#279 - The Marketing Strategies That Worked (And Didn't Work) in 2025 - And What We're Bringing Into 2026

You know what I've been doing over the last few weeks? I've been going through everything we tested in our business in 2025. Every funnel, every launch, every marketing strategy, every offer. And honestly, some of it worked really well, like surprisingly well. And some of it absolutely did not. And I think it's really important to be honest about that because I see a lot of people in this industry talking about what's working, but they never tell you when something stops working or when they scrap a strategy entirely, or more importantly, why. And that's not helpful. So today I want to walk you through every single marketing strategy we tried in 2025. I'm going to give you the real numbers and results and I'm telling you exactly what we're bringing into 2026 and what we're leaving behind. Because here's the thing. The market changed this year. The algorithms changed, by behavior changed. And if you're not paying attention to that and adjusting your strategy, you're going to waste a lot of time and energy on tactics that just aren't hitting anymore. So let's get into it. Hey, everybody, welcome. I am Kate McKibben from HelloFunnels Co and welcome to this episode of the Doing It Online podcast. Today I'm going to break down seven different strategies that we tested. I'm going to rate them honestly and I'm going to tell you what we're doing about each one going forward. All right, let's start with one of the most common funnels out there, the lead gen engine funnel, or that's what we call it anyway. What is it? This is a classic front end funnel. So you run ads to a lead magnet that's related to your first offer, your entry level offer. People opt in and they go into an email sequence and that sells them a low ticket product. We used our double payday sequence for this, which is something we still love and we teach inside the 100k Funnel Club program. And we use that to convert people after they opted in. The real goal here is twofold. You want to grow your list as quickly as possible and you want to cover the cost of the ads to do that. And look, this is a strategy. It's been around forever, it's proven it works. But here's what happened for us this year. At the start of the year, I would give this strategy a solid 7 out of 10. We were able to add thousands of people to our list every week. And it was roas positive, which was great, particularly as we are in a very expensive Niche, we, we were actually making more money than we're spending on the ads. And that's, you know, that's the goal. Right. But here's what got really interesting. As the year went on, despite multiple optimizations, the roas really dropped. And ROAS means return on ad spend, by the way, for anyone who's not up with the nerd lingo. And I think this is directly tied to the changes in Facebook ads algorithm. This, there was a big shakeup this year. So what we found was that the types of people that we were being sent, the people Facebook was putting our ads in front of, they were way more likely to opt in than they were to actually buy. And previously we were still getting a lot of buyers coming through with those leads. So yes, we were growing the list, we were getting leads. But the conversions to sales, and more importantly those initial conversions to the first sales, which are the ones that get attributed back to these ads, that was actually getting much harder. And by the end of the year, we were sitting at about a roas of one, which means we're breaking even. We weren't losing any money. We also weren't making any money. And for a front end funnel in an expensive niche, that's not terrible. You're building an asset which is your email list, while not bleeding cash. But it's not what we were seeing at the start of the year when we were actually profitable on that front end. Now why did this happen? So I think that with Facebook's algorithm shift, it started to really prioritize what it saw as the wins, right, which was the leads over the secondary wins to it because it was a lead based campaign, which was the purchases, which was what I actually cared about. So they were sending us people who are likely to opt in because that's the conversion event that we had set up the campaign for that these people weren't necessarily buyers, they were freebie seekers, people who are happy to grab the lead magnet but had no intention of purchasing. And the more that happened, the more Facebook learned to send us more of that type of person. So here's what we're doing about it. This strategy is still running, but it's moved from being our major front end player to being a supporting player. It's not our main front end funnel anymore. We've shifted our focus and our ad budget elsewhere, and I'll tell you about that in a minute, but we're keeping it running because it's still growing our list at break even and those people do eventually, eventually buy it. We have the data to back it up, just not right away. So, verdict? Yes, bringing it into 2026, but it's been demoted down to a secondary strategy and not the main one. Okay, strategy number two, live webinars. So I needed to create a webinar for our new funnel short sidequest. We updated a lot of our offers this year on top of all of this. And so we needed to recreate our funnels to match. And the best way to force myself to actually get it done, because I do not love webinar. I think I've been pretty honest about that. And to get it done by a certain date was to schedule a live webinar, invite people to it and then commit to it. I had to, you know, had to get done. I had to show up. So that's what I did. I picked a date, I promoted it, I showed up live and I delivered the webinar. But how did it perform? Well, the webinar itself, while the content, I would say is good, people seem to really like it. And we got all of those sort of positive signs that the webinar was ticking all the boxes. The actual event of the live webinar itself, I would only give it a 4 out of 10. And here's why. Show up. Rates were terrible. And I have heard this is across the board for many niches, not all, but for many niches, shove. Rates are getting worse and worse. My market, it is saturated. They are skeptical. They have been to a million webinars before. They are also more time poor than ever before and, and they're international. So it's really hard to find a time that's going to work for even a majority of my audience. You know, I could do it at a time that works for Australia and I'd lose the U.S. i could do it a time that works for the US and I'd lose Europe and Australia. There's really just no winning here. So on top of that, because you're only doing it once, there's not a lot of room for optimization, particularly optimizing of ads. And I'm very much on the side of building things that are going to be long running so you have a chance to test, to optimize, to improve over time. When you are creating a webinar, inviting people to it, you have a very short window to get it right and you just get that one shot. And if it doesn't go well, it's just not going to be a great outcome. So the people who did show up, the conversion rate was, you know, on par. It was fine, tick that box people bought. But because the shop rates were so low, I think maybe about 15%, it just wasn't a super profitable exercise. So as a standalone strategy, live webinars are not great for us. And to be honest, I'm kind of relieved because I don't like doing them. But here's the twist. Once we turn that webinar into an evergreen webinar, I Now rate it 8 out of 10. It's been running in our funnel ever since, and it's been making sales consistently. So the actual content of the webinar, as I had the initial hunch, it was good, the offer was good, the delivery was good. It was just that live format that just doesn't work for my audience. So what are we doing about it? I am glad to say I'm leaving live webinars behind in 2026. Unless I need to rerecord something or test a brand new angle. I have no plans to schedule a live webinar in the next year. But evergreen webinars, absolutely, those are staying. They are a core part of our funnel strategy. So the verdict, Live webinars are out and evergreen webinars are still in. Okay, strategy number three, the live paid challenge. So this one's a big one because we actually tried this twice and the results were wildly different. So what was it? We ran a live paid challenge. Not a free challenge, a paid one. And we went all in to make the content, the delivery, the best it could ever could be like the best thing we've ever really created. It was really hands on, really intensive. I was so excited about it and so proud of it. At the end, the goal was for people to actually come in, create a funnel and have it done by the end of the week. Like a mini accelerator, we structured it with a combination of pre recorded trainings, AI templates and prompts, and live Q and A and feedback sessions. This meant it was achievable for people. They could go through the trainings on their own time. But they also got live support from me, which made it feel more high touch without me having to literally speak for like six hours a day for an entire week. We based the structure loosely on how Russell Brunson runs his monthly challenges. I'm a big believer on modeling what works, and thanks to AI and some really cool tech, we were able to set this up in a way that felt really premium without being totally unsustainable for us to deliver it. So how it performed Round one. The first time we ran It, I would give it a 9 out of 10. The energy was incredible. People were going through it and completing it at such, such a high rate, higher than I've ever seen. Not just for like a challenge, but for any program we've ever run. People were getting crazy results, like making sales within that first week and some Then I think one of our best ones was in the 30 days after the challenge, they'd made over 103 sales from their funnel without any ads. It was so exciting. And our upsell rate into our other programs because, come on, let's be honest, this is why we do these things, was over 20%, which was just phenomenal. I was so happy with everything about it. The structure worked, the delivery worked, the people that came through, great. The energy was there. It was really fun to run. The results were there. So naturally we decided to run it again three months later. So round two, second time, I would give this a three out of 10. And here's what went wrong in between the two challenges. We were not focusing on our front end lead generation as much as I mentioned. This was the time that it was starting to, to sort of slow down and we actually pulled the budget back in a bid to try and fix it. So what this meant was we were not adding as many people as I would want to our list. So we just didn't have enough new people being added to the list in between the time to really then have enough of a new pool of people to make that same offer to just three months later. And I've since learned from a mentor that you actually need to grow your list by over a hundred times the number of people you want to join something like this in between running it. So if you want a hundred people in your challenge, then you need to add 10,000 people to your list in between, which is insane, right? And sometimes that math does not work. It's not always a hundred. It depends on your market, can be between 50 to 100. But we were definitely not hitting those numbers. So when we open the doors the second time, even though the sales numbers were similar, the energy was completely different. We had a lot more total beginners come through. And I don't mean that in a rude way at all, but the first round had a lot more people who were already familiar with funnels with the software, who already had their offers in place. They weren't going to be intimidated by things like, you know, scheduling out a couple of emails. The second round had way more people who were just starting out, and for them, a lot of what we're teaching was quite overwhelming. They didn't complete it in the same way. The vibe was very different and the results weren't there. And our conversion rate into our other programs at the end was only about 5% because it was just the wrong people in the room anyway. And that was obviously way lower than the first time. So it was not as fun to run and it wasn't as profitable. So what did we learn? Well, the live paid challenge model can work really well, but it's very dependent on having the right people in the room and to get the right people in the room, particularly if you're going to be repeating this challenge, which if you've put all the effort into creating in the first place you kind of want to do, you need to be very aggressively list building in between. And if you're not doing that, you're going to end up with whoever happens to be on your list at the time who didn't feel pulled to do it the first time. And they're getting around to it now and they may not be the right fit. So what are we doing about it? Well, two things. As far as the live paid challenge side of things goes. That current one, with its current structure, I'm leaving that I do have in the calendar to do one live paid challenge next year. The structure will be different, however, because we had spent so much time and energy creating these emails and this sequence and these trainings and these prompts and everything, and I didn't want to go to waste. I've actually turned it into one of our Evergreen funnels and that is working really well. So, verdict for this live pay challenge with this particular setup that is out for 2026, but a updated version, a tweaked version run on Evergreen, that's staying in. Okay, strategy number four, the segmented VIP launch. So this one was a huge win. What was it? Well, basically, we went through our entire audience, our entire list, and really looked at, you know, everything like the tags, the activity, other data that we'd been collecting over time. So things like what products people had bought, what emails they'd recently opened and clicked, what actions they'd taken inside our program and how engaged they were overall. And we honed in on the top 1 to 2% of our current list. Then we sent them a private invitation to a new high touch premium offer. No big public launch, no webinar, no flashy campaign, just a simple personal VIP invitation. How it performed, I give this on a 10 out of 10. This was incredibly successful. We Were only looking to invite in a very small number of people because the offer itself is very high touch and I wanted to keep it intimate. And we sold it out really quickly and really simply. No sales calls required, Just a couple of dms back and forth with people who had specific questions. The whole thing felt effortless, it felt aligned and it was very profitable. So why did this work? Well, because we were only reaching out to people who were already our hottest leads. They'd worked with us before. They were very active in our audience. They weren't cold. These are people who had been in our world for a while, who had bought from us before, who were engaged and active and trusted us. And we knew them quite intimately. We knew their business. We could hand pick them and say we knew that they were going to be a good fit. So it just removed all of the friction and all of the need for any of the bells and whistles of a big traditional launch. So that when we said, hey, we've got something new, we think it'd be great for you. It's invite only and there's only a few spots, they were very ready to say yes. So what are we doing with this strategy? Absolutely. Bringing this into 2026. Um, in fact, we want them to do more of this. So this is the kind of launch, it doesn't feel like a launch. It's just a conversation with the right people at the right time, and it is a hundred percent in for 2026. All right, strategy five. Many chat funnels on Instagram. Okay, this one was interesting because it worked really well at the start of the year and then it completely died off. So what was it? Well, basically, we, as were many other people on the Internet, were posting multiple times a day on Instagram and sharing what I call micro magnets. So these are little mini lead magnets that people would DM us a keyword to get access to. So, for example, we'd say something like, Want my 3 step framework for achieving XYZ? DM me the word XYZ and I'll send it to you. Then they DM us. Manychat would automatically send them the lead magnet and they get automatically added into one of our front end funnel sequences. And this was very much a volume play. We're creating a lot of content. There was a lot of B roll with a lot of short captions, which I was personally loving because it was very low effort and we were getting loads of engagement and funneling lots of people into our email list and then into our low ticket offers. And funnels how to perform well at the start of the year, 10 out of 10, it was one of my favorite things. We systemized it, we had templates, we had a content calendar and it was working really well. We were getting tons of dms, tons of new leads and really good engagement on our posts. But by early mid year it had really cooled off. People just weren't responding anymore. I think this strategy became really overused across the platform. Absolutely everyone was doing the DM me X word thing and because of that you weren't getting seen as much in the algorithm. Plus, as the algorithm likes to do, whenever people kind of figure out how to game it, it switches things up so that that no longer works anymore. So people were no longer seeing these types of posts as much anymore. And the people who were seeing it probably weren't the type who are most likely to engage anyway. I don't know the full ins and the outs of it, but basically you were no longer getting the double win of also having an algorithm boost by the fact that people were commenting on your posts. So I did notice that anytime that we came up with something like really great, like really grabby, really of the moment, with a lot of value and curiosity around it, that post would still go really well, but it would be the outlier. Whereas previously you could be reposting similar things multiple times a day. As I said, just update, change the B roll in the background, slightly change the caption and they would all do pretty consistently well. So by the end of the year the environment is very different. Um, and for me overall the effort wasn't worth the reward anymore of this like high volume content strategy. So we've pulled it way, way, way back. So what are we doing about this? Well, while we still will have some of these going, I'm scaling it all way back. Going into 2026, we're going from multiple posts a day to maybe four to five posts a week. And the types of posts again are going to be really changing and a lot less emphasis on that manychat style funnel. Sadly, it's probably an out for 2026. Okay. Strategy number six is low ticket offer with direct ads. Okay. This is a big one. This is what's actually replacing our lead gen engine funnel as our main front end strategy going into 2026. So I started testing this in November, which by the way is a really unideal time to be testing something because especially if that thing you're testing requires ads, it's usually a very competitive and expensive time to be Testing anything out. But I didn't want to wait. I'm an impatient person. So I thought, you know, I'm just going to, you know, lower my expectations. We're going to test it anyway. We're going to see what happen. Because based on what I'd been learning about the big shifts in the Facebook ad space, it was becoming pretty clear that the big opportunity there was that Facebook ads were once again. And you know, it. It comes and it goes, but we're once again really favoring simple, direct, low ticket offers once again. And here's why. So you probably all heard a lot of rumors talk about the shift in the Facebook algorithm, and I definitely have seen it myself. And what seems to be working right now, what Facebook really needs, because it's really just about figuring out what Facebook wants and giving it to it, right? That's how you generally get the best results. So what Facebook wants right now is it wants to be able to make a lot of conversions, which is great, right? We want that too. To be able to do that, it needs a really big audience talking like 20, 30 million plus. And it needs to be able to get whatever those conversions are really quickly. In fact, the quicker the better. So where in other times it was okay to be driving people maybe to something that was going through a longer sequence, you're going to get, and it still is okay. And the results will be okay, but the results will be amazing if you can actually be sending the ads to something that are going to get results fast. Because that's how the algorithm learns who to show your ads to. So instead of running ads to a lead magnet and then trying to convert people via email over the coming days and weeks, we started running ads directly to sales for a low ticket offer. Now we have done this in the past and it worked, but then algorithm changed and it stopped working. So we moved. So this one thing is we're always updating and changing our strategies. And here really again is the key. It has to be the right offer. You cannot just run ads to a B plus offer and expect it to work as well as it can. This needs to be like an A plus plus plus offer. Something that is so good, so valuable, so compelling, so unique, so of the moment that people need to have it. They're going to buy it cold. So we came up with a new offer. Again as a moment of inspiration out on one of my eight figure idea walks, there's a new offer specifically designed for this strategy. And I started running the ads to it ourselves, not through an agency because again, one of the changes in how Facebook ads are working is actually they are way simpler than they used to be, which is a win. It's good to me take our wins. And the thing is it is working better than and I don't. I feel like I need to like knock on wood. But it is working better than any other ad campaign I think I've run in my entire career of running ads campaigns and so it's like it's really, really blown me away Now I'm expecting that obviously this will not last forever, but while it is, you know, you may ky the sun shines. So current score 10 out of 10. We started off running the exact same ads budget that we've been running for our lead gen engine funnel and while obviously the number of people coming through because it is sales and not leads was significantly lower, the initial upfront roas was so much better. So our lead gen engine, which is the lead magnet to email funnel was getting probably 10 times as many leads and making less than a probably like a quarter of the sales. So same budgets and we're getting a three to five times roas on the direct ads versus a one times roas on the legion. Now we haven't turned the lead gen engine off because again it is bringing a higher number of people through and we are seeing that they are converting down the line. But because we've been able to get these ads working with roas of so like so much higher. Like I've never had more than a two times roas in my market for a direct offer ever. I think there is real potential to scale this and we have been scaling it and quite quickly and we're now getting similar number of leads through the sales campaign as through the lead campaign because of how much quicker we've been able to scale it up. Now before anyone runs out and starts running ads to their low ticket offers, a few things to keep in mind is one, the structure of the ads is very, very different to how it used to be. The actual ad creatives are very, very different to it used to be. So you definitely want to invest your time in learning the type of ads and type of ad campaigns like the actual structure of them that are working right now to make this work. I did, I spent a lot of time get it going through some updated ads trainings and it has been very worth it. And for those of you inside of our programs, don't worry, we are going to be recording a breakdown of this for you so we can show you exactly how to do it too. So what does this mean for us? Well, this is going to be one of the pillars of our 2026 strategy. As long as it keeps working. Obviously, as I said, algorithms can change and I expect them to, but for now this is crushing it and I'm absolutely going making the most of it. So a hundred percent in for 2026. Okay, let's now do a quick recap. So what we're leaving behind in 2025, the old style or the 2025 style of the Legion engine funnel as our real like main strategy is being, as I said it's being demoted. It is now a secondary player. I still think it's very important but there are strategies that are working better that we're going to put our focus on. Live webinars. They are definitely staying behind. Evergreen Webinars are in as always. Live ones are out. The live paid challenge with the structure we had. As I said, I still am interested to try one with a different structure later on in the year, but I just don't think that the the juice is worth the squeeze with that one. For us manychat and Instagram Micro Magnets, sadly that volume play is out. The effort is not worth the reward. So what we are bringing into 2026 segmented VIP launches. This is a huge win and we plan on doing a couple more of these strategically throughout the year. Low ticket direct to sales funnels via Facebook ads. This is the star strategy of the moment and is replacing our traditional lead gen engines as our main front end strategy. Evergreen webinars, as always, these are a core part of our final strategy. They're staying, they're not going anywhere. This is going to help us to hit our very big audacious goals for 2026. So that's it. That's everything that we tried in 2025. What worked, what didn't and what we're doing about it. And look, I think it's really important to be honest about this stuff because the market changes, algorithms change. What worked last year might not work this year. And if you're not willing to test, adapt and scrap the things that aren't working, you're going to waste a lot of time and energy spinning your wheels. So as you're planning your 2026 strategy, I want you to ask yourself what worked for you in 2025, what didn't? And what are you going to do differently this year? Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. And if you want help with any of the strategies that we mentioned. Drop us a DM over at HelloFunnels and let's chat. I would love to support you. All right, that is it for this week, guys. I will see you same time next week. Bye.