$1.5 million worth of marketing knowledge in 5 minutes
P.S. My favorite song of the week. Check out the audio version of today's episode on YT here Marketing is mostly a creative and adversarial game. Over time, channels get discovered, exploited, and discarded, with new entrants causing disruption in the market. Building and scaling your venture to $1 million per year no longer depends on having a massive team with tons of distribution. The most successful people today are not building their brands on the same old distribution channels that your teachers and mentors told you about. New brands call for new opportunities for reaching their audience. This is good news. Because in today’s episode I want to share a case story of one of the most prolific and successful creators in recent times. He recently launched his brand new course, the Creator MBA, to help creators and founders of all levels build a lean, profitable, and effective brand in 2025 while earning revenues of $1.5 million in the first week of his launch. Let me show you what I mean. A Case Study On The Rise Of Modern MarketingIt was 2019, and he could hardly breathe. His wife saw him struggling in the office and called 911. When he woke up, he found himself in the white allies of the hospital, unsure of what happened. The EMTs eventually came and told him that he’d had a panic attack. That’s what happened. He was working himself to death. He was becoming a victim of himself and the competition. For someone who has worked himself to become a Chief Revenue Officer in the healthcare industry, this was was wake-up call. His name is Justin Welsh. And it was about time that he should start focusing on his health before he finds himself in the grave. Since then, he left his corporate job to become a full-time online creator while providing consultancy to early-stage healthcare businesses. But as it soon turned out, many founders and creators started booking slots asking him how to grow their brand on platforms like LinkedIn and X. They asked him what he was doing to attract attention to his content, turning his work into a meaningful source of income, and the rest. Today he finds himself with over 1,000,000 social media followers and made over $6 million in revenue by selling online courses to his audience. Now, if you’re anything like me, you probably don’t have 1,000,000 followers to cash out from. The truth is that Justin’s email list only clocks at about 215,000 subscribers, which is where 90% of his revenue comes from. His built his entire brand on the back of social media without running any ads or pitching to clients. On top of all this, he was also planning to release his new flagship course, The Creator MBA, and he knew that this was something that wouldn’t be for everyone. He focused on his email subscribers to learn more about the kind of people who needed his course, combining the quantitative data of analytics with the qualitative voice of his audience. When it came time to launching the product, he already prepared an interest list for people to opt-in and receive personalised suggestions for his launch. This alone added about $600,000 of revenue to his campaign. There are a few key lessons that we can take from this to better understand the future of marketing. I) Learning about your audienceThe first thing that Justin did in his upcoming launch was to segment his audience. While he did have a gut-level understanding of who was following him, he didn’t have anything concrete to work with. This goes to everyone who are still posting content and hoping that one of them sticks out. When we start looking at the data to better understand our audience, you soon realise that is not about how ‘disruptive’ or ‘viral’ your content is. It’s about weather you’re attracting the right people in the first place. In the beginning most of this data will come from conversations that you have with people about your brand. Weather these conversations will lead to your next profitable idea will depend on the following two questions:
Over time your audience will become a clear reflection of where you stand and where you are going. Therefore, it is in your best interest to build a good relationship with them. II) Building engagement and excitement in the campaignShortly after segmenting his audience, Justin decided that it was time to start building his next course, the Creator MBA. He created an interest list which was designed to keep his upcoming course top-of-mind and build up excitement around the launch. This was only possible after tapping into the data he received from subscribers who completed the survey to his newsletter. Every week, Justin sent out personalised emails that included:
By combing the hard data that he collected from his surveys along with the customer feedback that these “behind-the-scenes” emails prompted, Justin was confident that he had created the right product to bring to market. Now it was time to cash out and deliver on everything he promised the course will bring to his audience. III) Personalising the launchLaunching an online course was something that Justin was already familiar with. But personalising the launch was something he had never done before. How do you make sure that you deliver on something that people can benefit from despite the level they’re at? This is not about standing on top of your audience. This not about positioning yourself as the “perfect deal”. Even if you have exceptional selling skills, getting the wrong people to buy into your work will only lead to more problems. It might even tarnish your reputation and generate bad word-of-mouth. This is about making sure that the people who buy into your work get what they expected to achieve results, and only results. To achieve this, he needed to make sure that the core elements of his course aligned with the message. This includes:
That’s it. No tricks. No gimmicks. Just why you your audience needs this now. And in my eyes this is the essence of marketing. Thank you for reading. -Michael |
