Dr. Destini Copp is a marketing consultant with more than 25 years of experience in marketing and online education and host of The Course Creator’s MBA podcast.
More than 3,700 online entrepreneurs use her time-saving templates, swipe files, and marketing training to help them grow their online business.
What is your business all about?
I help entrepreneurs, coaches, and experts in their field package their expertise or coaching services into an online course so they can help more people.
For example, let’s assume that your secret sauce is helping people learn how to paint with watercolor. You’re limited in the number of people you can help with your face to face painting classes. With an online course, you can take your expertise online and help thousands of others how to paint with watercolor.
We place most of our focus is helping course creators sell their online course. It can be easy for experts to create the course, but much more difficult for them to find their perfect students.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
First, I want people to know that they can pivot many times during their life. I earned a B.S. degree in accounting from Clemson University, but only worked in accounting for 1 ½ years. I started working in corporate marketing and moved up to a Director of Marketing after a few short years.
I got burned out by the corporate grind fast and decided early in my career that I wanted to do something different. Since I have always loved teaching and coaching, I went into teaching marketing at the university level, specifically teaching online. This was when online courses at the university level was just getting started. I did that for several years, starting as an adjunct faculty and moving up to an Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs where I had around 1,000 remote, virtual faculty reporting to me.
After working at the university for over 10 years, I was starting to get an itch again. I had always wanted to own my own business, so I quit my job and started my online business.
I wanted to combine my experience in marketing and creating online courses so that’s how I got started serving my niche and I’ve loved it ever since!
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
The #1 skill needed by a successful entrepreneur is to be a continual learner. I’ve been interviewing successful course creators for an interview series for my podcast and the one thing that has stuck out to me is the ones who are successful are the ones that are continually learning either from past mistakes or just educating themselves on business and marketing skills.
But, to be honest, I think this is a skill that needed by everyone no matter what their profession. If you need to improve your writing and grammar skills, find a course or book, and learn. If your spreadsheet skills need to be improved, go to Google, find some free courses, and take them. Successful entrepreneurs are continual learners, I don’t care if they’re running a $1 billion a year firm or a $100K a year company.
Another skill that a successful entrepreneur has is the ability to know when to get help. Whether if this is asking a trusted business friend for advice or hiring a coach. We all have weaknesses and don’t have all the answers on every single issue that comes across our desk so asking for help and advice is a must have skill.
The last skill I believe a successful entrepreneur has is the ability to listen. They need to listen to their customers, employees, or contractors. In addition, under this skill set is keeping a close eye and listening to competitive and industry trends. The online world changes quickly and you need to be able to pivot and change when things don’t always go as planned.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
This is an interesting question. One thing that I’ve already done this year is hired staff. I’ve realized that I cannot do everything myself, so my focus has been outsourcing and delegating. We have run into some learning curves so putting in place SOPs (standard operating procedures) is another focus to help us grow within the hiccups.
Another focus is continuing to refine and optimize our sales funnels. We have a solid product portfolio with lead gen funnels. However, we intend to focus on reviewing the data and optimizing them where necessary. Another focus, and probably the most important one, is driving traffic to the funnels and getting more visible to our ideal customer. We have several campaigns scheduled throughout 2021 to accomplish this.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
One of the huge mistakes I made initially was trying to build a product without building my audience first. I think this is a mistake that many new entrepreneurs make. You need an audience, which is simply a group of potential customers, before you start to build your products or services. When you build your audience first, this gives you an opportunity to interact with them on an intimate basis to ensure that you’re creating offers that they want and will buy!
I quickly realized that my approach wasn’t working and focused on building a basic website with a lead magnet. I started blogging and creating content. This really was an eye-opening experience for me.
Another mistake I made or perhaps this was more of a misconception, was not understanding how much time it can take to build and grow an online business. There are certainly ways to fast track this growth and one of them being paid advertising, but when you’re just starting out and self-funding a business like this, it’s more of a slow growth projection than a hockey stick. I had to learn patience and understand that you may not have a $30,000 per month revenue stream after just a few months.
The last mistake I made was not investing in a coach who had been there and done that. I really think that would have gotten me to the growth I was seeking much faster. I had a ton of marketing know-how, but it wasn’t in the online business niche. This was a lot to learn fast…and while I got there eventually, I would have gotten there much faster with an investment upfront in a top business coach who really knew their stuff.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
I love to geek out over marketing. I’m also a graduate marketing professor so this stuff excites me. I literally pour over every marketing concept out there. In my online business, I’ve tested a ton of different marketing funnels.
It really comes down to having an offer that people want, finding the people who want what you have to offer and walking them through the buyer’s journey toward to the purchase.
To find your ideal customer, you need to have eyeballs on your stuff. You can get this in a variety of ways, some are faster than others. In my business, I have traffic coming into my funnels from organic search on Google and Pinterest driven by my blog and podcast. I also do a good amount of PR, which includes finding podcast guest and speaking opportunities.
Some traffic comes in from organic social media, but when I really want to turn up the traffic like for a launch, hands down, I focus on paid traffic on Facebook and Instagram. When done right, with paid traffic, you can fill up a webinar, challenge, or a video series for an online course launch.
Let’s assume you have the traffic coming to your website. Once they get to your landing page, you need an offer that entices them. This is your lead magnet. This can be something like a simple pdf workbook along with a short training video.
The goal is to get them on your email list. Once they’re on your list, you will start your nurture email sequence. This walks your prospect through what we call in market as the buyer’s journey. At the end of this nurture sequence, you may invite them to join your online course or program, or if it’s a more expensive offer perhaps invite them to a webinar or workshop where you offer the program at the end.
To answer your question, my marketing process includes getting traffic to sign up for my lead magnet so they’re on my email list. Then through my nurture sequence, offer my online course as a solution. For my more expensive courses, I use webinars to promote them.
There are some individuals who come to my website, go to my shop, and purchase my products without going through any of my sales funnels and this is fine too! In this case, they see the sales page and it’s enough to convince them to purchase.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
The three online tools I could not live without are Squarespace, ConvertKit, and Kajabi.
I use Squarespace for my main website, and it hosts my blog and podcast show notes. I learned very early in my online business journey, how to use Squarespace and that investment has paid off tremendously.
I use ConvertKit as my email service provider. I think ConvertKit is a little pricey; however, they’re very easy to use. I have automations, sequencing, and tags set up in my online course sales funnels so it’s simple to segment my list.
Kajabi is the platform which hosts my online courses and the landing pages in my sales funnels. I like the student interface for Kajabi and their built-in landing page builder makes it easy to set up my sales funnels.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
If I only had $1,000 dollars to start a new business, hands down, I would invest in building a basic website where I could blog or host my podcast episode show notes. This may include an inexpensive course to learn how to build it myself, which I did when I started, and this has helped tremendously.
I would also invest in an email service provider so I could start growing my email list. The remaining cash would be spent on creating my lead magnet and landing page for the free gift.
What is your favorite quote?
“An online business is 90% marketing and only 10% product creation.”
– Dr. Destini Copp
This is a quote that I reiterate with my clients and audience. It can be easy to put together a digital product or service but finding your perfect customer who will pay you for that product or service is another story. I don’t want to discount the important of a product, it’s one of the 4Ps of marketing (taking you back to MKT1001), but there are many other factors such as price, promotion, and place that come into play with promotion of your business and product being the most important.
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
I think many entrepreneurs get stuck on making decisions that quite frankly won’t affect their future success. It doesn’t matter what email service provider, landing page builder, website, or online course platform you start out with. You can always switch in the future.
If you’re stuck on a niche or figuring out who exactly you want to serve, that’s ok. Just pick one and get started. It’s likely that even who you want to serve will change in the future as you get further along in your business. The important thing is to just get started because action creates clarity.
My best advice: pick a niche and start serving them. You just need to START.
How can readers get in touch with you?
The best place to get in touch with me is my website which is destinicopp.com or to DM me on Instagram or LinkedIn which is basically my name spelled out @destinicopp. I’m happy to answer any questions about starting an online business. I want others to avoid the mistakes I made so they can fast track their success.
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