Content Stategy from Start to Finish

 

 

Background

Felicia Pride came to me with the hope of upgrading and marketing her screenwriting course, The Creative Comeback. Pride is a screenwriting influencer famous for making it in the industry despite the odds being stacked against her as a black women in her late thirties (In her words, she was considered “ancient” in Hollywood.)

The general user profile consists of people who had “fallen off their creative wagon” at some point in their twenties or thirties and who wanted to return to the arts. Pride also specifically wanted to speak to people of color and other underserved communities.

Objective

Upgrade the Creative Comeback so that more people will finish the lessons and apply it to their lives. This means that the main priority for the course was to make it more engaging and easy to digest. From a marketing standpoint, our objective was to convey the value of the course and the effect it would have on learners’ lives. 

Challenge

 

Felicia Pride came to me with the hope of upgrading/re-designing the course content and building out a content marketing strategy for it. She knew it had value, but also knew the production of the course and the course platform weren’t optimal. She also felt that the language in the course branding wasn’t attracting the target audience.

Constraints

Measuring impact is always difficult. The main way we measured success was by tracking feedback, either by email to Pride or social media mentions. The Facebook group was also a fantastic way to see how we were doing. However, due to me being a bit greener at this time, I didn’t set up other metrics that could have given us a much better insight step-by-step on how we were doing.

The course had to be designed so that it didn’t require too much committment from Pride while at the same time meeting its objective of creating more impact. I would have liked to have had her be more involved in the Facebook group and to have had an active cohort system, where she could have been present for four weeks to help people get through the course in a linear fashion. I think mentorship was the missing key to getting people more active and involved.

Solution

 

Content Audit

I analyzed the course’s language, structure, and use of media to identify opportunities for improvement. While learners didn’t give us any specific feedback about what was and wasn’t working on the course, when we wrote email newsletter copy about the forthcoming upgrade and it including activities and videos, those who previously bought the course said that could be a game changer.

Voice

Adjusting the voice of this project was probably the single most important change that impacted its later success. Felicia’s core voice was confident and encouraging, but sometimes it became overly humble. I advocated rephrasing these parts of the course and most importantly, it’s marketing plan, to be more consistent.

When it came to the voice and how it was convenyed in marketing, Pride’s fear of sales came through and she would undersell the product. I analyzed how top course creators were selling their products and noticed that a more encouraging voice was working well – especially one with a mentor vibe like, “I have arrived, and this is how I got here.” I then advocated switching to this voice which I believe is why we increased our sales so much.

Pride later used this voice in her marketing materials for other projects and saw great success, especially in regards to her social profiles engagement which doubled. 

Course Homework + Weekly Charges

One of the most significant changes to this course involved adding homework and action items. Homework and “weekly charges” pushed the learners to engage more with the material, which goes back to our objective of creating impact.

The original course only featured questions in the body of the course, so I created printable pdfs to give the students a place to write down their responses to the questions they were asked throughout the course.

In addition to homework, students had a “weekly charge.” They were given three objectives to achieve every week. For example, we asked them to join a writing group in their area, attend a creative networking event, or work on a draft of their script.

Facebook Group

In order to REALLY ensure our learners/users were engaging with the course, I advocated starting a Facebook group. I put together weekly questions, Q &As, and, most importantly, asked users to report on their weekly charges.

The Facebook group was also a way for us to measure our impact on our students. We would also ask them if they had any concerns that the course didn’t address and this helped us add links to the resource section of the course.

Naming

The course modules were originally named according to track numbers, like “track 1”. I felt that this made the experience of scanning the course content clunky and difficult for learners to assess what they wanted to learn. I suggested renaming the tracks to one word that summed up their content, like “Commit” or “Create”. 

These one word module titles became especially important when students wanted to reference materials or promote the course on social media. Many of them would mention the course module names, such as “Commit”, when they discussed the course on social media. See pictures in the results section for examples.

Video production and editing

Today’s most successful online courses include video. Learners expect video and are often more likely to tune in if the lesson has a video. During the content audit, I identified that the course’s audio files weren’t high quality enough and also identified sections where video instruction would be better. I oversaw and directed the production of these new videos.

Readability (Platform Migration)

Pride’s course was originally hosted on Podia, but the platform wasn’t optimal for video and gave the feeling of a blog more than a course. Optimizing text for readability and adding GIFS and graphics to highlight core concepts was difficult. After thorough research, I decided to move the course to Thinkific where we had more formatting options.

I then built and edited the entire course to completion, including welcome pages and all email notifications sent to students.

Results

The course sold more in the first month after the upgrade than it did in the two-years prior. Learners routinely wrote heart-warming testimonials on twitter about how the course inspired them to write again and even get hired as screenwriters in Hollywood.