What is a 5-day challenge?
A 5-day challenge is a marketing approach that businesses use to show their audience the value of their offer, increase the visibility of their business online, gain new email subscribers, and often find new clients. It runs over 5 days, often Monday to Friday, and usually involves the business owner doing a live presentation each day and setting the participants tasks to complete that move them towards a goal.
Why do a challenge?
Challenges are popular because business owners have a captive audience of interested people taking part in the event to who they can sell their services at the end of the challenge.
The benefits of running a 5-day challenge are:
- Showcase your expertise and amplify your authority as an expert in your field
- Build a loyal engaged audience that loves your content
- Massively increase your email list of interested subscribers who look forward to opening your emails.
- Sell your paid offer without the hard sell.
What sort of challenges works well?
The challenge needs to give everyone who participates some value so that they can see the benefit of continuing to work with you. It needs to be challenging enough to make people really think about what they are doing so that they are actively engaged but not so onerous that they can’t manage to complete it alongside their other daily activities.
Challenges that help business owners to learn how to do something more quickly or more professionally are very popular. Every business needs to market itself, so challenges around social media marketing, better writing, managing your time, setting your vision and goals, and so on are very attractive to small businesses that don’t have many staff and the owner has to wear multiple hats.
How to create a 5-day challenge
1. Research your ideal client’s biggest pain point.
What do they struggle with most? How can you move them forward to help them start to solve this problem? Using online forums and carefully worded questions, you can gather great intel about what keeps them up at night.
2. Have a compelling challenge title and tagline
Your challenge title needs to clearly spell out the benefit of taking part. You are asking people to invest their valuable time over 5 days with you, so they need to be clear on what they will receive.
❎ Email marketing challenge
✅ Double your email subscribers in just 5 days
3. Set up your challenge arena
Many challenges take place inside a Facebook Group specifically created for the challenge. The group is usually opened a week or a few days before the challenge starts so you can begin to engage with your audience and build up the anticipation. The group is usually closed shortly after the challenge finishes. Resources used during the challenge such as videos or worksheets can be stored inside the group.
You’ll need a funnel to sign people up to the challenge, manage the challenge emails and follow up with them afterward.
4. Preparing your tasks
Think carefully about what your challenge participants will do each day to move them from where they are to where they want to be. Set tasks that build up over the week, so it doesn’t become overwhelming.
Day 1 – Pay attention to your hunger
Day 2 – Drink more water
Day 3 – Do 30 minutes of exercise
Day 4 – Cook a healthy dinner
Day 5 – Plan your meals for the next week
Day 1 – Reflect on your current writing strengths and weaknesses
Day 2 – Create your ideal client avatar
Day 3 – Identify your content pillars
Day 4 – Write a post directly to your ideal client
Day 5 – Plan your content ideas for the next week
5. Decide how you will interact with your participants
Many challenges are run using Facebook Lives for the live element, but you could also choose to use tools such as Zoom, Teams or Remo. Make sure your technology is set up correctly. It’s a good idea to have someone else helping you during the live portions of your challenge in case anyone is struggling to view your content.
6. Pre-launch
You need to market your challenge prior to challenge launch day. This can be the tricky part when you don’t already have a big audience. Business owners who are experienced in running challenges suggest Facebook ads as a good way to market, but this can be expensive. You could try to find someone to partner with who has a larger audience who are your ideal client and who is prepared to send out your marketing.
7. The challenge itself
Maintaining the momentum can be difficult as people get busy and often drop off challenges mid-week. You could use small giveaways related to your challenge to encourage people to attend the Lives. Make sure you interact with all the comments in the group so that your participants feel heard and valued.
8. Your paid offer
Your paid offer must be well-crafted, full of value upsell from the challenge. If your paid offer isn’t well connected to what your participants are learning from you during the challenge, they will feel a disconnect and this will affect conversion rates.
9. Your pitch
At some point during the week, you’ll need to tell people what your paid offer is. How you do this could dramatically affect your conversion rate. Leaving it to the last day isn’t the best strategy because participation will have waned by then. Talk about your paid offer on day 3. Very few people like hard sales tactics so try to keep your pitch short and to the point but remember to bring out all the benefits of working with you.
- Follow up
Your automated email sequence should be timed to begin after the challenge has closed and the sales cart should be open for around 10 days after the challenge ends for maximum conversion.
Considerations for running challenges
Challenges can work brilliantly if you are a high-energy business owner who loves to be in front of their audience on camera. Challenges probably aren’t going to work so well if you are camera shy and don’t enjoy answering questions where you haven’t had time to prepare the answers.
Challenges need correct planning with set timelines and actions, and you must leave enough time to prepare, promote and create FOMO to maximise the impact of the challenge. Pick a week when you aren’t super busy with other activities in your business and think about the best time for your audience as well. If your ideal client is an accountant, don’t run a challenge for them in January.
Expect the unexpected and plan for things to go wrong. Having someone else alongside you to take care of anything that isn’t working well during the live portions of your challenge and to assist you in responding to messages in the group is vital. You cannot do it all yourself.
How can a Virtual Assistant help with your 5-day challenge?
A Virtual Assistant can help with all aspects of how to create a 5-day challenge from doing research into what the challenge should deliver and to whom, to setting up the technology, creating the resources and helping manage the Lives.
If you’d like to find out more about how to create a 5-day challenge in your business, please email me on zoetheva@yahoo.com or call me on 07970719428.