3 minute read
INNOVATION
CHALLENGING TIMES
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What’s up with all the challenges? Everywhere you look online, there’s a challenge for something.
The ‘5-Day Focus Challenge’, the ‘4-Week Get Fit Challenge’, the ‘30-Day Pay-check to Profits Challenge’. There is even a challenge teaching you how to run challenges!
One needs to ask, why? The short answer: they work!
They work for the challenge participant looking to get some result in their lives or achieve some goal. And they work for the people running these challenges, as evidenced by the hundreds of millions of dollars generated in sales through these powerful marketing tools.
So, let’s take a look behind the curtain and see precisely why challenges have become the hottest craze taking the marketing world by storm.
WHAT IS A CHALLENGE? Before we take a deep dive into this world, let me clarify what a challenge is for the uninitiated. A challenge is a time-bound, virtual learning experience, which focuses on one primary outcome for the participant by helping them take action. These can be either free or ticketed experiences online.
What are the benefits for the challenge participant? • The participant can get a result or achieve a goal quickly. • They can try a new activity or learn something new, usually for free or at a low price. • The free challenge eliminates the fear of the unknown by sampling the teaching. • The participant can test the quality of the frameworks with little commitment. • The challenge reverses risk for the buyer/participant. • The participant builds belief in themselves by completing the challenge. • The participant can build quickly trust and rapport with the trainer, coach or expert. • The participant receives value from the expert up front.
What are the benefits for the challenge marketer? • Challenges are popular and easily accessible online. • Challenges can attract new customers quickly, from a global audience. • Challenges can generate revenue quickly; what might have taken months to produce can now be made in a matter of days. • The challenge not only helps find your dream customer but creates your dream customer in the process. • The challenge provides a platform to serve your customers at a higher level. • The challenge allows the expert to
deliver value and prove their credibility before ever asking the customer to purchase anything. • The challenge facilitates creating connections with and building a community of your customers. • The marketer can focus their advertising spend on a very niche target market. • The expert can solve problems at scale by teaching frameworks and methods to large audiences very cost-effectively. • Once participants have achieved a result and would like to engage further with the programme or the expert, the marketer can make an offer to them for billable services. • The sales conversion rates on challenges are usually significantly higher than traditional sales methods. Simply put, the online challenge is the quickest way to take cold audiences and turn them into highly engaged customers. In my opinion, they offer one of the fastest accelerators of digital sales success and should form part of any modern company’s online marketing strategy.
Scott Langley is the director and founder of Kaizen Alpha Marketing, a marketing consultancy based in Durban. When he’s not building digital sales funnels for his clients, he spends his time with his family or falling off a surfboard at his local break. You can read more about him here.
