What $18k on Ads Taught Us About Marketing That ACTUALLY Converts

We had 26.64% of people show up. If you're like, what does that number mean in context? Industry average is 18%. Sure. A free event. So we did pretty well. 44 calls booked before, 36 after. 80 calls booked total. 4 success call legends. And then we've had our best month ever in January.

We broke it down over three days, and it was really cool. And our intention really, going into this was, of course, because we wanted to create more impact, help more people, help coaches get leads, because it's the number one issue we see for coaches.

Welcome to the Success School Podcast. Today we're in a studio. We had a little menti b just before. So this is our second episode. We've recorded 84 four times now, so we're actually on 84 version four. So thanks for being here, guys. If you like the look of the studio, let us know. Steph's had a little few tears, so we'll see how this one goes. Steph, how you feeling?

Yeah, we've had a bit of a menti be today. It's. It's not always easy being a podcaster and being like this personal brand with all this pizzazz and, you know, she. Bang.

I've embarrassed ourselves in this podcast studio. The producers think I'm a fucking fraud.

Yeah.

No, it was the worst podcaster of all time.

So we have to say what happened, because I feel like it's relevant. So we're testing being in this podcast studio, and we just weren't expecting. Obviously, when you're in a new space, new energy, like, it's a bit of a different feeling.

Yeah, we had two dudes in the corner.

No. But then we got here, so we're already a little bit, like, I don't know, I guess maybe uncomfortable. Naturally, because you're in a new location, things are a bit different. You've got to learn the lay of the land. There's a lot of tech in here, right. And then we. They close the door and like, oh, we're gonna stay for the episode. And Tim and I are like, oh, we've never done a live episode before.

So different.

And honestly, we weren't that prepared. We've been busy, which we're gonna go through today. Why? We've been so busy. Things. It's good busy, but we've been busy. So we probably weren't as prepped as we should have been, so we just decided to kind of riff it anyway. Worst episode ever. Trying to throw it in the bin.

And, yeah, it was like 10 minutes.

And the worst part about the epis was that it was being witnessed.

Honestly, in my 250 podcast episodes in my life. That was the worst episode I've ever recorded. And like that was worse than my first ever podcast episode.

Oh no.

And someone was watching me.

Someone was watching. So embarrassment, shout out to the pod wave, guys. You guys are great. That was not our best moment. Forgive us. Forgive us. So my personal update, I spoke about it last episode, but this episode, it's becoming fruition. So last episode I spoke about the fact that I'm committing to eight new hobbies and I said that cooking was one of the first ones I was getting into. This weekend is the first cooking episode.

Of Feel like you should have done this like 10 years ago when we first got together, I started cooking like I had to go through the trial runs for 10 years.

Yeah, I've been a really bad cook, I think.

Yeah, I can remember that one in Dianella in our house.

Yeah.

You and you try to feed Dan and I and we were both like, oh, can we order something?

Yeah. It was so bad. I'm not a cook. I have not been a good cook up until recently.

Anyway, tell us about it. Sorry, I'm in.

I am doing barbecue classes.

Yes.

On Saturday. Which is hilarious. Cuz I think if you're watching this podcast and you're seeing me, I don't look like someone who would fang out a tong to throw it on the barbie.

But what would that someone look like?

I don't know. I feel like less feminine.

Yeah.

I feel like I'm going to be the only woman at this event. That's basically what I'm saying.

Really?

Yeah.

You think it's going to be.

They're very dude heavy.

I think it's just going to be hot chicks like you just like with dare.

What are we talking about today, Tim?

We are talking about how we got 964 people registered for our workshop. Round of applause. Let's go. Let's fucking go. That might sound like a lot or it might not sound like a lot. Either way, we're going to give you guys some value bombs today. So results on that guy. So you're like, what does that even turn into in the business? Did they even do well? Did they help some people? Yes, we did. We had 26.64% of people show up. If you're like, what does that number mean in context? Industry average is 18 show rate for a free event. So we did pretty well. 44 calls booked before 36 after 80 calls booked. Total four success call legends. And then we've had our best month ever in January. Lfg. Let's fucking go. We are so bad at celebrating.

We are so bad at.

So bad at celebrating. I think Steph bought me twice. That was it. So that's how we do it now. She gives me a bop. A bop. We go wedding ring to wedding ring and then that's kind of over.

Yeah, we don't celebrate. I think we maybe went out for dinner, but like just to our local. Like it wasn't even a thing. But let's wind it all the way back.

Okay.

Because you just shouted at heap of numbers down the line on the line, which I love. But what do we do? Like, what was this workshop? What do we do? Let's go back to the beginning. What was the workshop?

Your workshop? What? You tell us.

It was my workshop. It was. Well, our workshop. It was our workshop, but we said it was a challenge. But we found out that our audience don't relate to the word challenge. So we called it a three day work.

I think it's a fitness challenge.

No, I don't think people really want to be challenged all the time, you know, so it kind of makes sense. Conscious. Yeah, correct. Conscious of how you guys use language, you know? We did a three day live workshop and it was about lead generation. It was called Coach Lead Gen Machine. It was helping coach to generate or to build a system that would generate a thousand leads a month pretty passively and effortlessly. And we broke it down over three days and it was really cool. And our intention really going into this was of course because we wanted to create more impact, help more people, help coaches get leads, because it's the number one issue we see for coaches. But the second part of it was that obviously we would love to help more people in success school and give them an opportunity to experience how we help our clients to do this. And so this year we've committed to 12 workshops, 12 live events online so that we can really test out and flesh out this process of running live events and providing impact and really just go all in on seeing if this live event thing is great for personal brand recognition, growth, leads, sales, all the things. We just want to see how our year pans out when we do this. So that's the reason we decided to run it. And that's what we ran. And I thought it, I mean, Tim told you it went really well.

Even though we don't celebrate, it went super well. I just want to touch on one thing. Steph before we get into the questions that we have for each other that we've meticulously written in our notes, the big difference when we're presenting this and we had tons of feedback on we, we don't normally dive into the why on doing things in workshop. We're a bit more of like a what and a how. So we're doing this thing and here's how to do it and fucking go nuts, you know. But we spent a bit more time on the why. So we did why niche, why lead magnet, why ads. And I think it was really well received. Usually, like, we just assume that everyone just knows why you need a niche, you know, or why you need a lead mate, or why you need to run ads. But it was quite eye opening to me how much value people got from the why and us explaining the why, I was like, shit's just fucking common sense, you know? But like, it wasn't common sense because.

I think it allows you to tell more stor story and weave in a bit more context. It was good. It was a really helpful piece of advice.

Yeah, for sure. So, Steph, how did we get those results?

Okay, first of all, this started way, way, way before January. Like, we started planning this event in November for the end of January. So I think there's something to be said here for the fact that you have to know your customer cycles. And I mean, Lucy actually was the one that really alerted us to this when she signed up to our program. But there are seasons in your business, and if you've been running a business for a couple of years, you will start to see seasons where your customers buy and seasons where they don'. January is a season where our customers buy. And so for us, it's really. Am I allowed to talk about this?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Cool.

January for us is really a season.

Where I'm not trying to make faces.

You made a face. I was like, january is the season for us, for our customers buy. And so we know that notoriously, December is not in December. We decided like, we could run a heap of campaigns and push a heap of people into a program and get them on sales calls and, you know, whatever, try and convince people they should be ready now and get deposits and all this that other business coaches do throughout December that we just opted out of. We're like, December is a bit of a play month for us. We just want to enjoy ourselves, whatever. And so we started playing this back in November and we got advice from everybody, literally so many people on how to do this. And we Took all the bits of advice that felt good for us and made sense for us and we put it all together and we ran the numbers. And we ran the numbers.

I mean, like, most of it we were like, nah, it's not us. Yeah, like that's cool for you, but that sounds way too hard.

Someone was like, we do like a five week sales process. I was like, dude, no.

And they do an event after and they get deposits.

And I was like, they do a pre event.

How can we do it? As simple as possible, you know, pre.

Events and post events and this and that and oh, there's so many things. And we were just like, what's the easiest way?

Run workshop? Do good stuff, Sell people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we had a lot of input, a lot of thought around this before we even press go on it. And then January is a fickle month because you know it's going to be a good month, but it doesn't start until quite late in the game. And so the registrations and stuff did take a little while to start really kicking in. So we started to be like, oh, I wonder if we're going to get to it. But we didn't hit the numbers that we thought we were going to hit. From a lead generation perspective for ourselves in terms of like, we thought we were going. We were aiming for more.

1800.

Yeah, 1800. So we got halfway or over halfway. But at the end of the day, it was perfect. If we'd had double, we would have had a problem. We would have had actually a really big problem in terms of onboarding clients and successful. So how did we do it? We planned it really far in advance. We got a lot of advice from a lot of people who have been running them. We distilled that advice to make sure that we were still ourselves and still did the things that made sense for us. And then we went balls to the wall. Absolutely. How much did we spend in ad spend?

Yeah, 18,000 in ad spend. Cost per lead was like 19, which is double what I thought. So overall it did half as well as I thought it was going to do and it cost double as much. So. So four times as bad as our initial observations. But the end result was still what we wanted.

Yeah, of course.

So we underestimated how well we do on the back end.

Yeah, we definitely converted more clients on the backend than we were expecting.

Yeah. Which means that workshop was killer.

Yeah. Which means the workshop was great. High value, good job. And so, yeah, it was. It was really awesome. So on that Ad spend. What did the marketing strategy look like?

We kind of went into this thinking we're just going to go balls to the wall with ads. And then we went balls to the wall with ads, and the results were not what we thought they were going to be. So we had to, like, quickly pivot with that. So ads and email were the main strategy. Ads got up to about a thousand bucks a day. I was running like, 25 different creatives, three different copy variations, all the different types of ads. It was nuts. I think we had like 60 or 80 different ad sets running, like, at one time. At the peak, it was nuts. And Steph was like, how's the ads going? I was like, you don't even want to know, dude. Like, how the ads are going mayhem back there. I was trying everything. I was pulling tricks out of my pocket. It was nuts. And we run an email campaign. So we did three emails, week one, three emails week two. And then in the final week, we did seven emails, which was like the Frank Kern method, which was like just really short emails. Call to action and then book. And then we had a couple of podcasts, as you guys heard about, which were pretty good. Podcast was less effective than I thought. And then the surprising one, the one we on so much. Steph was organic. Actually did super well. Our organic got us quite the ways.

Yeah, I reckon it could probably got us like, almost 50%.

Yeah.

But it's interesting because, yes, it got us 50%. I spoke about it every day. So for. For the three weeks that we.

To yourself.

What do you mean?

I didn't see it every day on.

I did. I talked about it every day. Outside of the podcast episodes and the podcast. I talked about every day on my stories or every day. Every day, seven Mondays and week.

Mondays off.

Doesn't Mondays or weekends? No, no. So I spoke about it four days a week.

Yeah. Okay.

Every day, 12 times.

Yeah.

It's interesting. You podcast wasn't as effective. It's hard to measure because they could have already signed up. Like, surely people who are listening to your podcast also in our emails.

Yeah. You know, unsubscribed. And then they're like, I didn't get the email.

You guys were unsubscribing. Yeah. I think that organic was very. I think you need both. I think that that was a big lesson for us this year was that you need a mixed strategy. You can't just be all as organic, for sure.

So, Steph, what did we learn from. Or what did you learn from it? We'll Start there because you'll probably just ask me straight after this.

Yeah. What did I learn from it? I learned that it has to be a multi strategy, especially if you're going to get like thousands of registrations. It needs to be a mix of your warm audience, cold audiences, like new audience. So paid organic email podcasts. You really have to try and get across the board as many as you can. I learned that three days is a lot.

Yeah.

Three days was heavy energetically for us. Not helpful that we went out the weekend before. Three days was energetically heavy, especially because we still coach and we still, you know, have successful and all those things. So I, I don't know about doing another three event, although the results were great. So it does kind of feel like we should do it again. And I learned that. And this might be selfishly, I think that we're really good coaches. I feel like. No, because people were like, I'm really getting this. Like, thank you so much for just simplifying this for us. I do think that our way of teaching is a really simplified approach and it was really nice to have that validated, I guess, selfishly.

Yeah.

What did you learn?

Yeah, it was, it was interesting. We haven't run something on this scale, so we had like 2, 260 people on live with us at one point, which is nuts. So the chat was just going nuts. And then I just remember, like, he's.

Not the best on zoom on a good day.

Yeah. I remember one particular moment where I started talking about AI and then someone wrote, what about the water consumption that AI uses? And I was like, oh my God, I couldn't filter for this. Before we come in here is like this, like these rogue comments of people just like kind of throwing out complaints which are super random. And I was like, we just don't get this in success school. So I just was. Caught me off guard and I was like, what the hell? There's like a negative comment in here on someone with AI. And then I was like, oh, kind of rattled me a little bit. So it was just a little bit of like the shock factor of like what I learned. I was like, oh, I couldn't really prepare for that because I haven't done it before. Also, like, what did I learn? I was like, 260 people live on a workshop is nuts. Yeah, like mayhem.

We need a whole team in there.

Yeah, we need a full team. It was just me and Steph. I was like, day one, Steph was like, hey, Tim, can you check the slides? I'm like, trying to let people in. I'm trying to mute people. The chat's going nuts. She's like, what did so and so say? I'm like, I don't even know what day it is in at the moment. I can't keep up. I had like, nine coffees and I couldn't even do anything. Like, it was mayhem.

On your day, on day three, I remember you were just, like, riffing and you would throw a question to me. And I was so absorbed in just managing the chat that I was like, what did you ask? Like, I couldn't even comprehend what we were talking about. Like, it was a lot. Yeah, it was. Which is so fun. Like, it was so fun. What else?

I learned that we probably shouldn't go to a D and D festival the two days before. So that was a bit of a negative for us. So we went to a culture shock. 1991.

Yeah.

Metro City. Steph's first D and B event. Had the night of our life.

If you're on YouTube, we'll say had.

The two day night of our life. Yeah. Because it was just a really long weekend.

Yeah.

And then we had to present this workshop and give it our all. Yeah. Which was huge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We. I was concerned. Tim was like, we're gonna go to Culture Shock. I was like, babe, we've got our presentation the. On the Monday afterwards. And he was like, nah, you gotta live a little.

You know, we nailed it. Yeah. I think, like, what I did learn is the DM conversations have been epic. And I've loved talking to every single person that's been. Been on there. That's been great. It was just such a. Like, a connection piece to kind of bridge the gap. Because, like, people have seen us. Obviously these people have seen us on a podcast or a video or whatever it is, but actually, like, having that interaction is like a new level of connection with someone, which was incredible. And I think maybe a lot of coaches, consultants, service businesses, like, if you could do a workshop, you could do a challenge, you could do a presentation, you could do whatever it is. It's just like the next level of connection you could get with your prospects. And I think it's incredible. I'm, like, kicking myself in the head, like, with my short legs and wondering why we didn't do this sooner.

Yeah.

What the we've been doing. And, like, we did it, but we did it.

Yeah.

Like, we half asked it.

Yeah, we half asked it. And I think, you know, nothing good comes easy. And so, you know, it wasn't the simplest and most easy thing to do. But the benefits have been huge. Like I have felt so connected to our audience, I felt so connected to our clients. I have felt so connected to our team and everybody that's been involved in it. It's been a really nice, nice thing.

Yeah.

So I loved it. It felt so nice to kind of give back as well. Just so we can keep it like super tactical. If someone was going to run a workshop, let's say give yourself some time guys, like plan this properly. But let's say in two months time somebody was planning on running a workshop, what would you say are like the absolute must dos and like let's say there was top three, top three must dos marketing wise each.

Are we doing top three each?

Just top three full stop.

Top three to full stop.

Like what worked the best? Like maybe it was a type of ad set, maybe it was a type of post, maybe it was an email.

What do you think? Okay, so the top one, it has to be outcome based and actionable. Okay. So you can't be like workshop to feel better, you know, like it's got to be a bit more specific. Like ours was okay, I'd give it a six and a half out of 10. Like coach lead gen machine. The title of it. You kind of know what you're going to get but then the sub headline was like generate a thousand leads or whatever it was like that's pretty good. Like you know what you're going to get. Like when I've seen people do workshops they just do something super vague like feel better, like have more energy, like thumbs up, you know, like it's gotta be super specific and then once you have it, obviously you need to deliver that. Number two, the most effective email strategy that we've ran was the seven day sequence. I think we got like 180 opt ins from that which is massive. And what a seven day sequence is. Seven emails in seven days. And if you're thinking of that and having an aneurysm right now, I would implore you to do it because it is quite scary. But obviously like the results are incredible from that. So seven emails, they're really short, sharp, like hey do you want this thing? Click the link. The next day is basically the same thing just written differently. So it's basically seven of the same emails written slight different with slightly different subject lines. And then we sent that out 180 opt ins just from like that sequence, which is nuts when you think about it. And then lastly would be just to combine the organic and the paid together and don't just neglect one. So if I were to do it again and I do a big challenge like we did, I'd go full court press. I would go ads every day and I'll go organic every day and I'll drive everything at it. I know Steph said she did organic seven days a week, four days a week, but I would probably do seven days a week in full. Steph, anything I missed?

No, but I do think it's interesting. So we advertise for three weeks.

Yeah.

Yeah. At what point did we get the most signups?

Second week.

The second week. Interesting. So three weeks out, people are still. I mean it's January so it's a bit of a weird time. Everyone's like first week of January, everyone's like, I don't know if I want to like go to anything. I'm just like, I don't even know if I want to go back to work yet. Second week, I think they're starting to gear up. First week was not good. Not as good. Yeah, totally. So knowing that, would you change anything differently about that? Like what are you doing differently for our February workshop?

Yeah, we're just going to America for February. It's also not going well at the start. So ads in America, like I just assumed that 360 million people, all the entrepreneurs. Yeah, everyone's killing it. Like it's a prosperous time in America. We're going to kill this. Nah man. They don't want anything to do with us. So we have.

No, no, like yeah, there's like a.

Hundred dollar cost per lead. It's crazy. So that's not worked well. So I just flipped on the old trusty Australia. We've got $6 leads again. Let's go $6 registration. So. So what I would change next time? Probably nothing to be honest. I'm not going to put that much effort into just a one day workshop. Just we're not going to need as many people on there. So we're just going to run ads, email and some organic on there.

Yeah. And I think guys, you know one thing that Tim and I, we're really big and how we really employ you to do this because Tim and I are the really, really obsessed with just getting the data. So we're going to keep as many things the same as possible for the one day event as we are for the three day event so that we can see what worked and what doesn't because change too many variables. You don't know what works and why so, you know, I think that sometimes people can be like, oh, I didn't get the results I want. I need to change everything. But more often than not, you just need to make a few little tweaks and see if it works and then go again and go again and go again. And most people I know that are making big money off the back of webinars and events run them for like 12 to 18 months before they even start making real. I'm going to talk about big money. We're Talking about like $5 million a year businesses before they start banking in really big on the back end. The first time you do it, it's not going to be perfect. Like, chill the heck out. Try again, try again, try again. You get better. And time.

I know someone's thinking right now, like, I'm not going to get 964 people on a workshop. Should I still do it? And I was literally speaking to this two days ago to a client of ours, and she was like aiming for 100 and she was like, oh, it's not going to be. What would you say to someone like that?

Yeah, I was chatting with a client this morning who had 36 people register for her workshop. She had four people show up live. She still made two sales.

Let's go, 50 Cent, Sal, right? Like, spend the night.

Yes, absolutely. And she, she's still going to be able to reach out to those people and she's still going to be able to follow up and have DM conversations. She's still going to be able to invite those people to calls. They're still on her email list. Like, she's literally been doing this for like five weeks. So it just takes time, guys. Like, my first workshop, I think I probably had like 12 people on. It just takes time. And, like, you've got to be okay with being in the beginning phases. Like, you've got to be okay with being at the start, you know, and it doesn't matter. It literally doesn't matter. But the more touch points you can have at the beginning, and especially in the. No, like, trust phase, if you are a newish business or if you're a newish, in terms of you haven't been that public with your business or you've relied a lot on referrals and stuff like that, so you're still building your brand, I would highly recommend running them. Like, it's such a good game play.

So, Steph, do you think it's beneficial for coaches, consultants, service businesses to run workshops, challenges, that kind of stuff?

Yes.

Yes. Okay, cool.

I would do it.

Why?

I think it's easier than calling leads.

Damn. Laura Hagen is.

Yeah, she'll be loving that. She'll be loving that. I think it's easier than calling the leads. I think you have to do some. Something. Yeah, guys, you have to do something. You know, I don't care if you call leads or you don't.

Yeah.

I don't care if you hammer dms and you become the king or queen of dms. Like, we have some people who crush in DM and that's their entire sales process. We have people who crush LinkedIn. I don't care what your thing is, but just do it all the way in. And you're not going to get a result the first time, so it's going to take some time, you know?

Yeah, guys, do it all the way in. Steps. Advice. Yeah.

Hashtag do it all the way in.

Guys, just an important announcement here. Guys, manifesting is so 2024, 2025 is about taking action. So if you're on the fence and you're not getting there, guys, take more action. Run a workshop. Do some shit. Okay. Get crazy.

Do it all the way in.

Do it all the way in. All right, guys, we got some value on this very transparent episode. We told you all our numbers and stats. Should more business coaches be like this? Let us know. Send us a dm. There's a lot of bullshit in the business coaching industry, but we're giving you all of our stats. That's right here on the successful podcast. As always, guys, leave a like comment. Subscribe. We are super grateful for every single person that subscribes to this podcast. It was super cool on the workshop when some people were like, I love their podcast. And I was like, I don't know you, but this is epic.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thanks, guys.