Our Mega Launch Challenge Stats (copy + paste this strategy)
Episode 078: Show Notes
As you may or may not know, we had a Five Days to Launch Challenge earlier this June and we ran it literally just for five days, but we did a lot of promotion leading up to it and we wanted to talk to you today about everything that worked, the things we would've changed, how our engagement went throughout and how it's affected our launch so far. While recording this podcast, we’re literally still in the middle of launching, so can't give you final numbers, but we can tell you what we think it did in the beginning. We’re excited to jump in.
We are going to talk all about the challenges of launching and how to use these challenges to launch better, faster, stronger, awesomer, and smarter. We also dive into how to build more engagement, be more valuable, get more people on your list, and have a damn fun time doing it! So if you are ready to have some fun while making some money, then you better not miss this episode.
Building Engagement With Your Tribe
One of the benefits of running a challenge is that you grow your list really quickly by providing amazing value and wanting to make changes in the lives of your clients, customers, audience, tribe and community. Half of the people that participated in our challenge were brand-new to us and had never seen anything from us before, and the other half were existing members of our list who were hyper-engaged and super focused. We delivered the challenge content via email, so it hit everyone’s inbox at 5am the morning of that day. Then we facilitated further engagement inside our Facebook group with daily prompts and daily Facebook lives related to the challenge. We also promoted on Instagram and Instagram Stories within our group, on our Facebook page, through a paid Facebook ad, and through email for our current people who were on our list, letting them know that they could sign up for the challenge and that it was about to start.
Implementing the Promotion Piece
To promote the challenge we did our email list twice and spent a lot of time on Facebook trying to drum up excitement. We were dishing out constant value. We spent $2,000 on a Facebook video ad where we got on camera and talked about how awesome the challenge was, what people were going to learn, what we were going to cover, and the fact that it was free. We ran that ad from June 5th to June 11th, which was for the entire promotion period leading up to midnight of the start of the challenge. We posted on Instagram 24 times, and 14 of those were before the challenge even started! We really wanted to make it clear that you really only need to be in two spots, your email and the Facebook group. If you were in the Facebook group, we could talk to you more and on a more personal level than we could on Instagram. We’d rather just focus on getting people there instead of having them spread out all over the place.
Incentivizing Participation Through Special Additional Offers
The morning of the challenge start, each participant got an email at 5am and we asked them to join. They received a workbook when they joined the challenge — we made it super simple. The workbook was just some prompts and they had things to fill in and then we asked them to go post a certain response in the Facebook group regarding how they filled out the workbook. The way we got people to participate in filling out the workbook was by incentivized participants by offering a scholarship to our program. We also included the time and date of the webinar and what they were going to learn. We weren’t keeping anything a secret, and we think that that got people talking about The Strategy Academy before it was even really a thing, before people even really knew what it was, because they knew that it was going to be released. That first day and every day thereafter, we had a 30-minute plus Facebook live in our Facebook group.
Timing the Launch of a Challenge
Our entire point of this challenge was getting off your booty and launching something as quickly as possible. People literally have a threshold where they are only motivated for so much time and then they run out of steam. We tried to counteract this by making it short, but we still lost people throughout the five days. Even though new people were joining, the engagement gradually went down every single day. Just be mindful of how people work these days. People are busy. People don’t have a huge amount of time for things. If you are going to make a challenge, make it something they can complete quickly, like in a couple of days, or a couple of hours, not something that takes 30 days to complete. Instead, make that your freebie. To encourage participation, we also made it possible for latecomers to sign up and complete the challenge. We also kept our library up for about four to five days after the launch challenge ended, because some people just needed a couple of days to go over the content again, and it was really beneficial for our peeps.
One Mega Mistake We Made Launching Our Challenge
If you are wanting an ad for your challenge, then you should learn from this mega mistake that we made. Luckily, it was not detrimental. We had a conversion app running on Facebook, which means when you run a conversion ad, you’re telling Facebook what that conversion value is. We had the wrong page designated as counting as a conversion. We were counting everyone landing on that page as a conversion instead of people who saw the thank you page. So if you are doing an ad, just make sure you are sending the conversion to the right page!
Challenges We Faced Throughout the Challenge
First of all, we were trying to figure out how many people we would need in the door who were going to be hyper-engaged so that we could get those conversions after the fact and get people to sign up for our bigger program. We took what we needed, and then we added a bunch of buffer room, because we had never run a program that cost this much before. We didn't know how that would affect our conversion rate. We basically added 1,000 people to what we thought it needed to be. We were trying to get everything scheduled and just totally spaced on scheduling the first prompt to go out inside of our Facebook group. It would not have been an issue, because normally, we have our prompts in our Facebook group scheduled to go out at 9:00am central standard time. However, for the entire week, nothing was scheduled. We went through and loaded all the prompts, wrote all the copy, and scheduled them to go out when the email was being delivered, which now sounds like a big “duh”. Obviously, you want to schedule it at the same time. Don't leave a gap in between the time you are sending the email and the time you are giving people the opportunity to write something in your group. They need to know that they are doing it in the right place, so make that it is super clear.
Some Key Takeaways From Our Experience
The biggest takeaway is that you can go down two routes when it comes to how you want to look at your challenge. You can look at it as “I literally just want to provide value and I want to grow my list.” Do that, have a challenge, have a party, make it super fun, and be done with it. Now you have engaged people who are receptive to what you are saying, and that’s golden. That’s priceless. Or, in the second route, which was the one we took, you can have those same goals and those same ideas, but you actually want to pitch something at the end. The purpose of pouring this much energy into something like this before a giant pitch is you truly have people who are asking for what you are about to sell. Therefore, as soon as we opened the doors, the conversion rates on that master class were astronomical! We really truly believe that a big part of that had to do with the momentum that we had just created from running the challenge.
Quote This
As soon as we open the doors, our conversion rates on that master class were astronomical.
Highlights
How to build engagement with your tribe and grow your email list. [0:02:33.9]
Different ways of promoting your challenge and implementing the promotion piece. [0:05:35.1]
Incentivizing participation by offering additional, special prizes or added bonuses and freebies. [0:11:01.3]
Timing the launch of a challenge, as well as the activities that follow the challenge. [0:16:41.1]
One mega mistake we made launching our challenge, and how you can avoid it! [0:28:16.1]
Challenges we faced throughout launching and running the challenge. [0:30:50.1]
Some key takeaways from our experience running the challenge for our ideal clients. [0:37:18.6]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
How to build engagement, Promotion, Incentivizing participation, Timing a challenge, One mega mistake we made, Challenges we faced, Key takeaways
