How to Create Courses to Grow Your Agency

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Inbound Sales Journey, episode number 101. Ryan and I are here this week and we are going to be giving you guys a little 101 ourselves as we talk about courses. So this is something if you are familiar with some of our work here at Do Inbound. We have a good number of training courses built out and that's something that we take really seriously is education for the agency community specifically. So what we are talking about here today is how to create courses to grow your agency. Ryan, I know that you have some thoughts on this one and I'm gonna let you give us the intro, but we can talk about should there be free courses? Should there be paid courses? What should the format be? What are the platforms that people use? How do we come up with them? How do we build them out? I want your thoughts.

That's a lot of questions for me to answer.

Just give us a quick intro overview here to start with. Why? As an agency owner who's trying to provide services and make a lot of money and have a successful business where people are happy and my employees and team members stay with me and we produce really good work for our clients, why am I interested in courses?

So courses are in my opinion one of the best premium content offers you can give someone. So. Well, let me back up. I guess there's two options of courses, free and paid. So we have a lot of paid courses and we have a couple free courses with Do Inbound and that's been really helpful for us. The free courses have been helpful as a lead gen item and helping agencies understand what is it actually like to go through a course with Do Inbound. And I think that if you take that and you apply that to the agency space, kind of the same thing, right? There's a lot of agencies out there, a lot of them have similar looking websites, similar looking, a lot of stuff.

Don't get me started.

There's a lot of similar looking agencies out there and having a niche is one way to differentiate. But one thing that I think is really powerful is having some type of premium course that your prospects can go through that is the first step towards what they actually need help with. So for instance, they don't really produce any content. Your prospect doesn't really produce any content. They know that they want to do some marketing but they aren't really sure how to get started. You have an opportunity there to create courses to help people understand how to build a buyer Persona, how to approach the building a content strategy, how to approach PPC in X industry, whatever it is, instead of ebooks doing something a little bit different. And what that does is it makes it a more personal, personal experience for them. So if you write an ebook about it, that's one option and they can read it and it could be valuable and that's a great way to get leads. Or you can create a video course for them to go through that allows them to almost interact with you without you having to take the time to teach them something for free at that moment. And is like a. And has. I mean the key at the end of the courses is this is what we've gone over. This is really what you need. And let's either have a conversation about how to get there or here's another paid course now that you can go to that's going to get you what you need from there.

I've got a couple of follow up questions. I'm going to put you right on the spot here.

Do it.

Any agencies you can think of who are doing this? Well now have you seen examples of people who are using courses in this way specifically in the agency space?

Not really. Which is why I wanted to talk about this.

Well, I mean that's, that's what I wanted to bring out for people is. I think there's. I mean this is an. This is something that's worked really well for us at Do Inbound. The idea is that this would work well in the agency space and be a big differentiator because nobody that we can think of is doing this really well. Yeah, I mean there are a couple agencies I can think of who have courses but there's nothing that's like heavily promoted or at least my initial impression is like super high quality. So I think there's a great opportunity here. We want to share it and hopefully see some agencies move in this direction. But I didn't know if you had people in mind who you were already thinking of.

No. Yeah. I can't point to any great examples which I think is kind of the beauty of it is I don't think that the reason there aren't good Examples is because it's not a valid idea. I think if, and well, give me your thoughts on this because you might disagree if we were bringing Guava Box back to like full strength right now, creating both free and paid courses on the, on the short term list of things to do to generate income.

Well, I think, I think it depends on, on the audience that you're targeting. And here's the thought process behind this. You are in most cases as an agency, especially inbound marketing, website designs, paid advertising, pr, whatever it is, you're getting hired to do a job because you have a skill set. One, but the people who are hiring you don't have time to do it. So one of my hesitations with courses is that's a big. Has the potential to be a big time commitment. You can't really call it a course if it takes you 20. Can you call it a course if it takes you 20 minutes to go through it? Probably not. It's not really. That's not what people think of with courses. I'm not saying that every course needs to be 20 or 30 hours long, but I mean you probably got a couple hours into a course, even if it's a free course, potentially at least an hour worth of content maybe. I don't know what amount of content you need to have in order to justify calling it a course, but if people are trying to hire you to do work for them and your course is a lead in to them hiring you and they have to spend more time to do that, that would be the rationale of why it would not be a good fit for certain people. There are definitely a lot of reasons why it could be a good fit though. They need education before they know exactly what order they should be moving in and why they should work with you. There are definite ways that you can add value through a course and that people are willing to spend the time to go through and learn or have somebody at their company do it. So the short answer to your question, hey, if we're trying to ramp Guava Box back up today, courses on that short list, they're probably on the experiment list. Like let's roll out a minimum viable course, the MVC Classic. And, and let's see how this, how this works. Like let's, let's run some tests here, see which type of people sign up. Because in my mind certainly there's a lot of like, I'm, I'm totally happy at this point. No, no longer running a DIY business where I'm doing everything myself. Have a team of people and am paying people and hiring people to solve problems for me and I'm still willing to go through courses. But the majority, like it's very possible that the majority people you get into a course if you just throw it out there to the world are the DIY small business owner, you know, less than 10 people, five people at their company. And are those the people who have the budget to hire you to do the things that you want to do as an agency? So I think that's where you need to understand who are we targeting and what type of people are we targeting.

And I think there's a great opportunity there too to do a paid course. So you might not be able to work at all with the people with the low budgets that are diy and those people might have more time to actually do something because they don't have the ability to hire an agency anyways. So if you can solve their pay point of a course on strategy of how to do something without actually having to spend your time to do that and charge a couple thousand bucks for that and get 10 people to sign up, then that's, you know, money that you would have that you would have now that you wouldn't have. And potentially like sales people's times too of not having to go through. They have a nice quick, easy option to point those people to if the budget isn't there.

I'm gonna fight back on that point though.

Oh boy.

Because you know what this turns into. I don't think that that can be the main justification for a course is like, well, we'll. I guess it depends on how much work goes into this. But. Well, this is our way of. I'd say probably at most agencies, I don't know that that should be a focus for. Well, this is how we monetize the people who can't buy anything else from us. Because you know it's going to take time to put it together. If you have a course, there are going to be questions about a course and if you want bad course reviews, the easiest way is to not get back to those answers from people. So you're going to have a little bit of support time on any educational product that you have and you can set expectations. Hey, listen, we'll jump on a 30 minute call when you're done with this course. Or you get a couple emails back and forth and there's an option for paid support. There's a lot of ways that you can differentiate this and lay it out. But if your primary objective for putting together that course is then to attract the people who don't have the money to pay you. Those are the same people, as you know well, who are going to have the most questions about buying that course, and they're going to go back and forth for weeks before they actually make a decision on whether they can afford to spend $2,000 to buy a course or not. So I think you need to decide. If this paid course also helps monetize that aspect of my audience, but also adds value to some of the clients who I actually want to attract and bring in, then I think that's probably worth it and worth the shot. But I would not pour a ton of time and money and resources into building out a course that I'm going to charge whatever for and plan on that being for the people who don't have the budget to work with me, at least not without some. Without some substantial validation. I just think in the agency space, there's already enough drags on your attention and on your focus that you staying focused on the right customers for you is probably what you need to be doing.

Yeah, I think it depends on what stage your agency's at as well, because I think that if you create a course that's a little bit lower cost for people who are the DIY Persona that can't afford to actually hire you, the amount of time that you take answering some questions is far less than the amount of time that you would take. Actually. Like, I still think it could be worth it. Like, it depends on, I guess, what you value your time at. And I also think that there's a good chance it's not every single person that goes in there is going to bombard you with crazy questions. And I think it also comes down to what are the expectations with the course that they're getting and how well is the course put together? Like, frankly, we've gotten feedback on courses, which has been great because we've been able to add lessons and modules in there. And if you're. If you sold one of them and it's been like three months and you can't sell another one, then it's probably like, okay, take the loss, answer the questions, and don't spend time building more stuff out. But for us, like, let's game plan course. Like, we've had a ton of agencies go through that, and where it started from and where it is now is, like, very different. And that was because people ask questions. And I thought that although it was kind of like a time commitment for us to answer those, and then Modify the course. I'm really glad that we did all that because now we have a better product.

Right. I guess the difference that I'm seeing though is like let's Game Plan is pretty core to our business. This is one way that we specifically help agencies grow. And agencies growing and being successful is a huge part of that is our mission at DO inbound. And that leads to more success in the software platform with other training courses that we have with that. So to do that for us makes a ton of sense. And because the volume is pretty substantial, like we're marketing to people who should be using let's Game Plan and leveraging that product. I think on the agency side, if you are targeting businesses, most of your businesses that you're looking for, like Guava Box as an example, an ideal fit client for US is doing 25 million a year plus with an internal marketing team and they're in the software space. And if we build out a DIY web design guide or DIY PPC guide, that's not what those companies are looking for. So now we're looking into a totally different audience to monetize if those are the types of courses that we're building out. So I guess that would be the. That would be my reasoning for possibly avoiding. And we could say.

I think that.

In that case you're probably not saving that much time on the sales side either. I realize I'm just trying to poke as many holes in this and have a real conversation with you as we roll through it, but I think if then you're trying to also sell that course to people who you happen to get on the phone with. You could even be adding to your, your sales load, which may, depending on the price tag and close rate and stuff, may or may not be worth it. But I just say have those focused ideas in mind. And so my personal choice would be to build something that aligns really well with the service that we ultimately want to get them on and is also targeted towards the type of businesses who we want to attract and have as end customers.

Great. We just need a few listeners to be guinea pigs.

Be a guinea pig.

Tell us what, tell us how it works. I mean, I think that like, if we were building Guava Box back up, I would try a free course that's pretty core to like what we're trying to help our customers do. That's like a good first step. That lead that isn't like too crazy, maybe it's an hour long to go through or whatever that leads them into realizing like they don't, what they don't know and what they need and then like a pretty like clear next step partnership. Like what the next step would be with like getting this stuff done with us. And then I'd have a paid course for. I'm just thinking about our database and like the number of leads of that were the DIYs that just. We never monetized or did anything for that. Like they, I mean they need help and we could create a course and put it together and have it be a five hour long course and they could get a ton of value out of that and pay us 1,000, 2,000 bucks, whatever it is, you know, I don't know, we'd have to experiment with price there, but it could be really helpful and then give us some sort of monetization. And yeah, they would ask some questions and stuff. But I think also with courses the nice thing is like you can automate that a lot. Like automate the sales process a lot by having pretty clear overviews of exactly what they're going to be getting. You know, it's a lot easier to sell a small product like that than it is to sell your retainer service, you know, which is why we do the game plan also. It's the same concept in there. So I think that's what I would do and what I would try.

Nice. Well, there's our debate back and forth on courses. If we didn't scare you off, if I was unsuccessful, I'm just kidding. I'm not trying to scare people off. I just, I would definitely think about the alignment between who you're serving and the course content that you put together and the way that you structure that, the types of schedules that the people have who you're going after. But those are my thoughts on that. Anything else you want to add on what this looks like? Ryan.

Quick thing. So just if people are trying to do courses, we whipped one up in WordPress. It was okay, not great. We moved to teachable, which is another software to maybe look at. Again, there's no perfect software out there for anything. But that one's been pretty good. You can do free and paid courses there. So that's what we do for a lot of our trainings in do Inbound. But there's a lot of learning management systems out there to check out. But those are the two that we've tried and used and worked fairly well for us.

Yep, for sure. Cool. Well, I'm sure that sounds like the subject for a whole other episode at some point in time here, diving into what actually building how to build out the actual course itself and all that stuff. So we'll go ahead and wrap this one up for this week. If you guys have thoughts or have tried this, please let us know. We need these examples. We need these guinea pigs. And as we continue to learn more, we'll share that with you guys. So we'll be back next week as we kick off the very first episode of season number Are we on to season number nine?

Ryan Number yeah, I was going to try say it in Spanish. What's nine? Ocho nueva nueve. There we go.

There you go. All right. Well, we will talk to you next week as we kick off season number nine of Inbound Sales Journey. Until then, keep selling.

Thank you for listening to Inbound Sales Journey. You can find the show's notes for Today's episode@doinbound.com salesjourney that's doinbound. All one word.com salesjourney. Today's show is sponsored by Do Inbound, the world's first project and process management platform built specifically for inbound marketing agencies. Learn more@doinbound.com. if you enjoyed this episode, why don't you head over to itunes and subscribe? Make sure you leave us a review of the show. Until next time. Remember, life is a journey. Keep moving forward.