on the RockStar Empires blog, built on WordPress and hosted at WP Engine.

Here is the blog post in action which teaches you how to turn your knowledge into an online course.

Lead Magnet

The complementary download will be a worksheet the reader can download and fill in based on what they learn in the blog post. The pop up opt-in form for the download will be accessed by clicking a button in the blog post and will also be triggered when a reader exits the blog post by moving their mouse outside of the browser.

The opt-in form will be built using OptinMonster and will collect email addresses into Infusionsoft.

Re-Marketing

A dedicated re-marketing page will be built to target those who do not opt-in for the free worksheet download. This re-marketing will be done via Facebook.

The re-marketing page will be built on WordPress using Beaver Builder.

Here is the re-marketing page in action which promises to help the reader to “write your first lesson for your online course in 5 minutes.”

Thank You Page

A thank you page will be built to acknowledge that the reader has successfully opted in for the free worksheet download and to encourage them to check their email to access the worksheet and print it out. This page will also include a bonus free video that demonstrates how to apply what we have taught in the blog post to an actual lesson in an online course. The lesson we use in this video as the example will be one of the lessons from the RockStar Empires course.

The thank you page will be built on WordPress using Beaver Builder.

Here is the thank you page with the video that shows how the RockStar Lesson Format is used in an example lesson from the RockStar Empires course.

Autoresponder Emails

Once the reader is added to Infusionsoft, they will be placed in a campaign which will do the following:

• deliver the free worksheet download as requested
• send follow up emails explaining why each part of the RockStar Lesson Format is important
• send a follow up email with a link to a SurveyMonkey survey to establish the pain points of the target audience

Here is the survey on SurveyMonkey.

Facebook Ads

Finally, we will use Facebook ads to promote the blog post and the re-marketing opt-in page to our target audience. That's right, the re-marketing page will be promoted directly as well as being used as a re-marketing page for blog post readers who do not opt-in.

We'll begin by spending $100/day to determine the best audience, headlines, ad copy and images.

In Conclusion

I'll attempt to update my blog as this strategy evolves over time, however for now, I believe this is the bare minimum we need to begin building an audience of interested leads for our next launch of RockStar Empires. Are you doing this as a minimum in your business?

Love to hear your thoughts as always.