QBConfidential: How We’d Drive More Profit & Scale For Kurt Warner’s Business
This past weekend I was driving from Michigan to Colorado so we had the radio on listening to the NFL playoffs.
One commercial caught my ear, it was Kurt Warner’s advertisement for his business, QB Confidential.
As our expertise here at SluiceBox is helping people drive more profit and scale for their businesses using online advertising, I thought I’d put together a plan showing you how I’d do that for QB Confidential.
I’ve broken it down into steps so you can see what our process is and how it builds upon itself.
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Thanks for your time, let’s get to it.
Step 1: WHAT Is The Offer?
The first step in the process of selling more stuff is clearly understanding WHAT you are selling.
A lot of companies believe this is their product…but it’s more than that.
As you can see here, QB Confidential has taken their core product (a library of five video courses) and broken it down so different components appeal to different people.
The Free Agent Offer:
The price tag on the offer is $7.99/month. It’s a low barrier to entry offer that allows a customer to access the entire content library.
BUT…
The catch is that the course is dripped and customers aren’t able to move at their own pace (which is an inconvenience if you get into the content).
It is structured to cause frustration and get people to upgrade to the Franchise Tag offer.
When looking at this offer, it will have a lower Cost To Acquire A Customer (CAC) but generating profit from it will depend on:
- Getting people to stick for multiple months
- OR getting people to upgrade to the annual pass
It’s a great offer to drive volume into the business but isn’t the best offer for generating profit unless the backend is SUPER dialed in.
The Franchise Tag Offer:
The price tag is $120/year…which is weird to me because the monthly price ($8) x 12 is $96. Typically annual passes are a price advantage due to locking people in for a longer time.
If I were working with them, I would recommend making the annual price lower so it appears like a better deal OR providing a discount to people who have bought the monthly pass to make it financially advantageous to upgrade.
The addition of move-at-your-own pace increases the desirability of the offer…but I think they could make it even sweeter.
I would strongly recommend creating some kind of content bonus that gives them deeper insight into something they care about.
Maybe have Kurt do a quick segment with a few other popular quarterbacks talking about the stages of their development and how their mindset shifted between high school, college, and the pros.
Something that gives that extra little UMPH that gets them to pull out their wallet.
The Team Captain Offer:
I LOVE this offer because it is specialized for coaches which gives them the opportunity to speak to a particular segment that has the potential to be a multi-year client as they always have new kids coming through.
My only recommendation would be to utilize something like a Typeform that allows their leads to give some information before being told they’d need to speak with a sales rep.
Right now, it’s a contact form that doesn’t engage very much…by leveraging a Typeform, I would expect they could drastically increase their completion rate which would result in more leads and sales.
Conclusion:
QBConfidential knows how to create offers BUT the desirability of each offer has an opportunity to be optimized.
I applaud whomever helped construct these as they are an awesome start with the ability to be tested to see if results could be improved.
Step 2: WHO Are We Selling To?
First off, a round of applause for whomever wrote the copy on the landing page as they clearly called out their audiences.
Businesses that clearly understand their market and only focus on serving them do SO much better than those that try to appease everyone.
That being said, there are three (3) audiences they are catering to and they are not created equal. I want to break them down in terms of size, accessibility, and perceived profitability.
Audience 1: Coaches
Positives:
Coaches are audience #1 for me because there is a lack of quality and verifiably good resources out there to help young players develop.
I think the product Kurt and his team put together fills a need in the marketplace.
On top of that, coaches represent the opportunity for SUSTAINED PROFIT.
Coaches are always getting more and more kids to come into their programs so if Kurt’s product is as good as he says it is, coaches will be the cash cows for the business.
Negatives:
The only negative about coaches is the ability to reach them.
Every coach is responsible for dozens of athletes and they’re almost always busy so reaching them with online ads will be the most difficult.
That being said, there are ways to do it and the juice will definitely be worth the squeeze.
Audience 2: Players
Positives:
Players make up the largest demographic of high-intent users which means they’re an audience worth heavily pursuing.
Personally, even though I played center and linebacker, I would have loved to learn more about how quarterbacks saw the field as it would have helped me not fall into tendencies while playing defense.
If the video course is the only offer the company has, targeting players of all ages makes the most sense as they will likely all have a similar lifetime value (LTV).
If there is a backend with higher ticket items and annual coaching/training, targeting younger players should be the tactic in the long run as it will result in more profit per player.
Negatives:
The hard part about targeting players is that, in most cases, they won’t be the person paying for it; their parents will.
Which gives us a two prong challenge:
- Should we target player, parents, or both?
- If we target parents, attribution will be very clean…but if we target players, attribution is very likely to be messy as the campaigns will look to have very low ROI since the clickers aren’t buying.
This isn’t to say that pursuing this angle doesn’t make sense, it’s just that more thought and testing is required to set us up for success.
Audience 3: Fans
Positives:
Obviously, this is the largest audience and would allow for a ton of scalability if the code could be cracked.
Football fans can be reached on just about any ad platform and getting a video ad from Kurt Warner or another quarterback would instantly draw attention.
We’d be able to target people 25+ who have disposable income so attribution would be straight forward.
There’s also been a ton of people who have loved the Manning brothers segment on Monday Night Football so I absolutely believe there’s an appetite for this type of content.
BUT there’s a major concern for fan campaigns.
Negatives:
Say you can get thousands of people to sign up for a monthly subscription to learn more about the ins-and-outs of football…how long do you think they’d stick around?
On average, I’d wager two months…and that’s being pretty generous. That means they would be worth about $16 of revenue for the business.
Thankfully this is a digital product so there’s no/little COGS associated with the product but in order to make money on the front end, we’d have to drive sales for <$16.
Having done a lot of offers in the price point of the $7.99/range, the typical CAC is around $12-$20 range.
That means we’d have to do a TON of work to just get the thing profitable…and we’d be making (at most, $4/customer).
That doesn’t leave you a lot of room to scale things.
Now there may be a backend offer that completely changes the game…but I don’t think that’s the case.
Conclusion:
While I love the idea of creating a product to make more knowledgable fans, I don’t believe THAT portion is a scalable opportunity (unless I learn something else that changes the equation).
Because of that, I would recommend investing time in attracting coaches and players.
So now that we know our offers and have settled on our audiences, let’s talk about how we plan to reach them.
STEP 3: HOW Do We Plan To Reach Our Target Audience?
One of the value props here at SluiceBox is that we are more than just a one-trick pony. We don’t rely on any single ad network to make sales…we know how to make sales across ALL of them.
For that reason, I’m leaving Facebook ads off the list because that’s about the only platform everyone can sell on. I’m going to go after ad networks that are less utilized to show how we would approach scaling things up.
How We’d Target Coaches:
As I stated earlier, reaching coaches will be the most difficult of the audiences as there are fewer of them and they are typically very busy so they aren’t spending hours on the Internet every day.
We need to be extremely targeted with our ads and ensure we give them a quick way to get information that they can review when they find an opening in their busy schedules.
Here’s a few ideas of how we’d ideally reach coaches:
Choice 1: Twitter Ads
Twitter is a platform with a ton of content around sports and caters to an older demographic…so it’s likely coaches are spending some time on here.
By doing a quick search for “Football coaching” we’re able to find a list of handles with 25k+ followers that constantly share the technical advice on football.
These would be extremely targeted offers that would instantly gravitate towards the technical breakdowns Kurt shows inside of his courses.
Note: When reviewing handles, it was important to note that a fair number of them were about soccer coaching so curating the handles we target is key.
We’d also look at targeting people who follow quarterback coaches, passing academies, and competitions like the Elite 11.
Along the way, Twitter recommends similar handles that could potentially expand our audience.
Choice 2: YouTube Ads
YouTube has a massive amount of football content on it and a great deal of it is technical breakdowns on how to become a better quarterback.
We would start by doing some placement targeting to see if we can get ads in front of people who are 25+ who are watching videos like this:
This would likely drive very HIGH QUALITY leads…but we wouldn’t be able to spend much.
That’s when we would assemble a list of keywords for things like:
- Quarterback training
- Quarterback footwork
- Quarterback progressions drill
- Tampa 2 defensive scheme
- Tampa 2 vs Cover 3
These types of keywords qualify our audience and allow us to reach them on content OUTSIDE of the exact placement so we can get more reach.
Choice 3: Google Display Network
To piggyback on the keyword list from our YouTube ads, we would work to target content where these keywords appeared as it means a coach is consuming content relevant to what we are selling.
As you can see from this blog post, there is content out there that relates to the words we’re targeting…and the VRBO ads show you that it’s possible to target people reading them.
Choice 4: Hudl Advertising
The first three choices are easy access ad networks, but I believe that advertising on Hudl would make a ton of sense.
Hudl is a place where lower level coaches place highlights of their athletes so next level coaches can view them and go through recruiting…so the target audience is there in spades.
Hudl offers plenty of advertising opportunities but there would likely be a minimum spend commitment which means we would want to have our flows dialed in prior to going down this path.
These four options are what I believe are the best options at this early stage to reach coaches at scale.
How We’d Target Players:
Reaching players should be much easier than coaches as there are tons of them and they would likely have more free time to consume content online.
Choice #1: Twitter
Once again, lots of sports content on Twitter and the followings become a lot bigger that allow us to target a bit more broadly.
While it might make sense to target famous quarterbacks like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, the issue is that they have really large followings that are composed of more fans than quarterbacks.
We would want to target quarterbacks and/or quarterback coaches who are less well known but are sought after by top level quarterbacks.
We’d want to target people like followers of the QB Coach Todd Krueger (see above).
That would help us trim down to ensure we are going after players who are motivated to improve and not just “living the dream.”
Choice #2: YouTube Ads
Once again, lots of content that is easy to target. Our biggest shift here would be that we would target a younger age range and shift out to content that is more focused on the “hype” part of training.
Content like the competition of the Elite 11 (you’ll have to click to watch it on YouTube because the NFL doesn’t allow embedding)
Choice #3: TikTok/Snapchat Ads
For younger kids, TikTok and Snapchat are the primary social media channels they look at on a daily basis.
The ability to reach people ages 13–25 who are football fans at scale is easy to do on these networks…and the traffic is CHEAP.
We could target kids who follow specific people or go broad with just interest targeting for football fans and see what shakes out.
I’ve lumped these ad networks together as they behave very similarly and the content needed to be created for them is the same.
I’d bet my lunch money that TikTok would be a stronger performer than Snapchat but both of them should be tested.
Conclusion:
So those are my initial ideas on what it would take to reach out target audiences at scale on different ad networks.
The best part is that these are just hypotheses…some will work, some won’t, and new ideas will pop up.
At the end of the day, we’ll show up every day to compete and improve the system as we get more data behind it.
Step 4: WHAT STEPS Are Needed To Sell The Offer (Sales Flow)?
So now that we know WHAT we’re selling, WHO we’re selling to, and HOW we plan to reach them, we need to figure out how we get our traffic to CONVERT into customers.
Once again, I’m going to split this into two separate sections as we will be targeting coaches and players with different offers which means they’ll need different processes.
Coaches Sales Flow:
Being Kurt Warner gives you a fair amount of respect from coaches and players so I don’t think a whole lot is required to sell WHO the teacher is (which is a massive leg up)…but Kurt does need to clearly communicate WHAT they will get when they purchase either a single annual subscription or the Team Captain offer for multiple athletes.
Coaches often fork over their own funds to help their athletes succeed so they need to know that they will get a lot of value out of the information.
If I were Kurt, here’s how I’d do that.
Coach Specific Landing Page
First, I’d create a landing page that lets coaches know that Kurt has created an in-depth, five course video library to help coaches and players better understand the cerebral part of the game.
I’d have Kurt film a short video that would be placed on the landing page reviewing this and then say the following:
“I know you’re extremely busy so I made it easy for you to learn about the details of QBConfidential on YOUR schedule. There’s a box next to this video where if you give me your email address, I’ll send you a video that breaks down all of the specifics that you can watch when you have some time.”
There is a simple opt-in box that sends them the video via email.
Coach Specific Offer Page
After they opt-in, they should be immediately directed to a page that just shows the Franchise Tag and Team Captains offers that summarizes the details and gives them the ability to take action.
The coach could be ready to buy immediately so we wouldn’t want to prevent them…but more often than not, they’ll need to view the video.
Follow Up Email
Inside of the email, there should be a link to the video where Kurt breaks down the value of the library as a whole and then goes into the value of each component and what it will do to help develop the player more.
Inside the email and on the video explanation page there should be a link back to the Coach Specific Offer Page (see above).
Team Captain Typeform Lead Collection
The final change I would make it adjusting the “Contact Me” box into a Typeform as it typically increases opt-in rates AND it allows the sales team to ask more specific questions so they can better qualify the offer before speaking to the opt-in
Above is a quick video that shows some of the value that comes form using Typeforms.
Coach Sales Flow Conclusion
While there may be a bit more work to do to create a solid funnel for coaches, the juice is worth the squeeze because they are the highest value customers.
A few videos from Kurt and a little bit of landing page building would make this a massive improvement in the number of leads that are gathered and the conversion rate of those leads because the content is tailored to coaches.
Player Sales Flow
As I stated earlier, I imagine that parents will be the ones purchasing the bundle so we need to make it easy for kids to get the information to their parents to showcase the value.
To do that, we’ll have to put together some assets that cater to the way kids operate and then translate that to the way parents operate.
Player Specific Landing Page:
Just like for coaches, we need to create a landing page that speaks specifically to players and helps them understand how this product can help them elevate their game.
We would need Kurt to film a short video that explains to players how he uses a formula to help them improve their performance by understanding the mental, physical, and strategic parts of the game.
Then the video should cut to testimonials of players explaining how much their game improved because of working with Kurt.
It would also be great if they could add in how it helped them get more recruiting buzz and even a bigger social media following by being better (because this is what players care about).
From there, this landing page should have two options:
- Allow them to click to purchase from the Player Specific Sales Page (see below) if they have the funds for it
- Send more information to them via text message that they can share with their parents
It’s important to note that text would be the medium of choice here because kids are so much more likely to text than use email.
Follow Up Text:
The follow up text should contain two important things:
- A quick blurb like “QBConfidential helps young football players improve their game and get noticed by next level coaches, here’s how:
- A link to a parent specific page that contains more information
Parent Specific Landing Page:
It’s important to remember that parents have their kids ask them to buy them stuff every day…so the beginning of this page (and the video) should acknowledge that.
A headline should be something like:
“Improve Your Son’s Game And Chances Of Playing At The Next Level. Get World-Class Coaching From An NFL Legend…For Only $7.99/Month”
From there, there should be a video from Kurt that goes something like:
“Hi Mom or Dad, I know your kids ask you to buy them stuff every day…mine do too and most of the time it’s total junk.
That’s why I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you parent-to-parent why QBConfidential is actually worth your while.
After having a successful career in the NFL culminating with a Super Bowl victory, I can tell you the key to succeeding as a quarterback is understanding the mental, physical, and strategic parts of the game.
I’ve taken all of my experience and put together a video library course that will help your son raise his game in each of these areas and improve his performance on the field…and his chances of making it to the next level.
And while I could charge tens of thousands of dollars for this, I just want to make an impact on more kids…which is why I made the price just $7.99/month.
I want your son to have the best coaching money can buy…but ensure that it fits into your budget.
If this is something you’d be onboard with, click the link below to get started today.”
That link would then take them to the Player Specific Sales Page.
Player Specific Sales Page
When I say “Player” I’m referring to the two offers that cater to players:
- The Free Agent (Monthly Subscription)
- The Franchise Tag (Annual Subscription)
Both parents and players should be sent here because the information is the same.
We would just need to simply breakdown the details of what comes in the video library and articulate the value like it’s been done on the homepage.
Nothing fancy, just make it clear and simple.
NOTE: I still highly recommend reducing the annual subscription to less than the $8/month as I imagine parents would likely spring for it…they just need a price incentive.
Player Sales Flow Conclusion
While there is a decent amount of work involved in getting this flow set up, I would wager it will produce exponentially more effective results as it allows kids to operate the way they want (via text) and parents to get a parent-to-parent message so they feel it’s a good investment.
All of this can be accomplished very quickly.
Step 5: HOW Do We Catch The Market’s Attention? (Ad Strategy)
Now that we’ve done all of the background work that will help us set ourselves up for success (the work that most people never do), it’s time to make some ads.
To do this, I’m going to put together a few Loom videos to discuss how I’d recommend we create different types of content for each of our audiences.
Ads For Coaches
When it comes to coaches, they don’t want to hear a bunch of hype or hyperbole about what people can do for them…they want to see people in action.
That’s why I recommend cutting up some of the content that Kurt has available on his homepage and turning them into video ads and/or mocking them up into image ads.
Here’s a quick video showing you what I mean:
Ads For Players:
When it comes to players, they are most likely less concerned with the fundamentals Kurt would be teaching and more about what improvement could do for them.
They want to have better stats and increase their chances of making it to the college or pro level (even if that isn’t realistic from a numbers perspective).
Because of that, here’s what I would do to make ads that target players:
Ads Conclusion:
Just like everything in marketing, these are all hypotheses that need to be tested to determine if they are valid…but I can promise you that with the amount of research I put into this, the chances of success are very high.
If given the chance by Kurt and his team, I’d love to see what we could make happen.
Overall Conclusion:
I love the business Kurt put together and think they are doing some awesome things on the marketing front (go look at the content on his YouTube channel…amazing!)
I believe they can take things to the next level by segmenting their target audiences a bit more, creating messages and sales flows that cater to their desires, and creating some ad campaigns that target those specific people.
This is the process we use every day to help clients grow, and I guarantee if you use it, it’ll work for you too!
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