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What Kind Of Digital Offer Should You Create – Episode 12

If you’ve ever wanted to create a digital offer for your business, but haven’t been sure how to start (or even what to create!) this episode is for you! Today I’m talking all about the bottom of your marking funnel and diving deep into how to create a digital offer that will best serve your target audience. 

In this episode, we cover:

  • Figuring out the right offer for both you and your audience
  • My 2 top recommendations for creating your first digital offer
  • Different types of online offers to consider creating
  • My favorite way to test a new offer


Find it quickly:

  • 3:51 – How to really understand your target audience
  • 8:59 – Figuring out how you can solve their problem
  • 13:55 – Deciding on your audience’s experience
  • 16:29 – Deciding on your time commitment
  • 18:51 – Different types of offers
  • 27:36 – My advice for getting started

Resources mentioned:

This site contains product affiliate links. I may receive a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on one of these links.

Welcome back, guys. I’m so excited to dig into some more marketing funnel chat with you. Today, we’re going to be talking about the bottom of the funnel and specifically what kind of digital offer you should be creating in your business. And of course, as it relates to marketing funnels, but also in your business as a whole. 

We’re going to be specifically talking about digital offers in your business. So if you don’t have any digital offers yet, this is a perfect opportunity for you to really think through that, and how we can add them into your business. If you do have a digital offer already, I still think it’s a really great exercise to go through. Think about if there is a better way. Perhaps that you could be serving your audience or if there are other ways you can expand upon your digital offerings, maybe solve some other pain points, or just create more of an ascension ladder of your services and offerings. 

Why A Digital Offer? 

So why are we only going to focus on digital offers in this episode? Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to create it I have a little disclaimer. I think digital is a really great way. And by digital offers, I mean courses, memberships, anything that is a digital product. This could potentially include your service if it’s scalable in a way that doesn’t usually involve time equals money in the least, and not in the same sense of a one-on-one service might be right. 

Whether you have a land lawn care business, or you have a coaching business, or an e-commerce business, there’s a lot of that that involves time equals money. Having a digital offer is a way for you to serve your people really well, use that expertise, steward your gifts and the talents that God’s given you in a way that’s a little bit more scalable. Both in terms of the revenue that you’re having, the income you’re bringing in for your family, And also the impact that you can have by being able to help and teach and lead more people in that way. 

I really love digital offers. I’m actually working on creating my own next digital offer, so I can share more about that with you guys. We’re going to talk through some of the things that you should think about before creating your offer, like your audience, your niche, and how you can help them specifically. 

We’re going to get into some specific ideas of what that could look like by the end of the episode. I really hope this is helpful for you guys, whether you are first starting your own digital offer or creating your first funnel. 

If you have any questions about some of the words that I’m using with marketing funnels, evergreen, or things like that, be sure to go back and listen to Episode 10, Scaling Your Business With Evergreen Funnels. So not too long ago. That’ll be a good overview if you need a little refresher or if you’ve never built an evergreen funnel before. 

Who Are We Really Creating A Digital Offer For?

Okay. So before we start to figure out the type of offer we’re going to create. We want to first figure out our audience. Specifically, we want to think about not just an audience and like the avatar way,   Who they are, the demographic, those types of things. I really want to think about 

  • What are their pain points? 
  • What are their needs? 
  • What are their problems? 
  • What are their desires? 

Because more likely than not, there are a lot of ways that you can serve your audience. And there are a lot of problems, desires and dreams that they have. 

I have a friend who’s creating a funnel right now for new moms. I’ve been a new mom a few times now. There are a lot of different ways that you can help and serve new moms. So instead of just thinking of your target audience as the demographic, let’s think about them in terms of what is the very specific pain point, need, desire, problem that they have, that you’re an expert in and that you can help them with. Because like I said, there’s a lot of ways that you can serve your audience really well. 

When we want to think about how to serve them best in a digital way or with a digital offer. Let’s think through what those pain points are, list them all out. There could be 10 different ways but kind of getting that all out on a piece of paper first will help you to narrow down and to niche down. 

Niche, niche, niche

I’m sure you’ve heard this before – I’m definitely not an original thought here – but I really do believe that the riches are in the niches. That’s a very corny marketing quote, but really true because the more that you understand who your client is and how you can help them, the more you’re going to be able to specifically tailor the offer to their needs and their preferences. 

For instance, when we had our marketing agency and we were helping people run Facebook ads and get leads and get booked out, we were doing it for anyone. Our offer worked for lawyers, jewelers, and for photographers. We were running them for all of them, and they were all getting awesome results. Then when we were planning our own wedding we actually bartered our wedding photography. We spent around $300 on Facebook ads and we got our wedding photographer a $3,500 client from those $300 in ad spend. 

We had this aha moment, of “Wow. Okay. This same strategy works for lawyers. Works for photographers. Works for jewelers. But we really love serving the wedding industry.” We loved working with other solopreneurs or, husband-and-wife teams. They had a lot of the same values as us in terms of lifestyle and why they’re in their business and started it from a passion. 

So all that to say, we narrowed down our Facebook ad courses and coaching to specifically talk to people in the wedding industry. And our revenue the next year doubled. We sold twice as many courses and coaching programs than we had the year before. While there are other factors that go into it, I really think a huge part of it is that by specifically focusing on the wedding industry and how we were talking about our offer, the pain points we were talking about it, wasn’t just a generic “Hey, you want to get more clients?”.  It was,” Hey, you want to book more brides?” 

We could talk specifically to wedding industry terms, so they knew that not only could we solve their issue, we could solve their issue for them. It helped them to really understand our solution in a way that fit their need really specifically. 

It’s really, really, really important to figure out this first part. If you’re going to go and create a course or a membership or whatever it may be, you want to make sure that it’s the right fit in terms of the offer in the audience. 

Poll the Audience

One thing I’d recommend for you to do, especially if this is your first time ever creating an online or digital product is to interview your audience. Whether that’s polling people on Instagram or even better would be to interview some of your previous clients. 

Ask them what they need, what their problems are, and ask them to write it down in their words. If people have left you reviews, go back and grab their words. More likely than not when we try to talk about our own services and offers we know what they need. On the other hand, they don’t think about it or search for it in those same terms 

We might say, “Hey, run Facebook ads to get a new inquiry” whereas their verbiage might be “I want to get booked out with brides”. It seems really simple, but interviewing your clients will not only help you to figure out what pain points or problems they have that you can provide the best solution for, but it’ll really help you with that copywriting later in terms of your sales page and your emails. You’ll be speaking their words right back to them. 

Think About The Transformation Your Digital Offer Will Provide

Once, you know what their problems are let’s think about your own expertise and how you can solve that problem. There are a lot of ways you can solve their problem, so I want you to ask this question:

 What kind of results or transformation do I want my audience to experience? 

The solution that you provide is going to vary. You might want a huge transformation in their life or in their business. Maybe it’s a smaller thing, like how to set up your first podcast.   

I’ve watched a ton of videos. There are courses on that. The transformation of starting a podcast start to finish is a lot of work, but it might not be as much work as hitting your first six figures.   The second offer, for example, that transformation might involve more help. It might be a larger course. It might be more of a membership because there’s more of a personal touch point there. So the reason I want you to think about the type of transformation or the scale of that, is so that you can figure out what the scale of your offer is going to look like.   

A tip here too, is to think about if you already have a one-on-one service that you can turn into a digital offer.  Either the whole program that you already have, or a small piece of it. For example,  the Facebook course that I told you about earlier that we had was a one-on-one coaching service. Over the course of the 12-week program we worked with people one-on-one through setting up their Facebook ad campaigns, their whole business manager. The ad campaigns, the copy, the targeting, the ads. The funnels, everything. 

We took that one-on-one service and we turned that into a DIY course. 

I have a friend, Joy Michelle  (See her episode here) who is an amazing photographer. She scaled her business and she teaches other photographers how to do it as well. She gets asked a lot of questions like how do you send invoices? How do you send proposals? All of these are little templates that she can then package and sell herself. 

My friend Laura helps people create their workflows in HoneyBook and she has a lot of great templates that could be a digital offer for her as well. If someone doesn’t want her team to do the entire implementation, she can package those up and sell them. 

Think about what is going to help your students (because your audience will become your students in this case) be successful. What’s going to help them reach that transformation that we were thinking about? 

Try a Beta Test of your Digital Offer

I also think this is why it’s really cool and also really helpful to beta-test whatever offer it is that you’re thinking of. Or start with something that is already a one-on-one service of yours. As you’re going through that, you’re actually learning where are people getting stuck. Where do they need some extra support? Where can I give some other examples? 

For instance, I’m creating a funnel course. All of the one-on-one clients that I have right now that I’m building my funnels with are showing me that there are a lot of commonalities on where they’re getting hung up and what’s holding them back. Some of it is mindset and some of it is tech stuff,  and some of it is people just don’t know what to write when you say, write five sales emails in your funnel. 

So for me, I’m thinking, okay, great, I can create templates for what those emails look like, kind of like swipe copy, for example. If you have a one-on-one service or if you can beta test out your offer. I think it’s a really important step before you go and scale it all the way. It will give you live feedback before you invest the time into creating a course for example.

We’ve always done it kind of one-on-one to course, or one-on-one to a group program to course. It really helps you test as you go. 

So, what I’ll tell you too is if you’re considering an offer that maybe you don’t offer as one-on-one right now, could you go through it with even one or two people? Test that out, get that feedback.  Then use all of that to implement in your course to help more people. 

Again, in my own funnel building, the tech and the copy is what usually trips a lot of people up about funnels. In my course, in addition to some of the swipe copy, I’m going to be building it all on Kartra. That way I can make sure that everything is in one program. The tech is not super complicated, and something I actually really love about Kartra is that I can just share those templates. My students can literally steal my entire funnel. To me, that’s a huge burden and a place of overwhelm for a lot of my one-on-one clients is figuring out what systems do you use and how to make everything work together? 

So for my course, I want to figure out how can I make that easier for them. One answer?  Literally, give them my entire template. Just put your branding and your own content in it. I wouldn’t have maybe understood that pain point or had that realization the same way if I hadn’t already gone through the one-on-one process with clients. Hopefully that makes sense to you guys. 

What Kind of Experience Will My Digital Offer Provide?

Another part of solving the problem is thinking about the type of experience you want them to have. This goes back to transformation a little bit, but this is going to determine whether you’re selling an ebook, whether you’re selling guides, whether you’re selling membership, whether you’re selling a course and how all encompassing. Is it a small mini course or is it a thousand dollar course. 

It will help you figure all of that out because you can think through what kind of support is required. 

  • What level of expertise are they at? 
  • Where do you want to help them? 
  • How much time do they need to invest in seeing this type of success or these results? 
  • Are they going to need guides? 
  • Are they going to need templates?
  •  Is this an ongoing learning experience or is it one time like course versus membership?  

There isn’t one, right or one wrong way to do it. Like I have a $9-a-month membership that I’m a part of it’s the Email Marketing Membership with Liz Wilcox. It is. Amazing. Guys, this membership is $9 a month, so it’s kind of a no-brainer. It’s weekly email templates and ideas, and it saves me so much time in creating my weekly emails.

She just solved the pain point of, people know they need to email their list, but they don’t take the time to prioritize it. What can I do to make that easier? And so she sends a template every single week to help you write your emails. And I’m not joking since I joined (I guess it was November?) I’ve sent an email every single week to my list. Do I use every one of her templates? No, but for $9-a-month, if I even use one, it’s totally worth it to me. And, guys, Liz has like 3000 plus people on her list. So she’s making an amazing amount of income every single month from a  $9-a-month membership. 

On the other hand, I have bought $3,000 courses that were all-encompassing – to me almost overwhelming and I love courses – in content. But that’s because it had everything in. It was like a crash university course on how to do something. 

I just say that to let you know that those are totally different offers – a $9-a-month membership versus a $3,000 course. 

Both of those people are super successful in their own ways. They’re both helping me with totally different problems. The level of support I expect is different. The level of transformation that I expect is different. So think about those things before. You think about what that end offer outcome is going to look like for your students. 

One thing to think about is your own time and commitment, both now and moving forward. A course, for example, might take a lot more time and effort to set up on the front end, but usually it takes a little bit of effort to maintain going forward – if you’re not constantly adding new content (unfortunately for us when we did the Facebook course Facebook likes to change every other week, so I felt like we were always kind of updating that course). But for the most part, a course doesn’t involve a ton of maintenance and ongoing effort. Whereas a membership could require way less effort to soft launch and just get started, but would likely require more effort to maintain it if you’re creating and teaching new content every month. 

When you start to think about your audience, their needs, your experience, your own time commitment both now and moving forward, you’re going to be able to start to narrow in on the type of offer that’s going to best fit those answers. 

One thing you’ve probably noticed by now is I’m, not telling you the specific way to do something. I’m hopefully giving you a lot of questions to think about because you could be successful in a lot of different kinds of offers. But the best one for you right now is going to figure out all of those factors and what’s going to serve you, your goals, your business, your lifestyle, and your audience in the best way. 

Different Types Of Digital Offers To Consider

Let’s dive into some of the specific different types of offers that could, might be able to help you conceptualize this a little bit more. There are a lot of ways to do all the different types of offers. I’m just going to briefly share some of the most common ones and hopefully, that’ll help you think through which ones are best considering the questions that we just posed. 

Ebooks as Digital Offers

First, we’re going to start with something simple: eBooks. These are typically short. They’re super-focused pieces of content that provide information and advice on a very specific topic. For instance, I have a free ebook on how to map out your first marketing funnel. It’s available if you want to see it and kind of funnel hack or check it out. 

You probably see it on Instagram. There are people that are making a lot of money selling like $10 to $50 eBooks. Ebooks are great if you can condense and share your info on something that’s really valuable. Those are kind of no-brainer purchases for a lot of people. 

Someone actually just shared with me a LinkedIn. (Apparently, LinkedIn is back guys!) I was on a mastermind call and she was showing how she uses LinkedIn and how she set up her new profile. And y’all, this looks so different than when I used it in probably like 2015? 

I asked her where can I learn how to do this. I don’t even want to start and I don’t want to take 20 hours to learn about LinkedIn. She said, my friend has a  guide. It’s 20 bucks and covers how to set up your LinkedIn profile. To me, that is a no-brainer. I could spend 20 hours on YouTube or Google, or I could just buy this $20 guide. 

Don’t sleep on ebooks. They’re awesome. They’re a really great way to enter into digital products too, because they’re typically a lot easier and quicker for you to create and test and try.  There’s a lot less involved, both upfront and ongoing and they can get good quick wins for your audience.

Courses as Digital Offers

The next thing I’ll have to think about is courses. Courses are way more comprehensive than eBooks. They typically cover a broader range of topics. Maybe not necessarily a range of topics, but in depth information on one topic even. 

For my friend that I was mentioning earlier, who serves new moms, her course could be, the first three months with a new baby. It could be the first year of a baby’s life. Right. And it may involve everything from breastfeeding to sleep training to how to eat solids. Or it could be a mini course just on breastfeeding issues. There are a lot of ways that courses can look and they can be delivered in a lot of different formats, whether that’s video, audio, written, or some kind of combination. They can be a mini course for $50 or a $3,000 course. I’ve invested in both. The idea is that courses are usually more of a transformation and process and more in-depth. 

What does very well are courses that do involve some kind of video content as well. Even if that’s not necessarily like a talking head on the screen video, but screen-sharing things. 

Memberships as Digital Offers

The next offer that you could consider building is a membership. A membership program typically offers ongoing access to the content. It could include resources or support, or new trainings every month. It could include coaching, or live events and there’s a lot of different ways. 

The way you do a membership can change, but typically people are paying monthly. Like I mentioned, the email marketing membership that I have is a membership because every month I’m expecting new content. The price here can totally vary. I’m in this $9 a month membership right now, and Pete’s in a $50 a month membership for Facebook ads to continue to learn about that. 

And you’ll notice that when I’m talking about the scope and the price point – that isn’t what necessarily should dictate your offer. All of these things I’m mentioning like a course, a membership, there are low price ones and high price ones. Think more about what the product fit is for your offer and for your audience and what pain points they have are. Think about how you’re going to deliver that and the type of transformation that they need and the solution that they need. That will dictate the price point, what’s included, and if it’s a all-encompassing course, mini-course, membership, or ebook. 

Memberships can offer new trainings and every month, or simply be more ongoing support. The Facebook ad that my husband Pete is in is more of a forum where people are posting and asking questions and helping eachother. It’s more of the idea of peer experts that are helping you. In addition, there is new content content that’s being taught every week or every month. 

Templates as Digital Offers

Another offer that you can consider is templates. Templates are typically pre-designed resources, that can help your audience is save time and effort. They might include things like social media graphics, email templates, sales pages, things like that. 

I have a client right now, for example, selling her course on Thrive cart. Instead of taking the time to build out a sales page, she just bought a template on Etsy. That’s a really great way to have a digital offer as well. 

There are so many different ways to do templates. It could be something like your meal planning template for the week. I’ve seen people post Notion templates. I love Notion. I use it for my client portals, I use it for my podcast, guests portals, I use it for everything internally in my business. When I was learning how to use notion, there are a ton of templates that you can buy on really simple or really complicated topics. 

I think that this is one of the easier entry points into digital offers. More likely than not, it’s a template that you’re already using in your life or in your business. You’re just creating in a way that you can share with others. If people are asking how do you book guests on your podcast? How do you meal prep every week with all your kids at home? Think about what people are already asking and the resources you might already be using in your life in business. You might be able to template that out and sell it to your audience. 

The cool thing about templates and why I think they’re a great entry point into digital offers is you can offer them al a carte on your website. You can even offer them as upsells to some of the one-on-one work or coaching clients that you might have. 

Coaching as a Digital Offer

The last offer that I’ll talk through here (again, there’s a ton that you can think about, but just giving you some to think through) is coaching. Now one-on-one coaching services are not as scalable as some of the other things that I’ve just shared with you. But they can be delivered in person or online. They can focus on a ton of different types of topics from business strategy to personal development. 

I want to include this because I do think that it can be considered a digital offer to an extent. If you’re doing something like turning one-on-one coaching into a group coaching program, that is more of a digital offer. I think that’s a really great way to test out a course idea or a program before you make it evergreen or DIY. 

I really do think coaching or having some kind of one-on-one service in that way is an awesome entry point to creating a more scalable digital offer. And sometimes that even leads to creating masterminds or a more high ticket offer that is outside of just digital for example having a retreat or something. 

 I hosted the Move Mountains retreat with my friend, Laura for a few years. Most of that was online. We did a few months of coaching and workshopping and masterminding online and teaching. Then we met up in person at the end for a retreat. I would consider that a fairly digital offer aside from the retreat, obviously. 

Not as scalable as an evergreen DIY course, but for us, it was super fulfilling. We got to make these amazing connections, and it was a higher ticket offer for us because of the level of access, the level of transformation, and all of those things that we talked about at the beginning. Ultimately though, the type of digital offer that is right for you is going to depend on your target audience, your expertise, your goals, and it’s really important to consider all of those things.

It’s really important to consider the level of support that you’re going to offer, how you’re going to engage with the people that are in your membership or your templates, or your course. As well as the amount of time and effort that you’re willing to invest in creating it and to maintain maintaining that offer. 

My Recommendations For Creating Your Digital Offer

If this is your first time ever creating a digital offer. I’m going to remind you of two of the things that I really really recommend you start with. One is polling or interviewing your audience or previous clients, and two is pre-selling or having a beta launch. Essentially monetizing before you make it. This is going to help you to make sure that you have the right product offer fit before you spend all this time creating a course or an offer. That no one ends up buying. No one wants that. 

Here’s the last thing that I’ll say about figuring out the perfect offer for you. There isn’t necessarily one perfect offer. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there are a lot of ways that you can serve your people well, and you can help them get the results or the solution that they need. 

The type of offer you choose might change based on the season of life that you’re in. If you want to work a lot less and run a business two days a week, like I do right now, I’m focusing on an offer that is taking me way more time upfront to create. But I know it’s going to take me a lot less time ongoing to maintain and still get my audience and my students’ incredible results. 

I won’t have to work more than two days a week. Is it going to take me a lot longer to build this offer than if I had 40 hours a week to work? Of course it will, but I’m being really intentional in how I’m building it now because of the way that I want to scale it and maintain it. 

Just Get Started

I just say all of this, because I think it’s so easy to fall into this analysis paralysis trap, and think that you have to figure out the one perfect way to build your offer before you ever start. You end up never starting. 

My biggest advice for you today is that if you work through the exercises, think through the questions that I’ve shared, and pick one thing and get started. It is so much better to just learn and tweak as you go than to never start. If you never start, you’re never going to get feedback. You’re never going to learn. You’re never going to improve. I’m going to bet you (or maybe even promise you) that your first offer is not going to be your last offer. 

As entrepreneurs and as marketers, we’re constantly improving. We’re constantly tweaking. We’re constantly testing and learning. All of that’s really great., but none of that’s going to matter if we don’t ever start. 

And honestly, as entrepreneurs, we also know that failing is just part of the equation for all of us. Not every offer, not every course is going to be a hit the first time that we launch it. I know super, incredibly successful entrepreneurs who had zero people join their first lunch. Zero! 

Monetize Before You Make It!

Our first course that we did – Gosh, was it. 2016? – we pre-launched it and we had maybe a 400 person email list. We thought it was a really great way to serve our people, so we created the sales page. At that point, we knew what the offer was going to be, but we didn’t create any of the content yet for the offer or the course. 

We did a five-day sale to our list and we just said, Hey, this is what we want to create, and we want to make sure it’s the right fit. We were pretty straightforward of, Hey, it’s not yet created, but if you guys are going to buy this, you’re going to get a great pre-launch deal. And it validated us. We knew people were actually willing to pay for this, not just say that they’re interested. 

One person paid $500 at the end of that week to pre-buy this course. We made the course and that course wound up making us tens of thousands of dollars later once we actually launched it and sold it. To me, that was a really great way for us to validate that someone is actually willing to pay for this. 

I am a huge fan of the monetize before you make it type of launching when it comes to offers. It doesn’t have to be $500, but just getting someone to actually commit in some way and validate that it is the right offer. 

But I also just share that because we had one person say, yes, and that course wound up scaling a lot in our business. I know one person that had zero join their first launch and makes millions of dollars on their courses and another that had, I think, seven joined her first launch and now makes hundreds of thousands of dollars in that course. I just say that so you’re not freaking out on your first launch or the first few people to buy it, thinking “oh my gosh, I’m a failure because it didn’t scale overnight.”  Honestly, that’s just not the reality for most of us that it’s just going to scale into this huge thing overnight. And honestly, really not the why or the purpose behind it either. 

The difference between those entrepreneurs that I just talked about and a lot of other people is that they just got started. They tried it and they learned and they tweaked and they tried it again. That’s a huge part of what I love about funnels – there’s not just one right way to do them. They are a learning process. Especially as we change, our businesses change, our audience changes, or how we serve them changes. 

If we can start by getting a really good offer in front of the right people, it’ll make that learning process a whole lot easier.  

Start there before you ever try to start mapping out your funnel, or integrating the tech, or writing your sales page. Just get your offer right. Think through the things that we discussed today. Really dig into who your audience is. What they need. How you can serve them best. How you want to teach and share both now and in the future.  

Once you have that nailed down, guys, the rest of the funnel becomes immensely easier. When we have great offers that we believe in, figuring out the top of the funnel, opt-in, writing out our email sequences, building out our sales page – everything that’s involved in launching and marketing and scaling those offers. They just become a million times easier, I promise. So for now, let’s just start at the end. Let’s start with creating a really strong offer that serves others well. Let’s creat an offer that allows us to scale our expertise and our revenue online. 

I hope that was really helpful for you guys. I know that there are so many nuances and things that go into creating the right offer. So if you have questions, go ahead and shoot me a message on instagram@jordanjones.co.

And if you want a little bit of extra help with this, I do have a free five day challenge coming out to help you build out your first funnel. And there’s going to be a whole day and a resource on figuring out your offer. So you can go ahead and join if it’s live or Get on the wait list at Jordanjones.co/challenge. 

I’d really love to help you in building out your first funnel and really making sure that that offer is going to serve your audience really well, and allow you to scale your business and serve you well in whatever goals you might have. So thank you guys so much for tuning in today. I hope that was helpful for you. I can’t wait to see you next time on the Work + Worship Podcast!

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