How To Run A Group Program When You Have No Audience

A group program is your ticket to freedom and an easy avenue to go. In a coaching program, you need many people to sell it to, but how can you sell it to people when you are a startup with no audience? Today, Kendra Perry talks about how coaches can run a group program when they have no audience. She explains the value of the “No Launch Launch” and leveraging your networks in enrolling people into your program. She also added that the best way to launch depends on your price point and what you offer. So, what are you waiting for? Join Kendra as she dives deeper into running a group program today.

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How To Run A Group Program When You Have No Audience

It is mid-January 2024. Our snow situation is still not great. Unfortunately, we have had a total crap season for snow. It’s bad. Truthfully, every ten years, we have a season like this. I remember the 2014 and 2015 winters were similar to this. It was bad all winter. There were very few powder days and it just happens. I’m trying to embrace it even though I hate it but it’s a good time to go to Mexico. I’m going to Mexico. I leave on Friday the 19th, 2024.

I’m pretty excited about that because my parents go down to Mexico. They spend about six weeks in the Baja every year. My dad’s into kitesurfing and my brother goes down too. He’s into this thing called winging. You’re up on this foil and you have this wing that’s not attached. It’s a mecca for that. There’s this little town. It’s very small and rural. It’s called La Ventana. It’s this kitesurfing mecca. My parents go down there for about six weeks every year. In 2023, they ended up buying this 26-foot trailer because there’s this little trailer park on the ocean where essentially all the kite surfers stay.

My brother goes and gets it out of the storage in the fall. He was there for October and November 2023 and got it out of storage. He lives in the trailer. My brother is borderline retired. He was previously an engineer at a very normal job but got out of that. He runs conferences or events around the world for cryptocurrency companies. It’s super random. He has a lot of time off and he makes good money when he does run these events. He was down there. He came up here for Christmas 2023 and then he’ll be down there from January to March 2024, living the dream in Mexico.

I’ve been down there before in 2017 Christmas. That was a while ago. It’s a lot more built up and there’s a lot more going on but I like it because it’s low-key. There are some good restaurants. It’s not exactly like a beach location because it’s windy. It’s not like a place you go and hang out on the beach but I’m not a hangout on the beach type of person. I booked a room in this little hotel, like a boutique hotel that’s about 1 kilometer down the road from the trailer park. I’m going down for a week.

Initially, when I was going, I invited Ryan. If you’ve ever seen him on my Instagram stories, he’s a ginger. He has red hair. The sun is not his friend. He doesn’t usually get excited about hot places. Originally, he was not into it. Over time, he felt a bit guilty because my parents loved him and they were a bit disappointed he wasn’t coming. With this ski season not happening and the lack of snow over Christmas, he was like, “Maybe I should come.” I was like, “I’m going to book you a flight on point.”

I booked him a flight on my Avion points and got him a flight. We are not on the same flight. I got a direct flight because I’m going to fly down my mountain bike. There’s some mountain biking around there, which is going to be fun. It’s not life-changing but it’s something to do because I’m not a kite surfer and I’m probably not going to get into it at this point, maybe in the future. I don’t want to fly with my $5,000 mountain bike if there’s a stopover because I don’t trust the airline. I have a direct flight, which is great but to book on my points, I wasn’t able to get Ryan on the same flight as me.

He is going through Vancouver. It’s good because we arrive at the same time. He just leaves earlier than me. He leaves at 6:00 AM, which sucks, and I leave at 10:00 AM. Coming back, we leave at the same time. He goes through Vancouver so I get in at 8:00 PM and he gets in at 11:00 PM. I’m excited he’s coming. That’ll be fun. I almost wish I was going for longer than a week. Things aren’t happening up here but I could always fly back down. I have the time and it’s not super expensive but it’ll be nice to get some sun, do some biking, and hang out with the family. It’s going to be good.

Group Coaching Programs

For this episode, we are talking about group coaching programs, which if you’re new here, I love group coaching programs. Group coaching programs are my absolute favorite. I use them in my business. What I also teach my students to do is launch group programs. Think they are your ticket to freedom. Like a lot of other coaches, I started my business doing one-on-one coaching. Honestly, when you’re new to starting, it’s an easy avenue to go because you’re still learning how to sell, copy, and do social media. When you launch a group program, you need more people to sell it to because you’re trying to get more people enrolled in it.

I started with one-on-one coaching but I always knew I wanted to go the one-to-many route but I didn’t know how for a long time. I had to have a little bit of trial and error before I finally was able to launch one. Truthfully, if you are maybe a therapist or counselor, functional medicine doctor, or something like that, you might be in the model of booking one-hour sessions where someone books in for an hour and then you’re with the next client. That’s common if you’re something like a therapist, a counselor, or a Chinese medicine doctor because that would be the business model that you were taught in school.

Maybe you’re an unlicensed health coach and that seems easier. Maybe that’s the business model you’ve seen represented out in the world so that’s what you’re doing. Truthfully, the one thing I didn’t like about one-on-one coaching was that I was on my computer all day. I didn’t have a lot of freedom. Once my schedule was set, that meant that I was going to be in 15 to 20 one-on-one appointments. Honestly, I felt quite exhausted with it. I’m very introverted. It was a lot of energy for me to deal with throughout the day.

In my business with group coaching programs, 3 times a month I show up for a 90-minute group coaching call. In terms of coaching calls, that’s all I do. I love that because what that means is the rest of my calendar is open. That’s not to say I’m not working. I do work, although the hours I work vary significantly depending on the season. I have the flexibility to do those things when I want to do them. Usually, what I’m doing outside of group coaching calls is working on campaigns, creating content, and writing sales copy. I’m working on the promotional side of the business.

What’s great is these group coaching calls that I show up for about once a week is I have a lot of energy for them. I feel excited and they energize me versus when one-on-one calls used to drain me. I believe that group coaching is your ticket to freedom. A lot of people know this or see this, or they want a group coaching program but some people don’t have an audience. The reason you might not have an audience is that a lot of our students are therapists, counselors, Chinese medicine doctors, and some licensed health professionals. They have a brick-and-mortar practice. They want to do an online group coaching program but they haven’t made the jump into online.

Online is so different from brick and mortar. You can’t even compare the two. Therefore, they don’t have an audience or maybe you are someone who’s been able to get a lot of referrals. You get referrals from other practitioners or maybe you have some relationships going on. You don’t have an online presence. You’ve been able to do things that way. Perhaps you’re newer and you haven’t had the chance to build an audience yet.

What I will say is that if you want a group coaching program, you do need an audience to sell to. There is a way that you could potentially launch a group program without having an audience. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. What people don’t realize is the level of audience you want to launch a group coaching program. Something that people don’t learn when they come to a business is standard conversion, which means conversion is the number of people you convert into a paying client.

With what we’re talking about, people will think, “I have an audience of 100 so I should be able to get 20 people into a group coaching program.” That’s not generally the case. The conversion can run about 1% to 5%. If you have 100 people on your email list, you might be able to convert 1 to 5 of those. If you got 5, you could run a group coaching program with 5 but if you got 1, that’s not exactly a group coaching program. Understanding that conversion is important.

No Launch Launch

What do you do if you don’t have an audience? There’s something that I call the no-launch launch. What this is, is you offer your program to your personal and professional networks and/or past clients. What this is you’re not doing a formal launch. You don’t have an audience but there are people in your networks who you believe might be interested in being a part of your program. You don’t need to do anything fancy. You don’t need a launch plan, a webinar, or write a bunch of emails.

All you need to do is reach out personally to these people who you believe might be interested, give them a detail, and ask if they’re interested. If they are, you can enroll them in the program. This is the way that I first launched HTMA Expert. If you aren’t familiar with HTMA Expert, it’s my course that teaches practitioners how to interpret hair tissue mineral analysis. I knew I wanted to launch this course. I’d wanted to do it for a while but I wasn’t sure about the interest.

I’ve talked about this a little bit before but in the first three years of having my business, I also worked for Functional Diagnostic Nutrition, which is a certification training program for functional lab testing. I started with them as a course mentor. I eventually moved on to developing their postgraduate membership. I worked for them for three years so I was always very connected with health coaches. While I was working for this program, that’s also when I learned how to interpret hair tissue mineral analysis. I was the only one in the company who knew how to interpret it.

I ended up doing clinical consults for it. They had this program within the company that allowed you to order all these different labs. With those labs, when your results came in for your client, you could book a clinical consultation with one of the clinical advisors. I became a clinical advisor for hair tissue mineral analysis for that company. When I stopped working for the company, and this was a year after I stopped working for the company, I knew I wanted to launch this program.

Since I didn’t have an audience, I wasn’t making content, I had nothing. I wasn’t doing anything for this program. I reached out to everyone who had ever booked a clinical consultation with me through FDN and who had ever asked me questions or expressed interest. I leveraged my professional networks. I started reaching out to people. I said, “I’m thinking of running this six-week program to teach you hair tissue mineral analysis. We’ll probably start this date.” Gave them a few details.

“If I were to run this, would you be interested?” Overwhelmingly, people were like, “Yes.” Once I had the buy-in from people, I came up with a start date and followed up with those people. I said, “Here’s the link to sign up. This is the deadline. This is when we’re starting. Hope to see you there.” I ended up having a huge no-launch launch. I ended up making around $30,000, which blew my mind because I didn’t expect that. I was hoping to get $10,000 to $15,000 and I ended up getting $40,000 or $45,000. I can’t even remember. It ended up being very successful.

I didn’t have an audience at the time. All I did was take advantage of the people I already knew. For example, maybe you’ve been a clinical counselor for twenty years or something like that. You have all that client list. All the people who have booked in with you. You should have those email addresses. What I would do is send out an email to all those people and say, “Thinking of launching X, Y, Z program, it’s going to look like this. This is like the basic outline. If you’re interested, reply and let me know.” See if you get any interest because if you get enough interest, then there’s a good chance you might be able to launch without having to launch. Do this no-launch launch and leverage those networks.

That can be a great way to run a group program when you have no audience. This is something that I teach my students. If this is available to you, then use it. Don’t be afraid to reach out to go through your Facebook friends. Scroll through the list of your friends on Facebook and see, “Would any of these people be someone who might be interested in my program?” Don’t be afraid to do that. That can be effective and that can help you run your first round of your group program while you build an audience for your next launch. To run a group program, you need at least five. If you got 3, 2, or 1, I would still run it. Ideally, you get 5 to 10, and maybe you’ll get a little more. That’s a great number to run your first group program.

Build An Audience

What happens if you either know like, “I don’t have any networks,” fine, or maybe you reach out and you don’t get any interest? That’s a possibility and that’s fine. This isn’t a method that is going to be available to everyone. It depends on where you came from, your past, and your past professional experience. If that’s not an option, then you will need to build an audience. There are essentially two ways you can go about doing this. You can do organic, which is things like social media, or you can do paid ads.

I prefer a combination of both. Why is that? Organic marketing can take time. It depends. Maybe you rock your Instagram, you do a good job of creating content, and you have a big following. Maybe you have 10,000, 20,000, or 30,000 Instagram followers. Put those people on a waitlist. Have your primary call to action for your content to be on the waitlist for your group program. For a lot of us, social media growth is slow. Usually, we are going to need more. This is especially true if you are newer and starting and you’re starting from zero. It can take a long time to build an audience.

You might be wondering, “When you say to build an audience, how many people do I need in my audience?” When I say audience, I am talking about email lists. The best place to launch a group program is always going to be your email list. The reason for that is that it’s just not reliable to launch on social media. A very small portion of your people see your stuff on social media and it’s not reliable. You don’t have a great ability to follow up. When it comes to sales, the money is always in the follow-up. You can’t guarantee that your followers are going to see your content.

You can launch on social media but I would never launch on social media alone. I would always have an email list. This is where I make all my money, through email marketing. Think if only 1% of people see your Instagram content, that’s a crappy stat. On an email list, you can get an open rate as high as 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% and beyond. I like those numbers a lot better. When I talk about the audience, I’m always talking about your email list.

The ideal number to be able to launch a group program is probably 500 but you could do it with as low as 200 or 300. It depends on the quality of that list. Who is on that list? Maybe you’ve been out there, you’re established, you’ve been running your business for a while but you haven’t had a clear and solid niche. You’ve been helping everyone and then you’ve decided to niche down into migraines or something like that. There’s a good chance that those people on your email list don’t all have migraines. There might be some people but that is not a targeted email list. I would build 300 to 500 targeted people who have migraines and have opted in for migraine-related content. This is important.

I would say 500 is ideal but we’ve had people launch with as low as 300 but honestly, more is better. Those need to be targeted. If your program is about fatigue, you need to have some free resources specifically about fatigue that encourage people to join your email list. You only want people on your email list who are looking to solve their fatigue. The reason why I prefer using a combination of both is because social media is free and it can be very effective so why not get leads for free? Ads will help it happen quicker because for some people, to get 500 people on their email list through organic social media alone could take them 1 year or longer than 1 year. Do you want to wait that long to launch your group program and start helping people? Probably not.

If you’re willing to put some money behind it, you could get that 500 within a few months. You just need to do a little bit of nurture and then you can launch. The good news with things like Facebook and Instagram ads is that the cost per lead is still cheap in health and wellness. When I say the cost per lead, it’s the cost to acquire a subscriber. In my space in B2B, I pay more than your industry in B2C as a health coach. That’s good news for you because you might be able to spend a few thousand dollars and you might be able to get that 500 on your email list.

Price Point And Offering

In terms of the best ways to launch when you have that audience, it depends on your price point and what you’re offering. If you have a lower price point for your group program and a longer length of a program, maybe you’re doing a 6-week group coaching program, 90 days, or something like that, you might be able to launch with an email campaign only. You have your open cart and closed cart. You send out a series of emails over a certain number of days. If you’re launching at a higher price point, more likely you’re going to need an event, something like a webinar, a challenge, or something like that.

There are a lot of different types of events you can use to launch. I prefer a webinar, although I do challenges as well. If it’s your first time launching a program, I would keep it simple. The first time I ever decided to launch a group coaching program, I decided to do a five-day challenge with a webinar on the fifth day. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was so ignorant. It was so much work and was insane. I don’t think I realized how much work it was. For the first launch, I did so much work for myself. In the end, I didn’t even make that many sales, which is a whole nother story. I would recommend having a good webinar.

That’s an hour of your time. It is going to take you time to build a webinar. Usually, if I’m building a new webinar, it will take me about a month of working on it, that’s me working on it as often as possible so maybe 2 to 3 days. That could be a great way to help sell your program. If you aren’t confident that you’re going to get the signups that you want, there’s something you can do called pre-selling. This is something I also did with an HMTA expert. I hadn’t built the entire program before I sold it. The reason why this is effective is because it allows you to make money and pre-validate your offer with HTMA Expert.

I did the no-launch launch. I was able to run it by leveraging my professional networks but still, I wasn’t quite sure how many people were going to sign up. What I did was create an outline and a basic sales page for the program. It was a couple of weeks out so I sold it, and then the start date was a couple of weeks out. If you remember me saying, I made $30,000 enrolling 40 to 50 students. I can’t exactly remember now. I made $30,000 and I got to create this program. What I did was create the first module and then run it. I created each module week by week. It was busy. I ran this program over six weeks. I remember that we had training and Q&A on Tuesdays. Every Monday, I would spend the whole day making the PowerPoint presentation for that upcoming Thursday.

Was it a little bit stressful? Yes, it was a lot of work but what that allowed me to do was prove that this is something people wanted to buy. This is only going to work with a cohort sell program, something that has a start date and an end date. This is one of my favorite ways to sell a program. It’s also what I did for the Health Coach Accelerator. I sold it before I had the entire thing made. I feel that it’s the safest and least risky way to sell something because I learned my lesson early on.

The first course that I tried to sell was called Hormone Power. I created the whole thing in advance. It took me six months. It was an obscene amount of work. When I tried to sell it, I wasn’t able to sell it. That was demoralizing. I was upset about that. It taught me that it’s never a good idea to create the whole thing before launching it, especially if you’re not sure. If you’ve been out there for a while, you’re very established, maybe you’ve been in your niche for a while, and you have a good clientele and audience, then I don’t think you necessarily need to pre-sell, although it’s still not always a bad idea because it allows you to get something out there quickly rather than having to wait all the time it takes to create something.

It can be a good strategy regardless of what level you’re at. If you’re in a new niche and you’re unsure, I recommend pre-selling because if it doesn’t sell, then you’ve only created the outline in the first module. There’s not that much skin off your back versus doing what I did and spending six months creating something that ultimately nobody buys. That is what I would do. If you don’t have an audience, see if you can leverage your professional networks or past clients. Maybe there are people on your email list, in your audience, or on your Instagram who you could simply personally reach out to and ask if they’re interested.

Regardless of where you are in your business, this is something that you should pursue because it’s easy. It doesn’t take a lot of effort. Planning a formal launch with a webinar, registration emails, an opt-in page, and sales emails is a big deal. It takes a lot of time. It’s time-consuming. I always do things simply, how can I make this simple? We often make things way more complicated than they need to be. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I will see you next time, same place, same time where I help you become wealthy AF.

Important Links

• HTMA Expert