Create Challenges to Grow Your List

byTheCatherine

14K followers

3 years ago

When it comes to executing a strategy that builds your customer list, increases sales, and grows your profits, you can't beat a good challenge. Reaching out to social media, the marketplace, as well as, to existing customers with a challenge, is a fabulous way to move your business forward.

What kind of challenge you ask?

It might be a 3-day challenge, 7-day challenge, a 14-day challenge, a 30-day challenge or even longer. It can be about any topic you like. Whatever you are teaching, if it has steps people need to take to solve a problem or get better at something, it can be turned into a challenge.

Look at it much like an attractive win-win contest or competition where each participant is rewarded and comes out a winner. They overcome a problem they're trying to solve, they have learned something new from someone they consider an expert on the topic and they have fun doing it.

Even better, once you've created the first challenge, you can duplicate it by teaching other topics. More so, if you teach business to business topics, you can even use your challenge as a basis for teaching your customers, clients, and students how to create their own challenges to build their own lists and grow their own revenues. This is one of my favorite ways to do a challenge

You are passing on the secrets of success, with the assurance and guarantee that it will work…if they follow through. Speaking of guarantee... the guarantee you can offer is your hands-on assistance with a customer’s own challenge. If they are struggling with one of the pieces of a challenge, you can help them over the hurdle.

There’s not a customer alive who will not only appreciate your willingness to assist them in solving a problem they have. Be it improving their health, learning a new skill, building their business, or something else.

If planned and executed properly with care, you will have gained more subscribers, new clients, increased 'expert' status, and more revenue. You will also have gained the satisfaction of knowing you've helped your students overcome a problem they were struggling with.

Challenges can come in many forms and as mentioned before, can be done on just about any topic. If you know your audience well, you'll know what they need help with and can start creating challenges to help them overcome those obstacles.

If you still aren't sure about what a challenge is, let's look at a few examples…

Get Up & Move Challenge

This one is simple and can last as long as you'd like 10 days 30 days, or more. With this challenge, you would encourage participants to take 10 minutes a day to do some type of exercise. The exercise they do is not important, getting up and moving every day is the goal for this challenge. This type of challenge can have an unlimited amount of participants since you are not doing anything one-on-one.

Some people say it takes 21 days to create a new habit, others say it can take much longer. If you aimed for 30, 60 or even 90 days with this challenge, participants would start seeing some results from their efforts and continue to exercise every day

Rather than offer a 'reward' at the end, you could provide encouragement, a tracking sheet, or other tools they could use throughout the challenge to document their progress. To keep participants motivated, you could offer daily check-ins where they post what they did and how long each day. Allow participants to encourage one another, offer tips, and more in a private group.

if doing long challenges appeals to you, then my advice would be to start small. Start with a free five-day challenge and see how many of your tribe drop off before the end. Although of course, this doesn't matter the chances are they will remain on your mailing list.

If you are doing a longer challenge I would recommend providing a weekly workbook so they can record their progress.

A Voting Challenge

This is a little different than most challenges, but it can be quite helpful to you. If you ask the right questions, you can get a lot of feedback on what other types of challenges you can create.

You can open the door to an enormous amount of interaction between you and prospects - as well as your existing customers by simply asking and encouraging them to share their views on a topic, in the form of a vote.

So, while not a traditional challenge, you are challenging your audience to submit their thoughts and ideas. A voting challenge is a great way to show prospects and customers their opinions are important and matter to you.

Early in the voting process, you could offer insights into how the voting is going. You can encourage more votes by picking a few submissions and addressing them through a live video or on your blog (leaving the participant information anonymous.

The reward for participating could be something that addresses what your questions were about. Let's say the vote options were a choice of 3 things people struggle with when trying to quit smoking. You could offer a short report or resource list to help them with those three things.

A "Name Your Challenge" Challenge

Finally, if you are a consultant, you could do a “Name Your XXXX Challenge” For example, "Name Your Greatest Marketing Challenge" or "Name Your Greatest Weight Loss Challenge"

Using this example, you could offer any number of participants help with overcoming one of their biggest challenges. You could offer one-on-one assistance or, if multiple people had the same issue, you could do a group coaching class to help as many people as possible in one sitting.

Let's say you want to host one or more challenges about getting fit. You might hold a free webinar on the benefits of getting fit as a kickoff to this challenge.

You would send interested parties to a landing page dedicated solely for this webinar and challenge. On this page, you would invite participants to register for the no-charge webinar to be presented by you on a given date and time. In addition to registering, they would be required to reply to one question you present to them. "What is your biggest ___challenge and what have you done to date to overcome it?"

This will not only get people on your mailing list, but it will give you a good idea of what your first challenge should be about.

During the webinar, explain that you'll be hosting one or more challenges to help address the concerns submitted. And while you may not be able to address each one individually, you'll do your best to get the bulk of them.

From here, you can choose as many as you can think you can handle and award them a one-time free marketing consultation and to help them set up a personalized challenge they can follow. You can see which topics would be good for group challenges. You can host more webinars to educate about the specific topics, giving challenge participants assignments they need to complete before the next lesson.

Structuring your challenge in this manner will give you a compliment of 100% - fully prequalified prospects, along with more names on your contact list that you can market to on a moving forward basis.

Your prospects will be delighted at the thought of receiving a no-obligation consultation from you or a challenge created specifically to help them with their problem.

This kind of challenge will add more names to your customer contact list in addition to supplying you with a fresh new list of prequalified sales prospects you can begin to cultivate and maintain a healthy relationship with.

Regardless of which type of challenge you host, in return for their participation in the challenge, they get expert advice from you, possibly tools to help them achieve their goals or whatever you feel would be beneficial to them.

Promoting Your Challenge

Many challenges are simple to set up on social media platforms such as Facebook or on your blog. If you choose to host it on Facebook, once someone votes, post it automatically on their Facebook profile, inviting their friends to also vote. Doing this will help you generate more excitement and buzz for your campaign, as well as form a foundation for your challenge to go viral on social media.

Every time someone new is added to your email list, you have a great opportunity to communicate and engage with them on a regular basis, which will also help you build a long-lasting relationship with them.

If you publish a newsletter, announce the challenge to your subscribers, directing them where to find more information. Of course, you'll also want to send your regular newsletters to your new subscribers and challenge participants, giving you the opportunity to:

• • Drive traffic back to your website.
• • Promote your services and or products
• • Generate sales leads for your (company) salespeople
• • Establish yourself as an authority in your respective industry
• • Increase the recognition of your brand
• • Establish, and then maintain customer loyalty

If you are set up on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Google+, etc., you can:

• • Promote your challenges on each of your pages and platforms
• • Send out friend requests to everyone on your customer list on each of your social media platforms
• • Begin to post content on each of your social media pages and platforms
• • Monitor your social media pages and respond in real time to comments and questions.
• • Join groups that are related to your business, products, or services on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, and make a point of posting and sharing content on each.
• • Start your own group on Facebook and LinkedIn and promote memberships in it. Begin by inviting existing social media followers and those on your customer list to join.

Monetizing Your Challenges

As you continue to promote and build your relationship with those on your customer list, you’ll discover there is a myriad of ways to increase your revenues. Think creatively and listen to what your audience has to say. Your only limitation is your imagination.

One last thing…

As mentioned at the beginning of this report, any challenges you structure and promote can also be used by your clients to grow their customer lists and revenue streams.

In other words, you can package your challenges and related marketing material and sell them to your customers as PLR, so that they can offer challenges to their own audience. Even better, instead of just selling them the content, offer to help them set up and manage their challenges. This is a premium service that should generate a premium price.

No matter what kind of challenge you host, keep in mind the goal is to not only grow your own list but to help your audience solve a problem they are facing. You give them the information they need, the steps they should take, and throughout the challenge, you keep them motivated to continue until they reach their goal.

Not only will this help establish a great deal of trust and loyalty between you and your clients, but it will improve the lives of your participants. ... and happy customers are repeat customers. It truly is a win-win proposition for everyone.