There’s one main question that every course creator and online entrepreneur wants to know the answer to: how do I get more students and customers, more consistently?

A lot of people will tell you that this or that strategy is the answer. That you need to post on social media, or get featured in publications, or run ads, or run a launch, etc. But the truth is, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that is right for every single business owner. As I often remind my clients: where there is one strategy, there are hundreds, if not thousands, more. And the thing is, they all work.

What really matters, then, is that you’re choosing the strategies that align with your unique business model, financial goals, desires, priorities, and capacity. And that you’re doing so in a way that empowers a steady stream of clients, rather than relying on fits and bursts of momentum for momentary or fleeting results. 

Where a lot of digital-first service providers, coaches, and practitioners go wrong is that they are trying to get clients, students, or customers through siloed strategies rather than building a comprehensive Demand Generation System. I’ve already gone in-depth on what Demand Generation is and how to begin building your own system here on the blog, so do read that if you haven’t yet. 

As a brief reminder: your Demand Generation System incorporates your marketing, lead generation, and sales systems into one cohesive ecosystem that all works together to bring a steady stream of clients or customers into your work. There are four foundational components of a Demand Generation System: grow (how you attract new Right Fit people into your audience), nurture (how you ‘warm up’ your audience), identify (how you discern who is and isn’t a Right Fit, purchase-ready client), and invite (how you move Right Fit prospects into a purchase). 

You need to have all four of these components of a Demand Generation System in order to bring a steady stream of clients into your paid work. Overfocus on one or a couple and underfocus on others, and you’re going to find yourself consistently having to resort to hustle-y strategies to keep the cashflow coming in.

To give just one example: there’s been a lot of talk over recent years that, as a business owner and especially as someone selling courses, digital products, or even group programs you “have” to be marketing on Instagram. While content on Instagram can absolutely contribute to a steady stream of students and customers, it’s only ever going to play a part in a system that needs to be much more comprehensive than that. Your Instagram content, if created with virality in mind, could absolutely play a part in growing your audience. Most Instagram content is best at nurturing. But what about identifying prospects and inviting them into your paid offers? Sure, you might have a free resource that you promote in the comments—you might even have the automation set up where people can comment a word to receive a link in their DMs—and that free resource could even have an automated sequence that follows it, inviting people into your paid offers! But—and this is why building a comprehensive “ecosystem” of a Demand Generation System is so important, as opposed to building out your marketing, lead generation, and sales strategies as distinct silos of your business—does that freebie feel like a logical next step from the content this person just consumed? Therefore making it natural for the viewer to take that next step and get onto the email list?

Not to mention: does the actual topic of the content and the subsequent free resource you’re inviting them to sign up for attract a Right Fit, ready-to-buy client? Or does it attract a totally wrong fit person, who is nowhere near ready to invest in your services? I see this all the time especially with Reels that are designed in an attempt to go viral, because often what goes viral is relevant to a large subset of people—hence it going viral—and not at all tailored to speak exclusively to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client. Congratulations, you’ve just grown your audience, but it’s now full of the wrong people. This is how so many business owners end up with an audience they deem to be “freebie seekers” by the way: the content and messages that they’ve shared with the world aren’t attracting Right Fit, ready-to-buy clients. In many cases, they’re attracting people who aren’t even aware they have a problem that your paid work can and will solve.

All that to say: we need to create a comprehensive Demand Generation System in our businesses because it’s not only how we bring that steady stream of clients in, it’s how we make decisions about the strategies we’ll use to bring that steady stream of clients in. Without a comprehensive Demand Generation System, it’s so easy to get caught up in shiny object syndrome, where someone over there says you need to be doing ABC while someone else in that other corner of the internet says you need to do XYZ, and now you’re confused on which voice you should be listening to. 

You don’t want to keep relying on external voices to define how you do things in business. That’s not sustainable, and it certainly isn’t the smoothest and straightest path to achieving your goals and intended outcomes. You want to know what you need to do and how you want (or need!) to do it, and be able to tune out of any other voices that are ultimately only distracting you away from both of those truths. By the way, this ability to make informed decisions in your business, especially about the strategies you’re choosing to implement, is part of what I call having established a “CEO skillset,” and is one of the outcomes of our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND.

With all of that said, I hope it’s clear why exactly I harp on the necessity of building your own Demand Generation System. Let’s get into the ‘meat’ of this article, then.

Demand Generation for High Volume, Low Touch Business Models (e.g. courses, digital products, some group programs, etc.)

Since we’ve already covered what Demand Generation is previously on the blog, the purposes of this blog post you’re currently reading are to show you what a Demand Generation System needs to accomplish and might look like, practically, in a high volume, low touch business model such as a course or digital product model, some group coaching models, or other similar models. (Are you a done-for-you service provider, coach, consultant, or similar? I have a separate blog post that accomplishes the same aim, but for low volume, high touch business models like yours.)

Unsure what type of business model you have, or feel like your business doesn’t fit neatly into either end of the spectrum? Check out this blog post: How to Choose Your Business Model (plus, does it need to be scalable?)

Why have I separated out these articles based on business model? Because different business models require different things from their Demand Generation System. As just one brief example: high volume, low touch models (like course models) require a large emphasis on audience growth, whereas it would be entirely unnecessary for a low volume, high touch business model to focus the same amount on audience growth, because (it’s in the name!) they don’t need and/or literally cannot accommodate a large volume of clients.

Requirements for Successful Demand Generation in High Volume, Low Touch Business Models

Financial success—even just at a “sustainable” point, not even at an “exorbitant” one—in high volume, low touch business models depends significantly on how many people you have in your audience. I’ve seen a lot of online course creators starting out with even a few thousand or so people in their audience wondering why it’s so hard to make enough revenue to sustain themselves and their business, and it’s often—in part!—because their audience just isn’t big enough to make the level of sales they desire. If we assume that 3-5% of your audience converts into your offer/s—a typical “benchmark” data point to aim for, if you don’t have any reliable data yet of your own (though it’s often much higher in smaller audiences of newer businesses)—and you sell courses averaging $500 each, to make $100,000 in annual revenue, you’d need to make approximately 200 sales. Therefore I’d guesstimate that your audience needs to have at least 4,000-6,667 people in it (ideally this is your email list size, not social), and you’d want to keep growing it from there.

Obviously, if you have multiple courses and they all reliably facilitate results and you’re able to maximize your audience by selling multiple things to the same people, you could make more than that with an audience of that size. But what if you already have an audience of that size, and you’re not making anywhere near that amount of revenue? Well, this goes to the next two requirements of a Demand Generation System for high volume, low touch businesses: automation and assets, and AOM Alignment™.

Let’s start with automation and assets. When your business model requires you to make a significant number of sales in order to sustain let alone grow your revenue, you simply cannot be a live participant in every single sale. You’re not having sales calls, for example, with every single person who wants to buy a course from you. Instead, you need to create assets—such as sales pages, email sequences, freebies, etc.—that anyone can access at any time that serve as your “proxy” in the sales process. Additionally, to truly maximize your audience and make the number of sales you desire and/or need to, many of these assets need to be delivered automatically, often based on customer behavior. For example: someone opts in for a free training, that could be automatically followed up with an email sequence that provides a limited time discount to a corresponding course or digital product in your offer suite. Or: someone already on your list clicks a link to a blog post from one of your emails, they move into an automated sequence that gives them similar content and maybe also pitches a specific paid offer to them. The more automation that you can layer into every single component of your Demand Generation System—from audience growth and nurturing to identifying Right Fit prospects and inviting them into your work—the more successful your high volume, low touch business will be.

However, your assets and automations can only be effective when they are built on top of AOM Alignment. AOM Alignment is aligning your offers and messaging with the type of client you’re intending to attract, so that you can attract Right Fit prospects into right-for-them offers and reliably deliver the results through that work that you say you will. As discussed already, in high volume, low touch business models, a lot of your Demand Generation System will be automated. This means you don’t have the same opportunities as you would in, say, a face-to-face sales call to customize what you’re saying in real time based on the interaction you’re having with a prospect. Your assets have to be solid and able to independently move Right Fit prospects through them without intervention from you. Or at least, with very minimal intervention from you (e.g. you might choose to have a chat widget on your sales pages, so that people can easily reach out with questions if desired). 

Another reason why you need to have strong AOM Alignment in high volume, low touch business models is that you can sometimes run into more buyer hesitations—such as “will this work for me?” “is this actually what I need?” etc.—which can be mitigated, at least partially, by having a lot of positive customer feedback. How do you get lots of positive customer feedback? By reliably delivering on what you say you will, which, again, starts with building AOM Alignment.

By the way, all of this is why, in the Sustainable Success System, AOM Alignment comes before Demand Generation. The efficacy of your AOM Alignment in many ways determines the efficacy of your Demand Generation System!

The 4 Components of a Demand Generation System for High Volume, Low Touch Business Models

Now that we understand what a Demand Generation System for a high volume, low touch business model needs to succeed, let’s look at how you might shape each of the four components of your Demand Generation System. Typically when talking about Demand Generation, we talk about the four components starting with growth followed by nurture, identify, and invite since this is the order that a new client moves through. However, when we’re building a Demand Generation System, we actually want to start from the end and work backwards. This is because we need to know what you’re intending to move people toward before deciding how you’re going to move them there. 

Invite

The most common strategy for inviting prospective clients into your work in a high volume, low touch business model is a combination of a sales page and/or cart page alongside a sales email sequence. You also might occasionally choose to do a “pattern interrupt” strategy such as a flash sale (which may be automated based on a subscribers actions, or might be something that you simply set up for your entire audience at a specific time). 

As we’ve discussed, these assets are static and/or not delivered “live,” so they need to be able to effectively pitch your offer and address all buyer hesitations on their own. Unlike in low volume, high touch business models—where the invite strategy is often a sales call and therefore you could choose to not pitch to someone who is a wrong fit—these assets also have the job of preemptively filtering out anyone who isn’t a Right Fit client and filtering in anyone who is. (This is where solid AOM Alignment becomes so deeply necessary!)

Identify

If getting people to a sales page and/or cart page alongside a sales email sequence is your strategy for “invite,” then you need to have a way to move people to that sales page and/or get them into that sales email sequence. The most common way to do this is to offer a hand-raising opportunity (HRO) of some sort. Many people conflate HRO’s with a “freebie,” but HRO’s can be free or paid. Their key characteristic is that someone has to “opt in” for them, often by giving their email address, which allows the business owner to then initiate their invite strategy. HRO’s can also take many different forms, from being live—such as a 3-day challenge, or a live workshop or webinar—to being evergreen—such as a PDF guide, a mini-course, a prerecorded training, etc. 

If a HRO is your chosen “identify” strategy, then you’ll need to think specifically and strategically about where you’re promoting this HRO in order to get people to actually opt in for it. For one, it probably needs to be readily available on your website, and you might even choose to make your primary HRO for your primary offer—as, eventually, you’ll have an individual HRO for each or most of your paid offers—the main CTA on your website (e.g. “Start here”). You’ll probably want to also include links and/or invitations to it throughout relevant nurturing content (e.g. include an opt-in form for it in relevant blog posts) and occasionally directly promote it to segments of or your full audience (as is relevant). An advanced strategy would be running retargeting ads to the sales page, which would be shown to anyone who landed on the sales page but doesn’t purchase.

Nurture

In a high volume, low touch business model, the time you’re not spending in client sessions or on sales calls will largely be spent on marketing (or you’ll be paying in kind for someone else—or something else, such as by running Meta ads—to do it for you). 

Nurturing in this type of Demand Generation System can look lots of different ways, so long as it satisfies the requirement that you’re staying in touch with your audience with some sort of consistency. Additionally, the frequency that you need to be nurturing will depend on what the other components of your Demand Generation System looks like. If you have a pretty automated Demand Generation System where your audience is steadily growing (e.g. through ads) and content is going out all the time to subscribers, then your nurturing can simply be set up as part of that and you wouldn’t necessarily need to, let’s say, create a bunch of organic social media content. Whereas if you’re relying on organic social media to grow your audience and get people to opt into your HRO, you’d need to also do a fair amount of nurturing via organic social media posting in addition to any nurturing you might be doing post-opt-in. 

Some ways you might choose to nurture in a Demand Generation System for high volume, low touch business models are: regular email newsletter and/or nurturing email sequences, social media content, podcasting, YouTube, blogging, etc. You could also layer strategies on top of one another, e.g. by publishing a weekly podcast episode, running ads to that podcast episode to your warm audience (and maybe also a lookalike audience, for growth!), and including a pitch of your HRO in the episode description.

Ultimately, the important thing isn’t what specific nurturing strategy you choose, it’s that you are nurturing. The constancy of nurturing helps support your sales efforts by establishing trust and connection with your audience, so that when you do, say, a pattern interrupt like a live launch or flash sale, you’ve built goodwill with your audience and they’re more likely to step in or refer others to you.

Grow

Now that we know where you’re ultimately leading people, we can decide on an audience growth strategy. As a reminder, in high volume, low touch business models, you need a large audience in order to maintain steady inflow of revenue. Yes, you absolutely still want that growth to be targeted in the sense that you’re only attracting Right Fit prospects into your audience. But because you’re going for volume (and because you’ll hopefully also have some automated nurturing and inviting strategies happening!), there’s a bit less pressure to make sure that every single person who joins your audience is ready-to-buy, right when they join your audience.

You can therefore successfully utilize growth methods that cast a wider net, such as: ads, joint ventures, building an affiliate program, and/or other forms of collaborations (e.g. bundle or summit participation). You could also utilize various forms of search marketing (SEO on Pinterest, YouTube, or blogging) or organic marketing on social media platforms. Note that, especially in the more “evergreen” options (search marketing), you have to really ensure that the content you’re creating and keywords you’re focusing on attract a Right Fit client (e.g. you probably don’t want to spend a bunch of time creating YouTube videos only for those videos to attract people who aren’t at all interested in eventually buying from you). Finally, you may also look at things like podcast guesting, speaking, giving guest workshops or webinars, etc., but note that these will typically be slower growth strategies that bring smaller amounts of people into your audience at a time, compared to some of the previously mentioned strategies (such as ads).

Example Demand Generation Systems (inspired by my clients!)

I’ve given some broad ideas of what you might choose to do for each of the four foundational components of a Demand Generation System. For those of you who learn best by seeing real life examples, however, I have three separate client examples to share with you: a Demand Generation System for a couple of course and digital product creators. Note that while the goal of each Demand Generation System is broadly the same—create a steady stream of customers for their courses—they’ve each built their Demand Generation System based around their own unique audience, offers, as well as their personal priorities, needs, and desires.

Demand Generation for a Course Creator (not B2B)

This business owner sells a personal growth- and healing-focused course. She is newer in business and has one primary course to sell, and she has found so far that she enjoys giving live workshops as a way to introduce people to her work. She plans to eventually have other courses and HRO’s, but she’s keeping it simple right now. She also does not yet want to spend money on ads, so is primarily utilizing organic resources.

Here’s what her Demand Generation System looks like:

  • Grow: Organic marketing on Instagram, specifically, Reels with catchy topics and participating in (aligned) trends; collaborating with others in her industry (e.g. by going live together, or sending an invite to her HRO to their audience, etc.)
  • Nurture: Organic marketing on Instagram, giving a good mix of carousels or longer Reels for more in-depth information alongside her shorter/trendier content that’s more aimed at growth (mentioned above); weekly email newsletter
  • Identify: Monthly free or paid workshop on a different topic each month, which she invites her audience to via her email list and relevant nurturing content.
  • Invite: At the free or paid workshop, she pitches her course, sometimes with a bonus or discount attached for urgency.

As this business owner creates more courses, she’ll begin adding them into her current Demand Generation System as is possible. Such as by pitching a different course at the monthly workshop, or by putting people who have subscribed to her email list through an automated sequence that moves them through a series of nurturing, followed by relevant invitations into courses, and repeat.

Demand Generation for a Course Creator (B2B)

This business owner has multiple courses and a group coaching program that are primarily built for other business owners. They are very well established in business and really enjoy writing. You’ll notice that their Demand Generation System is multifaceted and they’re layering several strategies on top of one another to maximize each audience touchpoint. 

Here’s what their Demand Generation System looks like:

  • Grow: Meta ads (to a free PDF guide)
  • Nurture: Weekly email newsletter to full list; Weekly podcast episode, in which they include an invitation to opt in for a free training—upon opt in, subscribers are given a tripwire offer (an invite strategy); Various automated nurturing sequences throughout entire funnel, in between promotional sequences
  • Identify: Free PDF guide (promoted via ads) as well as various other HRO’s available on their website; twice-yearly “pattern interrupts” such as a live launch
  • Invite: Promotional email sequences throughout entire funnel and following most individual HRO’s; Sales page for each course; occasional “pattern interrupts” such as a live cohort of one of their programs or a flash sale

Get Started Building Your Demand Generation System as a Course Creator, Coach, etc.

No matter where you are in business, whether you’ve never sold a single course/digital product or you’ve been successfully selling for years now, you want to begin building your Demand Generation System. However, how much of it you build and how systematized and automated you make each part is going to differ depending on how solid your offer suite and messaging already are. 

Either way, you’ll want to start by outlining your whole Demand Generation System. Note that the choices you make about your Demand Generation System at this initial stage are, at best, an informed hypothesis about what might work. The further you are in your business journey, and the more established your business is, and the more business-building acumen you have, the more informed that hypothesis is going to be. If you’re pre-revenue, hopefully you’ve at least built up some business-building acumen, but naturally, you’re going to know less about what strategies are going to be right for you. That’s ok! My reminder to you would be: we all start somewhere, and we all have to take the journey to learn the things that we need to learn to accomplish the things we want to accomplish.

Choose one primary strategy for grow, nurture, identify, and invite, remembering that everything needs to ultimately lead toward that final step. It’s likely that if you’ve already been working to get students and customers, you are already doing things that fall within each component of the system. You may wish to jot down each of those and then assess how effective they are, and choose one primary strategy for each based on that (while ensuring that your chosen steps naturally work in tandem with one another!).

Then, once you’ve chosen those strategies, you’ll want to begin implementing each strategy (which may look like refining what you’re already doing or doing something completely new to you!) one at a time. “One at a time” is going to look different depending on all sorts of factors—including your experience using that strategy, your current capacity, etc.—but the real key is that you’re not trying to instantaneously implement an entire optimized system overnight. Not only is that impossible, attempting to do so would almost certainly make everything you’re doing less effective in the short term (because you’re not giving each piece the attention it needs to be successful) and in the long term (because you’re not gaining the intel and data that comes from an incremental implementation plan). 

“Did I choose the right strategy? What if it doesn’t work?”

One question I see online business owners asking a lot is, “How do I tell if I’ve chosen the right strategy/ies for each component of my Demand Generation System?” or “How long do I give something before I determine it isn’t going to work and I try something different?” The answer to this is multifaceted. 

First, my biggest recommendation to all of my clients is to start with what they actually want to do. I know, I know, that goes against most advice in this online business world, but you have to remember: I’m in the business of equipping you to build real, lasting Sustainable Success. The vast majority of my clients are going to be solopreneurs or business owners with very small (<5 people) teams, and they plan to be in business for the long-haul. This means that ultimately, they have to actually enjoy—or at least be able to tolerate—what they’re doing for a very long time. 

At the same time, we have to recognize that nothing in business is going to be something you enjoy doing all of the time. Every single strategy you could choose is going to have tradeoffs, so the question becomes more of: what tradeoffs are you willing to make? Not only that, but there might be things that you could genuinely enjoy, but you need to do some inner work around it first. The biggest example of this is social media: so many people claim to hate being on social media for their business, and yet, when we really dig into what’s happening to make them hate it, it’s not social media they hate, it’s some aspect of what social media represents to them (which brings up a fear response, and therefore very intense resistance to using social media for their business).

From there, we ask the question, “Now how do I make this work?” This is where things get fun! (If they weren’t already!) You take whatever strategy it is that you’ve chosen, and you begin bringing it to life using all of the business-building acumen you’ve hopefully already established. You’ll then implement your first iteration of it, through the process taking note of what you like and dislike about it, as well as what is working and isn’t!

Finally, you make adjustments to the strategy based on what you’ve learnt, and you go implement it again! Each time you implement it, you learn from it, and with each thing that you learn, you refine your strategy to make it even more enjoyable and effective the next time.

This is why I often feel that questions like the ones I posed above—”How long do I give something before I determine it isn’t going to work and I try something different?”—aren’t always the right question to be asking. Typically people are asking these types of questions because they’re doing the exact same thing, over and over, and not seeing any results from it. Or, on the other side of things, they tried doing something once and it didn’t work (sending one email inviting people to check out your new free training is not “trying something”!). If you’ve been doing the same thing over and over, without checking in with what you like/dislike about it and what seems to be driving results or not, then you’re not really implementing correctly. You’re implementing to check a thing off your to do list, not implementing to actually experiment and figure out what works. 

The classic example of this is posting on social media. Let’s say that you have a low volume, high touch business model—the opposite of what those of you reading this current blog post have!—and you’ve decided to post on social media 5 times per week as your nurture-leading-to-identify strategy (meaning: you’re using social media to nurture, but you’re also using each post to invite people to book a sales call). We’re also going to assume that you’ve already built out AOM Alignment, and know how to create messaging for your offers that speaks directly to your Right Fit client. If you don’t already have that, then you need to start there before you really dive into Demand Generation, because any Demand Generation can only be effective when done on top of strong AOM Alignment. 

With every single post you create, you’re ideally also taking note of how you feel about the content you’re creating and whether you feel you’re successfully speaking to a Right Fit client. From that intel alone, you’ll begin to make your content even better, because you’ll be learning with every single post about how to better talk to your Right Fit client/s. After a month or so of consistently doing this, maybe you still haven’t booked a single sales call. However, because of how much you’ve practiced, you feel even more confident in your ability to speak to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client. That would tell me that it’s probably worth it to keep trying with this same strategy, because it’s likely that that first month of you really focusing on implementing this strategy was you “finding your sea legs” and you’ll now more consistently be better at speaking to your intended target audience.

Over the next month, you’re going to continue refining based on the results you are (or aren’t!) seeing. Remember that those results are both internal results—like your confidence that your content is speaking to the Right Fit person—and external results—like how many sales calls you book, but also taking note of other data points as you’ve determined are relevant (which you’ll decide when you initially design your Demand Generation System). Be mindful of the data that you watch and question what you initially assume it means. For example, you could be losing followers during this process, which you might initially assume to mean that you’re doing something wrong. And you don’t want to rely on this one data point—”I’m losing followers”—you want to look at multiple before you make decisions. Namely: if you’re feeling more confident in your ability to speak directly to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy client, that could mean that the followers you’re losing are actually your content working because it’s filtering out wrong fits from your audience.

Ok, we’re now at the end of month two. You’re still watching yourself and taking note of the internal and external results. But what if you still haven’t booked a single sales call, even though you can feel the difference in how effectively you’re speaking to your Right Fit, ready-to-buy people? This is where we might start to look more deeply at the strategy itself, though not in the sense of, “Is it time to get rid of this?” but more in the sense of, “How can I set this strategy up to be best-positioned to succeed?” The answers to that question are going to be different in each business, but it could mean that you need to revisit your messaging for your offer/s, or audit your content to ensure it actually is speaking to who you intend it to be speaking to, or even that your audience on this platform is presently too small and you’d need to rely on a different—typically less sustainable over the long-term—strategy to bring clients in sooner, while building this audience up. We’d also want to double check that your implementation of the strategy isn’t suffering because of you spreading yourself too thin in your business or out of it, and, if we find that you are, we’d want to address that by looking at where we can simplify things across your business and/or within this strategy, as well.

Now, if you were to hate implementing this strategy more and more every day—independent of the external results it is or isn’t bringing—that’s when we might look at a different strategy for you. But as long as it’s something tolerable or even enjoyable—again, not influenced by the external results it is or isn’t bringing—it’s often worth it to keep going there, but to continually refine what you’re doing based on what you’re learning at each step.

The key in all of this is to remember: every strategy can work. There is no “one right strategy” to choose. Flitting from one strategy to the next is often what makes it seem like no strategy will work. You simply need to continue experimenting, learning, and refining based on what you’ve learnt to make your implementation of the strategy even more effective.

An Invitation to Go Deeper

When I lead clients through the process of designing their own Demand Generation System—like I do inside of our comprehensive business training program, EXPAND—we typically start by outlining their entire Demand Generation System. As part of that, we audit what they’ve already been doing and make immediate decisions about how to simplify and streamline their current efforts. During this initial stage, we’ll also decide what KPIs (key performance indicators) we can watch to track the efficacy of your chosen strategies. 

From there, we’ll typically do a tune up of their current nurturing strategy, for the simple fact that we’ll want them to continue nurturing as they later build and implement their identify and invite strategies. But also, often by fixing their nurturing strategy to ensure that it’s speaking directly to Right Fit, ready-to-buy students and customers, they see a quick influx of new customers into their offer/s (mostly people who have been in their audience for a while, love what they’re doing, but only now feel like the business owner is speaking directly to them).

That momentum helps to then sustain the business owner as they begin building out and implementing their identify and invite strategies. I encourage my clients to implement both several times before we go back to their nurturing strategy and begin systematizing it. I make this recommendation because you learn so much from your identify and invite strategy that you can then use to make your nurturing approach even more effective. If you have multiple courses and digital products, I’ll also typically recommend that you get really good at your identify and invite strategy one of them before you start trying to create an identify and invite strategy for all of them. Taking it offer by offer allows you to learn what an identify and invite strategy actually needs to look like for your offers to sell successfully, and then you can much more efficiently create an identify and invite strategy for other offers after that.

Finally, we end with their growth strategy. We end here for the fact that when you start growing your audience, you want to be able to have systems set up for those people to go into so that the people who are already ready-to-buy can jump straight in, and the people who aren’t quite there also have that ongoing nurturing system that primes them for that purchase later on. 

I’m so excited to be running a 9-month live cohort of EXPAND starting February 2025. Building out and implementing your unique Demand Generation System—on top of effective AOM Alignment, of course!—is one of the core outcomes you can expect when you join the cohort. Applications are open now, so head over and apply today. Let’s set your business up for real, lasting Sustainable Success in 2025!

Want more posts like these? I send them out most weeks to my email list; get on the list in the form below.

Handy Links:

Carly Jo Bell of WholeCo Media - Headshot@2x

hey!

I’m Carly Jo Bell.

(Though you can just call me Carly.)

Carly Jo Bell is a business strategist and mentor, and fonder of Whole Co media. Through her courses and programs, podcast, and one on one coaching, Carly helps pulled-in-every-direction entrepreneurs create a business that brings in as much joy as it does revenue — by cultivating deep self trust, and solid foundations as the first step.

For more from Carly, and to learn about her signature “looking external for inspiration, and internal for answers” approach, join the conversation by signing up for her weekly email series, Carly's Couch.

Sustainable Niching for Online Service Providers & Practitioners - blog post by WholeCo Media

Sustainable Niching for Online Service Providers & Practitioners: How to Niche Without Limiting Your Audience & Business

A note on what to expect from WholeCo during this political climate - by WholeCo Media

A Note on What to Expect from WholeCo During This Political Climate

Business Foundations vs. Strategies - by WholeCo Media

Business Foundations vs. Strategies: What You Really Need to Create Long-Lasting Sustainable Success

Demand Generation for Low Volume, High Touch Business Models, including service providers, coaches, and consultants with 1_1 or group programs - blog post by WholeCo Media

How Service Providers and Coaches Get More Clients, More Consistently (Demand Generation for Low Volume, High Touch Business Models)