If you’re not trying new things in marketing, you’re not going to keep the attention of your audience – and I LOVE testing and experimenting with new strategies. And what I love even more, is reporting back to you all the results and letting you know what works and what doesn’t!

Today's post is a breakdown of a challenge I ran in October.

So, full transparency – I did not originally plan on using the challenge to generate sales. I believe that this is in fact why this was so successful, the goal was engagement, community building and brand awareness.

When you focus on what you can give instead of what you can get, you’re always going to win.

Recently I had a big webinar FLOP. Yes I was a bit glum for a couple of days as its never nice having something not work, but I quickly bounced back and decided to launch a fun challenge to create some buzz about Profit From Products.

One of the biggest assumptions in my world is that one product will change your life, and whilst it can set you on a great path to freedom, what you need is a Products System – a system of products in your business strategically launched and linked for maximum profits and freedom.

The goal of “The 5 Day Products System Challenge…

To take my challengers through a number of daily tasks to help them get clear on what a products system is, why they need one to achieve their unique objectives and the steps they need to take to get there. It was to be ran in a Facebook group with 5 daily challenges sent to all those who signed up.

Stage 1: Preparation & a huge reason to signup

The first stage of prep was creating all the graphics for the ads, banners, Facebook group and landing pages.

To increase signups and build some amazing engagement, I decided that I was going to put together a huge prize package for one lucky winner from all those who took part in all the challenges. This £18k prize package consisted of mentorship, coaching and consulting from some of my incredible friends in the online marketing world.

I also spent time crafting a beautiful challenge landing page to explain what it was all about, who I am, how the challenge works and the mentorship prize (67% conversion rate).

During this project that I wanted to test Facebook messenger bots to save people the need of having to check their emails to get the daily challenges. A fair amount of my prep work was getting to grips with using Many Chat to trigger a “Join the challenge” campaign from a Facebook advert and understanding the different types of campaigns.

TOP TIP: Give yourself ample time (2 weeks minimum) to get all your content, graphics and challenge tasks planned out, written and designed because once you get into the build up / challenge weeks you're going to be crazy busy engaging with your audience.

Stage 2: Build Up Week

With all graphics ready, I created a few different ad styles to encourage signups testing long posts, short posts and Messenger bot ads. 

The messenger bot ads worked well and were pretty inexpensive, but as they triggered a messenger campaign and NOT an immediate registration (registration link was shared after a couple of messages) I felt they weren’t as effective as the normal “website conversion” ads sending traffic to the landing page. Once registered, challengers were invited to the Facebook community.

TOP TIP: Create a number of pre-challenge tasks / warm-up events to keep engagement up during build-up week whilst others are arriving and build excitement for the main challenges.

This is crucial because you need enough build up time to get people into the challenge group, without those who join early getting bored.

Stage 3: The Challenges

Build up week really set the tone for the challenges, so when they came round everyone was excited to dive in and the engagement was SKY-HIGH!

To become eligible for the mentorship prize, the challengers had to take part in all 5 challenges by posting their work into the Facebook group.

This then gave me the opportunity to give valuable feedback, build more engagement and support the community through some of the difficult challenges.

I encourage completions by promising all who completed the 5 tasks a ticket to a live online workshop.

There’s a fine balance you need to achieve in the content you share, and I would recommend making it thought-provoking and challenging and providing additional support to help people through.

TOP TIP: Build in live support to encourage challenge completions. You’re naturally going to have different levels of challengers – ranging from complete novices to those who are more advanced. But if you make the challenges too easy, you’ll lose the advanced folks… make it too hard, you lose the novices.

Stage 4: The Launch

As you read at the beginning of this post, I had no intention of originally pitching anything on this challenge – but realised towards the end of the challenge that I was actually doing my challengers a massive dis-service by not giving them the next step.

In this particular challenge, having had them take part in tasks to help them create a 30,000 ft view on what a Products System is in their business, the next obvious step was to implement those ideas.

I launched a 3 month mastermind (£591) with an upsell to private coaching (£1638) and a checkout offer to add the Challenge Debrief to their order.

I simply pitched this product on a livestream in the group a few days after the challenge finished (to allow people to catch up with the challenges) and was delighted to have sold out the 20 spots I had in 72 hours, generating £18070 / $23705 in sales.

It was the first time I had ever sold on a livestream, and it was actually really fun to see the excitement and the sales flying in whilst I was live.

I decided to leave the community open after the challenge to give those who couldn’t afford the coaching a place to continue their digital products journey.

TOP TIP: You have to create some urgency or scarcity with what you’re pitching to encourage people to take action, so the cart should only be open a few days or only a limited number of sales available. In this instance I chose to limit the number of spots available.

What I would do again:

1 – A challenge! It was SO fun, highly engaging and valuable, and clearly positioned perfectly as the sales flew through the door.

2 – Going ALL in during the challenge week. I answered every single post that was made and had my VA ensure that this was done every day. You wouldn’t believe how much it means to your tribe to have you reply directly to them, and it creates breakthroughs, loyalty and community.

What I would improve for next time:

1 – Messenger bot ad strategy. Honestly, I threw this particular aspect together to test the waters and even though I had 712 people sign up on the bot campaign, not all of those actually signed up or took part in the challenge. Worth doing again but with some changes to the approach.

2 – More prep time. I only gave myself a few days before build up week and in hindsight a couple of weeks would have been better to get more done in advance so I wasn’t creating content during challenge week when I could have been adding more value. 2 weeks prep time at least next time.

So the final results…

• Start to finish – 19 days
• 385 segmented email addresses
• 300 people joined the group
• £401 ($530) in ads
• £18070 / $23705 in sales