IAM1507- Marketing Coach Helps Course Creators to Successfully Sell their Courses Online

Marcio coaches course creators like Khe Hy from Radreads, Ted Seides from Capital Allocators, and Robbie Crabtree from Performative Speaking. He’s also the founder of Nerd Digital and has coached dozens of other course creators as a Marketing coach with Maven.

Marcio has worked with brands like Boba Guys, Immi Eats, Kettle & Fire, Danone, THE TEN SPOT, Remedy Kombucha, and more to generate millions in online sales using digital marketing and is excited to work with course creators every day. He also believes the e-learning market is poised for continued growth, and he’s excited to help people take advantage of the opportunity.

• CEO Story: Marcio started freelancing after leaving an agency that works with big brands. He took a lot of courses and did consult. He was locked into work with a course creator which turned out to be fun and successful. And so Marcio started to focus on that niche helping smaller clients, helping them reach their success.
• Business Service: Group coaching. 9-step program – six-figure launch. Which will help the client package the course, build a funnel, and get traffic to sell your course online. One-on-one coaching – customized strategies on how to scale fast.
• Secret Sauce: Giving clients in-depth research, very customized for each business need.
• CEO Hack: Book mention: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari – reminds us that people love narratives, and stories, which will make us connect, organize, and move forward. Creating courses, doing courses in groups
• CEO Nugget: Do not overcome your lead magnet. Free access to a lead magnet tool that positions you as an expert. Helps you with an insider program to take.
• CEO Defined: Be diligent about what you are doing today with your processes, and solutions and turn it into an intellectual property that you can own, sign, and name that solves the problem that only your product can solve.

Website: www.nerddigital.com

LinkedIn: imarciosantos

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iMarcioSantos

Facebook profile: imarciosantos

Free access to Lead Magnet Tool: Nerddigital.com

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Transcription

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00:22 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO podcast.

00:49 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Marcio Santos of Nerd Digital dot com. Marcio, great to have you on the show.

00:59 – Marcio Santos

Thank you, Gresham. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

01:02 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on the show. And before we jump into the interview, I want to read a little bit more about Marcio and hear about all the awesome things that he's working on Marcio coaches course creators like Kehi from Rad Reads, Ted Sites from the Capital Allocators and Robbie Crabtree from Performative Speaking. He's also the founder of Nerd Digital and he has coached dozens of other course creators as a marketing coach with Maven.

Marcio has worked with brands like Boba Guys, Emny Eats, Kettle and Fire, Danon, The 10 Spot, Remedy, Kombucha, and more to generate millions in online sales using digital marketing and is excited to work with course creators every single day. He also believes that e-learning marketing is poised for continual growth and he's excited to help people take advantage of that opportunity. Marcio, excited again to have you on the show, my friend. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:52 – Marcio Santos

Very ready. Thank you, Gresh.

01:54 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. Definitely excited to have you on. What I want to do to kick everything off was rewind the clock here a little bit more on how you got started with a car, your CEO story.

02:03 – Marcio Santos

Yeah. So I got started. I mean, I've been a CEO a few times in this iteration right now with Nerd Digital. I started about 6 years ago, just before my son was born, my first son and my mom were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. That's when I decided to leave the agency where I was working with brands like BMW, Scotiabank, and Vimeo. And I wanted to spend as much time as I could with her. So that's what I did. I left and started doing some freelancing work and in the process, I ended up taking a lot of courses in SEO, web analytics, content marketing, email marketing, and stuff like that.

And I eventually just started doing the consulting and that's where NERD Digital sort of went. It wasn't until 2 years ago that I locked into the opportunity to work with the course creator by the name of Kehi. There's somebody on my email list who said, hey, there's this guy who has his blog. He's not, you know, one of these big brands they work with, but we want to help him out. The experience was so much fun. Above everything else, it was just so much fun to work with him and help him go from five-figure to six-figure launches. It was like, man, if I could have this much fun, have this much impact with a smaller client, that's what I'm gonna do. So I just decided, you know, this is something I'm gonna focus on and the rest is history.

03:27 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, well, I appreciate, you know, you tell your story. Obviously, sorry to hear about your mother, but love that you've been able to kind of make that decision so that you can spend more time with her and then the rest of your family as well too, which is so important. But I think one of the things that I really loved in even in creating this podcast was really getting to understand there's not necessarily one way to skin the cat, so to speak, that you can figure out what works best for you, your desire, where you are in your goals and your journey yourself and create the business from there.

So I love that you've been able to have that joy, that experience, that impact from being able to kind of help out so many other course creators. And I think it's such a great lesson for all of us to remember that you can create things in the way that you hope to create and still have the enjoyment and impact and success that you've been able to have.

04:11 – Marcio Santos

Amen, yeah, goodness had it better.

04:14 – Gresham Harkless

There you go. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, a little bit more on how you work with these clients and these brands. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that looks like, how you serve them, and what that process is?

04:23 – Marcio Santos

Yeah, so I have 2 ways that I work with clients. One is in a group coaching style. And so I have a 9-step program. It's called the 6-Figure Launch. What we do there is walk people through the 9 different modules that help you package your product, build a funnel, and get traffic so that you can sell your course online. And then I have a one-on-one offer as well. And so I work one-on-one with people like Kehi, Robbie, and Ted. And for those, for those people, usually what they want is,  more, I mean, that's really what they're looking for is more one-on-one time look to, for us to go more in-depth into their business to really provide some customized copy, some customized strategy for how they can really scale and go really fast.

So, Robby, for example, when he came in, he was doing around 10, 10-ish a month, 10K a month. And within 90 days, we took them to about 40 K a month. And so that's usually the type of transformation that our clients are looking for with their course or training program.

05:33 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. And I love that you use that word transformation because I think, you know, regardless of our products and services and what we might do, sometimes we forget about that human aspect. And as you kind of talked about the reason why you started your business and we can sometimes shop over that. That transformation I can imagine by having that increase in revenue, probably makes a huge impact not just for him, but also for so many other people as well.

05:56 – Marcio Santos

Definitely. I mean, revenue, you know, cash flow and revenue are the lifeline of any business. And so, it definitely helps to change the dimensions of things. When you can add an extra 0 to the bottom line, especially to a smaller business, it makes a real, it makes a real impact. Absolutely. You get to move the needle forward.

06:16 – Gresham Harkless

And I think so many times being able to kind of realize that, you know, they're, you know, one to one or group or the different ways that people can work for you, there's definitely opportunities. And sometimes it just takes us looking or having somebody look that we can kind of lean on, look at things from a different perspective, and help us to accelerate their growth. Correct. Awesome. So I want to ask you now for what I call your secret sauce, and this could be for yourself, the business, or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:43 – Marcio Santos

It's really, I, I'm obsessed, I think is the word. When I work with my clients, I give them in-depth research and I try to be as thoughtful as possible. I think that has to be my secret sauce. And I've heard that several times. I was just last week, we got a new testimonial from Livia, one of our clients, and she went through our group program. And that's what she was saying. And I was like, wait, that's also what Yana said, or Anya said, and what Joy said. And so I think that's really it. It's something fun that we get to do, like in the group coaching when we have different people. So one person has a course about healthcare. One person has one about fitness and has one about business, but I'm able to give each of them something very customized during our group call that helps them to go forward. So I'd say that that's my secret sauce.

07:37 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And, you know, I think there's a book by Grant Cardona. I think it's it's be obsessive, be average. And I think that obsession, the thing that is so fascinating, what kind of fuels a person, is really manifested in our products and services and things that we do. And as you kind of talked about it, sometimes if you really love what you do and you really are making that impact, you can't help but provide people with that great experience. And when you're in that special place and you're able to kind of execute on that, as you mentioned in a group culture, being able to one-on-one do whatever that might be, it really puts so much, I think, great energy, but a great opportunity for the people that are going through it and also probably that are even taking the courses at that.

08:20 – Marcio Santos

Well said.

08:22 – Gresham Harkless

Well said. Nice. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

08:34 – Marcio Santos

The thing that comes to mind is a book by Yuval Noah Harari, by the title of Sapiens. And this is my hack because, in it, he reminds us that people love narratives, people love stories, and it's really through stories and through that that we connect, that we get organized, and that we move things forward. This book was really important to me. I ended up reading the other 2 of his books. Yeah, so 3 other books, but I read 2 of them. And it really helped me to actually establish more of my conviction to help more course creators.

He also points out the importance of, or the impact that AI will have in the workplace, and how jobs and people will be displaced by machine learning and AI solutions. And because of this, we will have to learn faster. And learning is challenging if you're doing it on your own, which is, again, why I think course creation and doing courses in groups, specifically cohort-based courses is so, so important. We need this and we're going to need more of them. And so that's why I think that that's my hack. I have this perspective, this point of view, which I think is an advantage that I have.

10:00 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely appreciate you sharing that book and that hack-in. Because I think when you really start to understand the historical how stories and things were passed along, I really love that aspect. And just to cut out of the reminder that comes from that. But I also love that you were able to kind of and maybe like even he in his books, where they were to kind of take that deeper to not just say, this is how it's happening. So, you know, that's the this entire story, that's the entire book.

But just understanding like this is the ramifications of that and how you can kind of take that and run with that and kind of hearing how that has really fueled everything you've been able to build as well too by giving people that opportunity to be excellent at their craft to be excellent at being able to kind of communicate that craft to help other people and just the ramifications of being able to kind of learn, learn on impactful and excellent level is so, so huge. So, what would you consider to be what I like to call a CEO nugget? So this is a little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice is something you might tell your favorite client, or if you have to do a time machine, what might you tell your younger business self?

11:06 – Marcio Santos

So the tip that I have for you if you're listening, if you have a course, even if you don't have a course, but you're trying to generate leads, usually I come back to the same type of idea and that is to not over complicate your lead magnets and we have this I'll actually share this with you Gresham with your audience they can go to nerddigital.com forward slash Gresham and when they do they'll get access to this tool that I use to teach my clients is this framework called the basic lead magnet framework and what it does is it helps you to package your knowledge And it does that by taking something that you already know.

So if you have a program, I help you to identify inside your program, which step you're going to take. Let's say you have 3 modules, which modules you're going to take? And then how you would turn that into a lead magnet, right? So how you can turn that into a lead magnet that positions you as an expert that is helpful and that also doesn't cost you an arm and a leg in terms of money and time? I know a lot of people who could spend a lot of time writing ebooks that nobody really wants. And instead, they can do something a lot simpler. So that's that's the tip that I would give download the basic lead magnet tool because that would be super helpful for you.

12:28 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. We'll definitely have that link and information in the show notes as well too, as well as other ways that people can get a hold of you and get in touch with you. But I absolutely love that you use that word, you know, basic and you know, and what the lead maggot is, but also the simplicity of it, because I think so many times we can get kind of obsessed and attracted to the complex and being in alignment with success. But often as I imagine that you teach and show and help people to understand is that the simplicity of helping people to kind of learn whatever it is is actually the way by which they're going to retain it and probably be able to execute on that. So I love that, you know, you're, you're, you're taking your own medicine, so to speak, and you've been able to kind of create something that can help empower people to be able to kind of get something there out, out to more people and be able to kind of see some success.

13:17 – Marcio Santos

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I'm sure they'll enjoy the tool. It's useful.

13:21 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I love that. So thank you so much for sharing that. And so I want to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Marcio, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:35 – Marcio Santos

So being a CEO to me, I think who I want to speak to is what I call, these IP creators, right? So these intellectual property, property creators, and these intellectual property holders. The way I see it is over time, we're consistently developing new IPs. Whether you're a marketer or whether you have a business, I heard on your show sometimes you have people that are in real estate, some are in consulting. And each of those persons, they have some kind of unique IP. They have some kind of unique idea.

1 guy is interested in using technology and data for real estate. Another lady is interested in helping entrepreneurs scale to 6 figures and live that entrepreneur lifestyle. Whatever it is, having the perspective of creating packaging, and selling your IP is a really powerful idea. And so I would say to the CEOs out there, if you're gonna be an IP CEO, that what you want to do is be diligent and be aware.

You need to practice a lot of awareness of what is it that you're doing today in your processes, in how you're helping your customers or delivering solutions, how can you turn that into an intellectual property that you can own, that you can sign, that you can name, that solves a problem that only your product can solve and be bullish on the side of different and not on the side of better. If you can make your, IP different than what's out there, that is 10 times better and 10 times easier for you to sell. Then you're trying to make it better.

15:11 – Gresham Harkless

Truly appreciate that definition. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get a hold of you, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:26 – Marcio Santos

Anybody that's listening that wants help, either packaging their course that they want help selling their course or they're just on the fence maybe. They're not sure if they're ready or not to pack something. Maybe they've been serving their customers for years, but they want to speak to somebody. Head over to nerdigital.com. That's N-E-R-D-D-I-G-I-T-A-L.com. And we'll help you out. Again, the link to the lead magnet for the basic lead magnets to help you package your IP is nerddigital.com forward slash Gresham. And you can head over there and download that today.

16:05 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome.  And to make it that even easier, we're going to have the links and information again in the show notes so that people can follow up, get a copy of that lead magnet, and take advantage of all the awesome opportunities. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:16 – Marcio Santos

Thank you, Gresham.

16:17 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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