We dive into how to get more website traffic and conversions through better messaging, positioning, landing page optimization, multi channel marketing, and PPC with Pedro Cortés in this LMScast episode hosted by Chris Badgett of LifterLMS. This is a great show for you if you’re a course creator looking to improve your messaging and understanding of your offer.
There are a lot of terms in the world of marketing and sales. Pedro spells out the definition of key concepts to understand as they apply to converting leads to paying customers for your products and services.
Understanding the fundamental difference between your homepage and a landing page on your website is important for how you structure your messaging. Your homepage is the general page many people will hit if they go to your website itself. Whereas a landing page may be more targeted and is likely to have a message for a specific audience.
Conversion is the process of having a lead take action on a specific step when they visit a page on your website. This may include signing up for a free ebook or hopping on a consultation call. Messaging refers to how you explain your offer, and how you explain the benefits and why they are relevant and important to your prospective audience.
There are some questions Pedro outlines that you can ask yourself in order to gain insights on how you should structure your messaging for your online course:
- Who is the easiest customer to convert?
- Who is my best customer?
- Who can I provide value to the most?
We often see a specific archetype of customers we serve that will bring in 80% of the revenue for the company, so figuring out a way to best serve them and positioning yourself to market to those people is a great strategy for increasing your revenue.
Identifying a product to build in many ways comes down to finding what issues people are spending time and money to fix and figuring out how you can serve that market.
To learn more about Pedro Cortés be sure to head to Cortes.Design. You can book a free strategy session with Pedro there to jump on a call and analyze your problems and your goals to see if it is a good fit to work together. If you have any questions for Pedro, you can also feel free to email him here.
At LifterLMS.com you can learn more about new developments and how you can use LifterLMS to build online courses and membership sites. If you like this episode of LMScast, you can browse more episodes here. Thank you for joining us!
Episode Transcript
Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place if you’re a course creator looking to build more impact, income, and freedom. LMScast is the number one podcast for course creators just like you. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co-founder of the most powerful tool for building, selling, and protecting engaging online courses called LifterLMS. Enjoy the show.
Chris Badgett: Hello, and welcome back to another episode of LMScast. My name is Chris Badgett, and we’re joined by a special guest, Pedro Cortes. He’s over at cortes.design. Welcome to the show, Pedro.
Pedro Cortes: You’re welcome Chris. I’m glad to be on, and hopefully we make this a very useful episode.
Chris Badgett: So one of the things that happens as I’ve been in business is sometimes you come across, when you get in a company of other entrepreneurs, you kind of recognize each other a little bit. And then sometimes there’s these niches within entrepreneurship or digital business or whatever. Like copywriting or conversion optimization or funnels and marketing. And I feel a strong affinity to you because I can tell you’re obsessed with these things like I am. And I also need help with these things.
Chris Badgett: I’m open and that I have like incorrect assumptions and am not fully optimized with that. So, for the course creator out there, I think this is going to be a great show about improving your messaging and understanding your offer a little better with the goal of getting more leads and closing more sales, and having a system, and a process to do that for your course or your training based membership site.
Chris Badgett: I wanted to start by just a quick definition of terms of conversion, messaging, positioning and a landing page. How’s that different from a homepage or whatever? Like could you just kind of circle the wagons on those terms just so people have a baseline if they’re new to this kind of thing?
Pedro Cortes: Okay, sure. Basically, the first one is let’s say the difference between a landing page and a homepage. So, the landing page is just whatever page a potential customer lands on. So it may be a page for that you created for ads, maybe that’s an article. Sometimes in my case I attract people with articles. So the article needs to convert to the the person as well. And the home page is just, let’s say if you go to www.yourdomain.com or something, that’s the homepage, like the main page essentially.
Chris Badgett: And how about conversion? Like what is conversion really?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, conversion is this, when you try to get let’s just say for conversion optimization is just when you’re trying to get people to visit a website and then take some action sometime is trialing a product for free or calling you on a phone or whatever and essentially just wants to make as many people as you can to take that action that you’ve defined. And hopefully [inaudible] is related to a style.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. And marketing is a big topic, but what is messaging mean within that? Like what is that? Communication, but really messaging, what does that mean?
Pedro Cortes: Messaging is basically how you explain your offer and how you really explain the benefits it has and why are they important, and really communicating to your ideal buyer. So, essentially people buy because they only buy if they understand how they can use your course or whatever solution you’re providing in order to get the results they want. So, if they don’t understand how they can use it, then they just not going to buy it.
Pedro Cortes: So, essentially messaging is just the marketing aspects of exploring those reasons why people buy. And then just putting it out there on whatever [inaudible] might be. Might be a a landing page, it could even be a letter. I mean, whatever you can or an ad or whatever you at them with the messaging just has to hit their desired outcomes.
Chris Badgett: And what about positioning? Where does that squeeze in? Like what does that actually mean?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah, I mean, the thing with marketing is, it just has like way too many things and way too many names, since I’m just confusing. But essentially you kind of want to use them all together. I believe that positioning is the first step before you get to messaging because if you think of positioning is like, let’s say you have a group of people and they could all buy your product or they could buy anyone else’s products.
Pedro Cortes: And you are going to look at them and say, “Who is like the easiest to convert? Who’s like my best customer? Who can I provide value the most?” Or the other way around? Because [inaudible] this is, let’s say you’re a customer, you’re like a consumer and then you look at several products and you’re going to try to find out which one is perfect for you. So, the company that took the time to create an offer that is perfect for you is the one that positioned themselves better for that ideal customer.
Pedro Cortes: And then they just bid out to the entire competition. Because as a consumer, you looked at all of the other solutions and you say, “This isn’t ideal for me. So my only chance is to look at that one, like look at that option.”
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. You have a really awesome image on your website and that’s at cortez.design, not .com it’s cortez.design. And it has a picture of people kind of coming into a your website, like a lot of people. And then there’s some people in the middle that are thinking, “I don’t get it. How is this different? How does this work? I’m leaving.” And then there’s one guy who actually converted at 0.05 conversion rate. And the quote that he’s saying is, “Screw it, let’s try it anyways.”
Chris Badgett: And I really love that picture because I have a mature software company and website that does convert, but I know it’s not optimized. And a lot of people have that, “I don’t get it. How is this different? I’m leaving.” So, when I saw Pedro’s schedule a call link and you know, he’s doing this for software companies. So, if you have a software company and you want to increase conversion kind of really get into this, I’d encourage you to check that out.
Chris Badgett: I heard Pedro on another podcast called Rogue Startups, which kind of opened me up into his world and his thinking and that’s how I ended up on his landing page. And here we are having a call where I wanted to share some of that value. He’s also got a great book that you can get that where he goes into what some of the things that we’re going to talk about today. Well, now that we kind of have a baseline of knowledge, I guess what’s the big… before we get into like how it works and everything, what do you help people do, businesses do, specifically software companies? What is the offer?
Pedro Cortes: So, essentially the offer is really specific to… every offer is really a vehicle to a transformation. So, essentially is before you make an offer, you need to identify a current position of that company and say… and identify that something they are stuck on and they’re frustrated about. And then finds the thing that they really want. So, when I help companies with, and then like the offer is like a consequence of that. But first I need to identify those problems. So it’s always fixing a problem.
Pedro Cortes: So, the problem is when you build a SaaS company, which is just an abbreviation [inaudible] software as a service, just so people know, understand as well. As the founders usually do the sales themselves and they can scale the company pretty fast, especially because I work with the iTech at SaaS, so sometime starts at least like $1,000 a year or something.
Pedro Cortes: And then they can scale the company to 50 grand a month in between 50 to 100 K a month. Now, they doing pretty well, but then they get stuck there because they started with something that was focused and they knew their targets and usually it’s maybe they had another company and created the software to do that, like it happens all the time, but then as people, they create really good programs, really good products and then a ton of different people start using it and then it just becomes a mess.
Pedro Cortes: They lose clarity and then they can’t really scale because they tried paid ads with vague messaging and everything and SaaS is just getting like super [inaudible 00:09:19]. They just [inaudible] and especially they get stuck. And to I, I usually help them as I just coach them throughout my process that I’ve tried with the ton companies and essentially start with positioning and say, “Who’s bringing 80% of the revenue, I’m just going to try to give you like a brief presentation on this.”
Pedro Cortes: Who’s bringing like 80% of the revenue. So who is the easiest one to convert out of all of your segments. And essentially, why are people switching over from the competitors tools to yours? Because science says that there is like seven times harder to convert someone that is from a competitor. So, those people will always have the reasons on what’s missing from your tools and what’s special about your tool. And that’s something you always need to be aware of, so you can present that on your page.
Pedro Cortes: And then is like, taking all those reasons from [inaudible] and then putting down throughout your entire website, throughout advertising and stuff like that. And then essentially also we need to find some channels that are specific to… that are ideal to attract those customers. Because sometimes PPC, there are some ways to get around PPC and it’s still scalable.
Chris Badgett: That is awesome. Music to my ears. But I wanted to to say to you, the listener out there, one of the ultimate hacks is to learn for another industry. So, even though we’re talking about SaaS companies, software companies, everything that we’re talking about here, you can apply to digital, really any product, but we’re in this case course sales or membership sites sales.
Chris Badgett: And just to lay an example out there, there’s this whole segment of people building courses and training programs and coaching offers in the business niche that are offering marketing courses or growth courses. And if we’re… let’s just use an example of somebody who has an offer and a transformation they can deliver in a process, and coaching, and everything to help certain type of company grow from like let’s say a 100K in annual revenue to a million.
Chris Badgett: So six to seven figure offer. That’s who they want to serve, that’s who they help. How? Let’s get into like some of the nitty gritty on that. Like, how would that type, of course, creator or trainer start the process of identifying the problems?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, the thing is, if a course creator already identify that they want to take someone from a 100,000 a year to a 1,000,000 a year, then they already identified that stage. So it [inaudible] I don’t find a problem with, is already better than most people do. But then, essentially, this is what’s within the find programs. And this is like a lesson for life in general as it’s only a problem if they’re either spending time or money trying to fix it. If they’re not, then it’s not a problem is not a priority, no matter whatever they say, it’s bullshit to be honest.
Pedro Cortes: So, you want to look at, just make a list of whatever companies you can take from a 100K to 1000,000, and then you’re just going to figure out, okay, who’s already spending time and money getting there? Where are they spending their money? How much is costing them? Is it working? Is it not working? What’s missing, what’s not been missing. And essentially trying to break down where you can come in, where can you provide the most value and then, try to [inaudible] and try to really make obvious the amount of time or money that it would take from trial and error, if they don’t follow your proven process essentially.
Chris Badgett: That’s cool. We’re going to jump around a little bit because… but I want to go fast forward to the conversion point. I heard one time that there’s three reasons people don’t buy. They don’t trust you, they don’t trust the product and the one they won’t admit to is that they don’t trust themselves, that they can get the value out of the product. How do we handle these kinds of objections for our offer?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, the first one is, they don’t trust you. So, essentially what do you have to do is you kind of just show them whatever companies you have worked with before. I mean, you show them you have like a very detailed process and one very good thing is, the best way to do it, even [inaudible] you provide value first. So, if you teach them something, then they will assume you’re an expert at it essentially. And really, a nice [inaudible] is just knowing more than the person you’re selling to.
Pedro Cortes: So, I mean, as long as you provide that value and you can add some social proof on top of it, you can answer that objection. Then is, they don’t trust the products, right? Is that what you mentioned?
Chris Badgett: Correct.
Pedro Cortes: I mean, that’s kind of similar to having social proof from the results as well. But the other thing that people don’t really talk about is, highlighting the problems of other solutions. So, if they don’t trust your product, it doesn’t mean like it doesn’t work. What’s really means is, they just want to make the best decision, the best buying decision they can. And that just involves removing all of the [inaudible] options that they have.
Pedro Cortes: So, what I usually do as an exercise, let’s say for the SaaS companies is, SaaS companies have Trustpilot or something and you can look at the reviews. You can look at what people are complaining and then you can just say that there are also softwares that are like an all in one solution. So, one easy way to do that you can do this is, you’re going to stop duck typing all these softwares together. It’s going to cost you a lot of money and everything.
Pedro Cortes: So, essentially just want to make that like a no brainer. And you honestly want to show them as many use cases as possible. So, let’s say a, do you have any example of a product that I can use?
Chris Badgett: Well, yeah. I mean, you could use Lifter LMS I guess as the example.
Pedro Cortes: Okay. So, what you can do is, one you need to say that this is everything you need to [inaudible 00:16:19]. This is everything you need to build a course or a coaching program, that is the most complex you want. Like you won’t need anything else. Even if you scale five or 10 years from now, this is infinite to you. It has like everything you need and more.
Pedro Cortes: And then, when you get to a specific industry, you just say, to make it to one, provide the use cases and show the social proof as well, is the way you explain it. You just say, “This is how this very successful course and health is using Lifter LMS to do the get these results.” So, when they are getting the proof and they’re getting the use case, so it’s like the easiest way to answer it. And then you can just duplicate that to all of the other niches because it’s fairly similar.
Chris Badgett: Anything else on positioning in terms of presenting your course or your training program as the best solution? What else goes into being seen as the best option?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah. Being the best option is the way you make it perceive that is you need to make it, like the impression you want people to have is, you want people to say, “This was built for me essentially.” So, the position is really having that focus of saying, “I’m building a product that is exactly for that person.” And what I like to call positioning 2.0 is, some people focus on, I’m just going to do a course, let’s say, use that example from a hundred to a million a year.
Pedro Cortes: So, I say I’m going to build a course for any niche. That’s the ones to go from 100K a year to a million a year. That’s terrible, isn’t ever going to work.
Chris Badgett: Great.
Pedro Cortes: You can do a little bit better. And this is the limits that people get is, “I’m going to target accountants [inaudible 00:18:20].” Maybe they have to, I don’t know. Like a team of accountants or something. And then positioning 2.0 is associating an industry and a transformation. So, I want to help accountants that are making a 100K from a corporate job and they want to quit their job and start their own thing and still make 100 K that’s one. A one transformation.
Pedro Cortes: Then other one could be someone that is already like a freelancer and is making 100K, then they want to make 200K or 500K or something. Then it’s like accountants don’t want to scale their team so they can free up their time and scale to 50K a month. So, there’s endless transitions within the same industry. So, basically the positioning is infinite and you just have to choose which one you want to focus on first.
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.
Pedro Cortes: Then you can present your offer as [inaudible] and then it does exactly for me for that stage.
Chris Badgett: So, how do we do that differently? Let’s say on our just general homepage where we’re not sure how they’re getting there or whatever. It’s just our homepage versus a paid campaign where we can directly target accountants in a certain area or somehow target them as already being somewhat successful and established. A landing page makes sense, because you can make it just for them. But how do you do it on a general homepage?
Pedro Cortes: The general homepage is, you need to identify what are the common use cases people are using, and they are looking for like in general. And that’s the thing you presents. And then when you get to, let’s say to the case studies, like when you get to the social proof parts, that’s when you segment so [inaudible] and then you use the social proof like I said. And then you show a use case plus the social proof of, oh, this is how this health course’s doing great by using [inaudible] and everything.
Pedro Cortes: Yours is a little bit different because sometimes in SaaS, there are what we call vertical and horizontal solutions. So, vertical is when it’s very specific to a niche. And horizontal is when it works equally well on all different issues and it requires a little, some different positioning but is usually better because it’s like infinite. You just start with one niche at a time and then you evolve in concentric circles essentially.
Pedro Cortes: And you just target the easiest one and then you try to use that one to become famous, and the other one as well. One example of no result, a company can be like click funnels. They just provide websites for all of the other niches, but then they provide [inaudible] the affiliates for each niche.
Chris Badgett: Wow, that’s great. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is you have this lean landing page Canvas, which is really cool. And one of the things when I see somebody who’s good at creating leads and I end up on one of these and it’s in a Google drive somewhere, somebody who’s good at marketing and lead generation, whenever you open it, you’re going to see all these little characters in the top right where there’s all these other people on it looking at it too, which means you know how to get traffic. So, I guess this or something else, just in general, what advice do you have for lead magnets? Like getting people, what’s counterintuitive that people don’t realize about lead magnets?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, lead magnets are just like [inaudible] I’d say lead magnets or something you can offer for free. But you’re not going to offer… sometimes people just say, “I’m going to create an ebook and I’m just going to try to get some leads with an ebook.” But the thing is, it’s not about an ebook or a free email course or something, is about fixing the problem. So, if you’re done the positioning exercise properly and you know, big problems that people really care about, then you know how to provoke them.
Pedro Cortes: So, you just essentially say that small little piece helps you fix a part of that problem and then they’ll hop turn very easily. So, that’s the secrets for lead magnets is just trying to say that fixes a problem and then if you want people to move forward, you’re just explain how something else improves a bigger problem. So, let’s say I [inaudible] can get an overview of my process and so on. And then I just say, oh, this is like an overview of the process. If you want to fix like a bigger problem in the templates and everything, you’ve got to book that session.
Chris Badgett: That’s great. You mentioned earlier, I think, and correct me if I misunderstood you, but you said something about like liking small markets or something like that. What did you mean by that? And recently I’ve heard like Seth Godin talking about the minimum viable audience or whatever. Like he’s kind of saying something similar and I just want to know what you mean by liking small is okay, small’s good. What is that about?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah, so essentially when you’re doing like your positioning exercise, the people that are most likely to convert or they are like the easiest to convert is the one that you start with. And then you try to find, you also find [inaudible] these people and the next niche I want to evolve with. So, like the only example that comes to mind is I’m working with a company that’s provides software for dealerships, right? And dealerships can get pretty big, they have a bunch of locations and stuff like that, but they also work with a lot of smaller companies that provide the tires or the oil or whatever.
Pedro Cortes: And have actually the same metrics to track. So, if we target those companies and we sell them their software, essentially, the dealerships will see that they are using this software and they will ask, oh, why are you using this? How is it good? And basically we got referrals to bigger companies by leveraging the smaller companies are easy to target because they all talk with each other. So, you get free referrals. Does that answer you [inaudible 00:25:20]?
Chris Badgett: Yeah, that’s really good. I want to circle back and ask you about, there’s like a disconnect I think that makes some people’s brains explode where on one hand they get the advice. Like you have to have your ideal customer avatar. There’s like this one person either make it a real person or do amalgamation of all your best, the attributes of your best customer. And it’s like this one person that you create content and product for and do marketing to. Versus this other camp, which is about segmentation and a reality where there’s multiple avatars, so, what’s your thinking around those two schools of thought?
Pedro Cortes: Okay. I mean, like I said, this, it definitely depends on the company, depends if you have a no results or a vertical solution.
Chris Badgett: Yeah.
Pedro Cortes: [inaudible] I mean if, I say you have a ton of different customers. If they’re using the same tool, they have the same problems. So, essentially you already have something of common to work with. And then, if you want to make it even more specific, maybe in the retargeting campaigns, you make it more specific to them, then that’s totally fine. So, basically it’s more of a middle ground.
Pedro Cortes: And really that’s about it because one really… you know that a company is just don’t really know what they’re doing. If they have more than five avatars or probably more than four, then that make no sense, because they’re not finding the patterns on what people have in common. So, if they are buying the same product, the product they sell, they have similar problems. You just to… they always have similar problems but they have different use cases.
Chris Badgett: Yeah, that makes sense.
Pedro Cortes: [inaudible] But your first you show up [inaudible] cases.
Chris Badgett: Very cool. What about… let’s say a course creator membership site creator is like, they have a good offer. It’s converting, they do organic, they’re on the content treadmill, they’re pumping out blog posts, podcasts, whatever, and it’s working. And then they try to go to paid acquisition, PPC, and they fail like what’s… but it works on their organic works. But when they go to paid it fails, what are the key mistakes they’re making when they go to PPC?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah. I mean, the key mistakes is probably is just assume that people are searching for your solution and then use ad-words. You only use ad-words if people are clearly searching for your solution. And if they are, then [inaudible] is going to be pretty hard. And then let’s say Facebook, like everyone’s on Facebook and stuff like that. It just depends on, I mean, on Facebook, I think it works generally. You just need to do something that works for you.
Pedro Cortes: So, let’s say if you offer courses, the best way to do it is you make valuable content on Facebook and then you promote it and then you follow up with, we target them with a click through ad that gets you to a lead magnets, or even to a buy page if the course’s like very cheap. Or you get them to buy a small ebook and then you get them to buy a course or something.
Pedro Cortes: So, essentially it’s not about the advertising, it’s about being on channels that your customers are. I think you might [inaudible] real estate agents that are [inaudible] or something. They just use a channel that they are familiar with. So, one thing real estate agents are familiar with is mail, like direct mail. So, you can use lumpy mail, which is you just add a presence and then you fed ex it.
Pedro Cortes: So, people always open it and then you have the same pitch as a landing page but on a card and it costs less than a PPC ad, because it could cost like five bucks for them to open it. But they are just as likely to convert with probably more because it’s on their desk. I know they either put it in the trash or they call it.
Chris Badgett: So, there is a segment of this the Lifter LMS audience that creates training courses for real estate businesses. So, what I encourage you to press pause, listen to that again and then go take action on that tip. Because it’s a really good tip. What part of your methodology is PPC, but it’s also exploring channels. Can you elaborate on… we get our messaging dialed, we get our positioning right. We get our landing pages in, we scale through PPC. What is the channels part like the JVs and the dream 100 and these other things. What is that all about?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah, so there are like other channels that you can still pay for. So they are not organic. JVs is when you partner up with someone else and you give them an affiliate fee, so essentially, it’s still paid and what you can do, what usually works really well is sometimes agencies are providing a service, let’s say for software, sometimes they provide a service and then the software that my clients are selling [inaudible] So it just makes sense for them or to recommend it and get a commission.
Pedro Cortes: So that’s the kind of thing. For course creators, you can be, who’s already teaching something similar or something that overlaps and then you just say, Oh, you can get the profits without getting the work of creating another product. Or if you want to create another product, you can just test it without creating it and you’ll see the demand and everything. So, it’s the Davies and the dreamer 100 goes hand in hand. So dreamer 100 is basically a concept that comes from [inaudible] I think he died at 58 or something like 20 years ago. I don’t know.
Pedro Cortes: He was a very smart marketer and direct response guy. And basically what he did is, if you want to be like how many presents in your market and you want to dominate it, essentially make a list of the a hundred most influential people or channel [inaudible] you just divide that by four things. It could be podcasts, it could be newsletters, it could be consultants that you can JV with them and stuff like that. And then you just sponsor them.
Pedro Cortes: So, you can sponsor newsletters, you can sponsor podcasts. Because podcasts can get really specific and they also like way cheaper. So, you can reach like a ton of people for, let’s say 300 bucks an episode, and you reached like a ton of people and they are highly targeted and they have the recommendation from a person they trust. So, it’s way better than PPC. So, those are the kinds of things that you can do to get around with.
Chris Badgett: That is awesome. We’re getting towards the end. I just wanted to ask you a few more things. You’ve developed this skillset and this specialty and you’ve narrowed your niche and your focus. And I know you’ve done this before, like for clients or whatever and you’ve kind of as a coach or somebody who offers coaching and kind of done with your service, how did you… I’m trying to help the other people out there who are doing one on one consulting and they’re wanting to get into like a coaching done with your model. What advice do you have for just offering done for you to done with you kind of coaching style, offer? How did you make that transition? What tips do you have?
Pedro Cortes: So, essentially you’re going to take… this is not really that hard if you have a very well defined process. So, even when I was doing it by myself, I had like a very well defined process. So, essentially I just want to look at how can I teach my clients this? Why should I teach my clients this? Which person should I teach? How long would it take? And stuff like that. And in my case, because I’m teaching landing page messaging and stuff like that, I have like [inaudible] I will help them along with the calls and everything.
Pedro Cortes: So essentially, it’s very similar. And because I had templates on my website and alternative people checking out, pretty much 24/7. And I saw a couple examples that people did without all my help, then it just makes sense. So, the templates are there to where I can just help people out and pinpoint some things and they can do it just so they, especially on the positioning side, because the messaging, they can get a ride with all those templates. Does that answer your question?
Chris Badgett: That does, that’s brilliant. Well, just a couple just kind of lightning round questions. One of the neat things that I learned from you is about images in your book, which I highly recommend you can find that over on Pedro’s website, cortez.design, was about images, how to select images. What are people doing wrong with their images on their home pages and their landing pages?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, the image is first you define the copy. So, you define structure, what things need to need to come up first. And then you define the headlines first, you need to define the headlines first. So you can scroll through the website and just read the headlines and you understand everything. And then from whatever the headline says or whatever that section is supposed to do, because each section has a goal, it’s just choose an image that supports that headline.
Pedro Cortes: And if you come with abstract like illustrations and there was pretty stuff that are common nowadays. That is just going to be distracting from the actual headline. So, what do you want to do is just make it say exactly the same thing or you just one really good way to do it is sometimes with screenshots or [inaudible] really rough, let’s say you screenshot something on your Mac and then you have those arrows and then you write something in red or something that’s even better than just having obstruct illustrations.
Pedro Cortes: Let’s roll a thumb as is just defining the copy first and then putting an image that supports that the copy or a gift because the gift can tell. If an image can tell like a thousand words, a gift could tell you 10,000.
Chris Badgett: Another thing you said, which I really appreciate was stay the heck away from stock photography, which I thought was a good tip. A quick copywriting tip for an email subject line or a Facebook ad title or whatever, what’s a quick copywriting tip?
Pedro Cortes: I think a good practice is if you start with a question, because if you start with a question, the brain is kind of forced to answer it. And then there’re [inaudible] generators for copywriting that you can use. Essentially, just put like a program and the desired situation and then it generates a bunch of headlines that are really good and that have been testing in a lot of direct response ads and everything. But essentially, I think for these kinds of things, you just need to keep a swipe file and then you can just look at them and you get some ideas.
Pedro Cortes: But those headline generators are usually pretty good and you can say, usually the thing that I use as a question is, what if you could get like a desired results without your main program or your main objection? So that’s usually a really way to get people to click.
Chris Badgett: All right, two more rapid fire. What’s one action somebody could take today if they don’t actually know who their most profitable or best customer is or identify that, what should they do to figure that out?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, essentially you want to, the first question is who was like the fastest one to convert? If you have that data or something, who like didn’t even ask you questions and they just converted it right away? As you just kind of need to find that and who was investing the most before they bought your solution? So, let’s say if you find someone that I don’t know, maybe they were hiring someone. Let’s say you sell a course and they were hiring some agency or consultant or something. And they fired them and just follow your course. Why they did that, who did that and at what stage and stuff like that?
Pedro Cortes: This is like a very important process and it’s something that you’ll only get the answers after the followup questions. So, the thing about positioning is [inaudible] that has all of the questions. You only had the service level by yourself because you need to ask the followup questions. That’s always the hard part. So, if you’re giving me an example, maybe I can provide like a followup question. If you have an example.
Chris Badgett: Well, if we used our example of somebody who helps freelancers go from a hundred freelance website, builders go from 100,000 a year to a million, what should they… and they’ve got like a client list and a prospects list and they send an email and they say, “Why did you?” Well, I guess that’s the situation. And their question was, “Why did you choose to or why did you choose to work with me? Or why are you interested in possibly working with me?” What would the followup question be?
Pedro Cortes: I mean, first you kind of don’t ask that question because you’re just asking [inaudible 00:40:20]. So you’re going to say, how long did it take you to take a decision? What were you doing before you decided to purchase? And when was the tipping points to where you decided to get the solution instead. That answers like the question you wanted to ask? But is just gives you 10X more insights because it’s just going to get biased because when you ask me that, let’s say you were to ask that on my case, I would just say, it just felt right or something. That’s the answers you’re going to get.
Chris Badgett: Yeah. No, that’s great. I love that. And final rapid fire question, and this is another great insight I got from your book, which you can find over at cortez.design is, what message should people have right above where they present their pricing?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah. You saw that on the book or was that a question?
Chris Badgett: I think I saw it in the book, but like right before you position or how do you make your pricing, put your pricing in a good light? Like what’s sentence or small bit of copies should be there.
Pedro Cortes: Yeah. So, essentially, like before you show the pricing, you just try to anchor it and price and green just means you’re going to compare it to something else. So, your pricing seems like super cheap and that’s something that people don’t do all the time. So, with the course, it’s probably always time and money essentially. So, or you can, how many hours would it take if you just tried this process with trial and error instead of using a six week process with my course and you’ll get the results way faster or [inaudible] had three members of your team doing this thing for two months, and then you’re kind of get the same result as if you bought the cost.
Pedro Cortes: So, essentially you want to quantify that as much as possible and there’s going to be like 10X the price of the product and then it’s going to be like an O Breiner essentially. Or you compare it to other solutions. So, let’s say they have like a ton of different solutions at the same time. As they say, oh, do you want to hire copywriter? Let’s say you’re training companies to do some branding or improve their website or something. Do you want to hire a copywriter and then a designer and then an agency and then a developer? Or do you just want to teach your… let’s say teach a marketer how to do it and then they can do it like a billion times even if it doesn’t work out the first time and essentially have an asset instead of [inaudible 00:43:21].
Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Well, I really appreciate that Pedro, you’ve dropped a lot of wisdom today and if you’re listening to this and you have a software company, go check out cortez.design. Pedro, I also really appreciate and recommend which is getting on the phone with people, the right people, qualify your leads. But that’s somewhat surprisingly rare that you can do these days. So, it’s always cool to see somebody doing that. Any other final words for the people or anywhere else they should go to connect with you?
Pedro Cortes: Yeah, I guess you can just, if you have SaaS company, you can go ahead and book a strategy session. I’ll just jump on a call, analyze your problems and your goals and everything and make sure we’re good fit. If we are, then we can move forward. If we’re not, it’s not a big deal. And if you want to ask me a question [inaudible] you can just email me a [email protected]. So, it’s probably on website as well. And if you don’t know how to spell it.
Chris Badgett: Awesome. Well, thanks so much Pedro. Really appreciate it.
Pedro Cortes: Awesome. Glad to be on the show. Hopefully it was valuable for everyone.
Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMScast. I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I hope you enjoyed the show. This show was brought to you by LifterLMS. The number one tool for creating, selling, and protecting engaging online courses to help you get more revenue, freedom, and impact in your life. Head on over to lifterlms.com and get the best gear for your course creator journey. Let’s build the most engaging, results getting courses on the internet.
