The Art of the Offer with Tommy Magill: $30M+ Mastering Paid Ads and Course Funnels

Crafting and testing offers that scale, building trust as a content creator and using organic content as testing ground before running ads.

About The Episode

This episode is all about scaling profitability of your content and we're joined by Tommy Magill – he's scaled content businesses by millions through paid ads.

In just over a year, Tommy Magill's marketing agency went from zero to managing over a million in ad spend, and becoming the number one affiliate for Shopify. As a dynamic player in the content and course creation space, Tommy has unlocked potent strategies for leveraging trust, credibility, and a strong offer to not just attract but retain your audience.


On this episode, we'll cover:
- The art of securing low interest business credit and using storytelling to supercharge sales.
- The science behind testing offers and strategic allocation of funds for maximum return on investment.
- The undeniable power of content creation in building trust and testing course concepts with your audience.
- The insights Tommy gained from working with top-tier clients, including the effectiveness of paid ads and course marketing.
- Tommy’s perspectives on the future of content strategy and his commitment to long-form content for the year ahead.

2 IDEAS FROM THE PODCAST

IDEA #1: Dynamics of a good offer.

What are the dynamics of a good offer that make it able to scale?

Is your offer almost too good to be true?

Is it? That's a good starting point. As Hormozi would say, 'Making an offer so good, it feels stupid not to take it. If you're able to do this, your only job now is to explain how it works, and the convincing will take care of itself.

Ex. Do you know a legitimate way of helping business owners acquire credit at a 0% interest rate for twelve months?

Great, now your job is to explain how that works.

IDEA #2: Testing Offers That Convert.

Step 1: Set Your Budget

Before anything else, decide on your initial investment. We're talking about predicting the net loss for the first few months and being able to cope with it.

For example, Can your offer operate initially at a 50% ROAS while you upsell your customer, while the algorithm optimizes, or as you test different creatives?

Doing this will help you understand your unit economics. Or as Tommy once said:

Step 2: Creative Brainstorming

Spend a couple of hours dissecting various offers out there. Use tools like Segment Analysis in Similar Web (not a paid advertisement) to analyze specific pages or funnels within a competitor or partner site and reveal how effectively it is monetizing.

You can then take inspiration and incorporate the best practices into your offer.

Step 3: Crafting Your Anti-fragile Statement

Craft a unique statement no one else can claim based on your offer.

When that statement rings true, it creates a flywheel effect as people share their positive experiences and how good your offer is.

Step 4: Launch and Learn

Launch 5 to 15 ads across 4 or 5 themes.

Start with a core truth (Anti-Fragile Statement) that positions you uniquely.

If you can demonstrate your Anti-Fragile statement effectively, you then simply need to convince people it's real inside of your funnel.

1 KEY LEARNING

Using organic content as a testing ground before running ads.

Leveraging successful organic content helps shape your Anti-Fragile Statement and advertising strategies before investing in paid ads. This method is effective for ensuring content resonates with audiences.

Timestamps

00:00 Transitioned from affiliate marketing to online courses.
05:02 Networking: staying connected, learning, adding value.
07:03 Low ticket, mid ticket, high ticket products.
11:47 Meeting to discuss market offers and tactics.
13:55 Testing multiple ad themes increases engagement and credibility.
17:44 Create content like interviewing customers, engage, snowball.
20:21 Success story of growing ad spend with Shopify.
26:05 YouTube marketing boosted spending from $20k to $650k
29:06 Creating personal connection, scaling ads strategically.
31:18 Jeff Bezos ad transformed YouTube, made money.
34:15 Platforms favor organic content, diminishing ad space.

The Power of Affiliate Marketing and Education in Business Growth: "Found my way into courses because affiliate marketing keeps you sharp on just whatever marketing channel you chose."
— Tommy Magill [00:02:33 → 00:02:40]

E-commerce Pricing Strategy: "There's like the low ticket product, which is everything underneath. Like $197, which we found was like a consideration window from a click was like less than four or five days on average. There's what's called mid ticket, which is like that 197 to about 2000 ish dollars, where the click to purchase averages a little bit. I think it's seven days is what we found for the average. And then for high ticket, which is like anything 2000 plus, we see consideration windows of like 14 days on average."
— Tommy Magill [00:07:03 → 00:07:41]

Impact of Compelling Offers in Business Launches: "there's one of the brands in our portfolio talks about business credit and helping business owners acquire credit at a 0% interest rate for twelve months. We launched that, I believe it was like three years ago, and it sort of was mind boggling."
— Tommy Magill [00:09:29 → 00:09:46]

Webinar Marketing Insights: "I think this alone will provide a lot of value if you go to a tool called similar web and you just put in the website webinar jam, and webinar jam, for everybody who doesn't know it hosts a ton of webinars. And so if you put that into similar web and you look at the referring traffic, you can see effectively what are the best performing webinars right now, or over the past three months."
— Tommy Magill [00:12:07 → 00:12:34]

Building an Unassailable Brand: "this brand that we create is the only brand in the world that can do this like this."
— Tommy Magill [00:13:03 → 00:13:10]

Viral Marketing Strategies: "And when it rings true, the great thing is, then there is a quote unquote flywheel of people talk about how easy it was and how engaging the communities and everything like that."
— Tommy Magill [00:13:55 → 00:14:07]

Effective Content Creation Strategy: "set aside at least an hour per week. But really, I say, like four to 5 hours per week. So an hour per workday, so to speak, creating content for six months straight and do that every single day, and depending on your follower size, maybe that looks like Amas, maybe that looks like creating a Facebook group and just going in there and just talking about what you're got."
— Tommy Magill [00:15:52 → 00:16:20]

Creating Engaging Content: "Very similarly with content, do you want to know that what you're doing is on point? And again, it resonates with people and engages them so that they do follow."
— Tommy Magill [00:18:01 → 00:18:10]

Enterprise Shopify Success: "We started last year and it's with a couple of previous clients from my performance marketing agency and then two people who work with me. But yeah, we've been able to grow from $0 in ad spend to over a million a month in ad spend. And Shopify did confirm that we were the number one affiliate in the world for them, which is a really cool thing to hear."
— Tommy Magill [00:20:46 → 00:21:12]

Agency Advantages in Marketing: "What do you offer that no other agency can? And, like, as an agency with four dudes just sitting around in Boulder, Colorado, it was really tough to figure that out. But when we did and they said yes, it was great."
— Tommy Magill [00:29:15 → 00:29:30]

Episode Transcript & Castmagic Chat

More episodes like this

Tips from the best!

Join our free weekly newsletter to learn from the smartest founders, operators, & creators.

Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
Castmagic Logo

Start Scaling Your Business With Content

The most powerful content AI, at your fingertips

Get Started