Week 1: Validation Experiment

This week's project was a challenge due to the Thanksgiving holiday, but I deveoped a creative solution. Since I already have an existing business, I wanted to validate what I've been hearing from some of my existing and potential students: they don't have time to take a class.

I had already conducted a survey with them, but did not use the techniques outlined in the class resources, so I developed a new survey, and ran a Facebook ad offering a free social media strategy class, which took visitors to the survey and they could take the class after they completed it.

SocialMediaOnlineClasses.com - image 1 - student project

SocialMediaOnlineClasses.com - image 2 - student project

Since the U.S. was celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday last week, I knew response would be poor. So I ran the ad in countries that were interested in social media that were not celebrating Thanksgiving, specifically Canada, Thailand, India, Slovenia, United Arab Emirates, Russia, and targeted small business owners.

I ran the ad for only two days and got a high number of clicks (185) but a low response rate on the survey: only 4 responses. That was not enough to validate the project, since I needed a response rate of 8/10.

However, I did learn that Thailand has a huge response rate on FB ads. I had previously been getting a large number of FB fans from Thailand and so included them in the FB ad. I will definitely run a FB ad promoting my online classes to Thailand with the goal of getting optins to my mailing list.

So while I was not able to validate this particular experiment, I did get a good result from the ad itself.

Week 2: Product/Market Fit

I conducted an online survey of both existing customers and users who have opted in to take a free class but haven't paid yet.

Got an 88% "must have" response: only a few responses would not be disappointed, and none of them had to do with the product, but with the idea of social media itself.

Definitely a "must have" product, so looking forward to growth topic this week.

Maria Peagler

Founder of SocialMediaOnlineClasses.com

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