This week I’ve been attacking two ends of the same problem – getting people to learn news skills.
Most people know me frm my marketing efforts, but there’s a princuple I’ve written about before that blows all the funnel tactics out of the water.
Rate of testimonials.
Testimonials make marketing easier. Lots of testimonials make marketing a lot easier.
But to get testimonials you need to get a result for your customer, so you’re going to need to focus on that in your lead magnets and your products.
Information products (in their pure form) don’t do that. Information on its own doesn’t get you a result.
To get a result, and therefore a testimonial, needs you to put that result into action.
All the learning management systems I’ve seen are really bad at this. They’re great for housing text images and video to give you the information you want, but to do any actual work needs you to go into another system like a workbook and all the hassle of sharing Google Docs notion docs spreadsheets and God knows what else.
Too often your users will be unfamiliar with these tools.
So I’m building a small course delivery project, with a focus on watching students as they take action.
If you’re interested in trying it out just drop me a reply to this email and I can give you a sneak preview of what I’m working on.
Back in the conversion world, I got a few more examples uploaded to the collection of A/B tests that I talked about last week at https://theconversion.co/tests/
I’ve got the email list set up for this project as well. It’s a separate list from this one so you’ll need to sign up separately.
I got a Thrivecart offer set up to tie in with it as well (https://theconversion.co/counsel/
Then I got railroaded by a Chinese app.
I haven’t talked about this much on this list, but I have an investment in an agency that promotes Western brands to the Chinese. I do a bunch of consulting and some marketing for them.
For about 7 years we’ve been quietly building campaigns on a Chinese app called Xiaohongshu. Then this week all hell broke loose.
The US decision to ban TikTok spurred about half a million users not to go to Meta but to go to Xiaohongshu instead. You might have seen the story under the app’s Western name REDNote.
It’s one of those bizarre opportunities in life where something you’ve been ticking over at, not really getting any attention, suddenly becomes the focus of a massive amount of discussion.
The usual suspects are leaping on the bandwagon pretending they know all about this app, but we’ve got a list of client and testimonials and actual campaign examples with results that they’ll never catch up within a couple of weeks.
So that’s an opportunity that it’s dark not to pay attention to right now. I’m still keeping my other projects going but I’ve had to cut back the time I spend on them just for the moment.
If you’ve ever read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, you’ll recognise the scenario. All of a sudden something you’ve been working on for years becomes the flavour of the month. You’d be an idiot not to capitalise on it.
