Why creating an offer first will help you create better content

Are you a course creator looking to take your content strategy up a notch? You might be surprised to find out that it may come down to one thing: an offer.

An effective offer can dramatically improve engagement in your content by creating a specific call to action and providing value. To show you how this simple tactic works, let’s look at why an offer could be the missing piece of your content strategy. Offers are often overlooked when creating content, yet having compelling offers in place as part of your strategy can have a huge impact on its effectiveness. With this blog post, we’ll explore why an offer should be the most important part to address even before your marketing plan, plus some tips for creating effective offers that meet these criteria: low effort with high value-for-cost ratio, can be delivered fast, and feel achievable. Let’s dive right in!

Here are the five core things that are crucial for driving your content strategy:

1. The importance of an offer before creating content

2. Understand the customer journey

3. How to incorporate customer feedback into your offer even if you have no clients

4. Use the problem solution framework

5. Optimize your offer with bonuses

The importance of an offer before creating content

Crafting a message that stands out in the sea of content is hard enough without confusing or overwhelming your audience. To ensure you stand out and make an impression, crafting a specific offer that captures your audience’s attention is important.

An offer gives specificity and clarity to your message, helping you stand out from the crowd and focus on meaningful outcomes for your customers. With an offer, you can capture the interest of new customers whilst also showing existing ones that you’re focused on delivering results.

Here are a couple of examples that demonstrate how addressing a common objection and including it as part of your offer will help inform some of your content strategy as well. We’ll take an example of a professional organizer whose biggest challenges are either price justification, motivation or accountability and time. An example of one component of a strong offer is overcoming the price objection by pointing out the cost savings their clients can experience after organizing their space – which could then go toward covering the course fee. This helps demonstrate tangible value for what could be seen as an investment and should help build trust with prospects as well as provide motivation to follow through with the service.

An another example of this is that working with a psychotherapist can often be an intimidating prospect, especially when it comes to facing the emotions that can arise from introspection. A common objection is overthinking and that most people don’t want to feel. One of the examples of a good offer from a psychotherapist will acknowledge this objection, and help clients to work through it by incorporating it in their course or offer by providing a resource that gives them a list of negative feelings along with examples and also incorporate how the offer covers a way for them to get your their fears of feeling using their neural chemistry, and showing them the process of a counter thought therefore reducing and unwiring the habit. A good offer in this case will be one that helps clients feel supported and empowered on their journey towards the outcome, instead of daunted by the process of self-discovery.

Understand the customer journey. 

You can do this by walking in your customer’s shoes and seeing their problems chronologically. Marketers refer to this as the customer journey, but not many explain what a ‘journey’ is. It is simply understanding where your people are before they take up your offer and stepping through all the objections they might encounter. This will help you understand the pain points they experience before reaching you and how you can help them overcome these issues.

To create a successful offer, you need to include and address the core needs of your customers. Ask yourself: why should the customer choose your offer over all other options? You might need to consider factors such as credibility, how it will benefit them, and the associated costs. What makes your offer better?

But better still, you must include and address every single objection that might come up for your customers by including it as part of your sales conversations, whether those are in a hosted webinar or one-one-one conversations. They must also be visible on a sales page if the primary way of getting customers is in an online setting. Asking yourself these questions can help you structure a compelling offer that will drive conversions from potential customers.

How to incorporate customer feedback into your offer even if you have no clients

If you’re looking to incorporate customer feedback into your offer but don’t have any clients yet, it can still be done! A great starting point is to begin with channels such as Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Reddit. Record the pain points customers are having by searching for high emotion keywords alongside your core offering.

E.g. One niche is ‘create content’, so I might search for the keyword (create content) + high emotion keyword (Frustrated) to see the language for the market related to what you offer – this will help you get a feel for which aspects of your offer should be adjusted or strengthened. Get your detailed messaging research guide as by taking the time for research, you are giving yourself a valuable head start in understanding the wants and needs of future customers. You can even use this knowledge to craft a more attractive future offer that combines learnings from market research as well as live customer feedback!

Using the problem-solution framework

Using the problem solution framework is an effective way to solve any issue that arises in the market.

By listing all of the objections that are identified during market research and one-on-one conversations, you can start to take a methodical approach to finding solutions. With this framework, you’ll be able to use some of your most creative approaches to reach a successful resolution. Plus, by keeping track of objections and solutions in one spot, you’ll be able to refer back to them as needed for future troubleshooting.

How to optimize your offer with bonuses

Optimizing your offer with bonuses doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult. High value items, such as bonus material or experience added at minimal cost and effort to you can make a real difference to customers and help your offer stand out from the rest. You can create bonuses that will increase the ease, speed or achievability of your offer and make sure it’s something people will keep coming back for. A few small changes could be the difference between merely meeting customer expectations and exceeding them – plus they don’t necessarily need to be complicated or expensive to achieve maximum impact.

To Sum Up

In conclusion, incorporating a compelling offer first before creating content can have a significant impact on the effectiveness of your content. It creates specificity and clarity to your message, helping you stand out and focus on meaningful outcomes for your customers. Crafting a successful offer requires understanding your target audience, addressing every objection that might come up, and incorporating customer feedback, even if you have no clients yet. By using the problem-solution framework, you can take a methodical approach to finding solutions and reach a successful resolution. With these tips, you can create an offer that is low effort, has a high value-for-cost ratio, can be delivered fast, and feels achievable, thus improving engagement in your content and driving conversions from potential customers.