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Lesson Info

Create Your Campaign Schedule

When you have your campaign schedule, when you know from start to finish what needs to get done, guys, you do not need to reach for the marketing junk food. You don't need to worry about, well but should I be doing more of this hot new thing that everybody else is doing? Should I, do I need to get started on this hot new platform? To get this campaign to completion? To get this product sold? No or yes. But the answer is up to you and not your panic mode. Not the mode that keeps us reaching for junk food when we're hungry but instead making choices for really nutritional, sustainable marketing deliciousness choices. So you don't feel gross at the end of your campaigns. You don't feel like you've been used and abused by all the work that you've thrust on yourself by the end of the campaign. Instead you feel like our yoga goddess at the beach. Completely in control of her peace of mind and her balance. And with lots more money in your bank account, right. So let's again, let's just kinda ...

review where we've come from here. Because this is all gonna be pretty helpful as we start building this campaign. We started with that 12 month view. We looked at the whole year and we plotted out where our offers were going to go. Some of you might have 12 months of offers, some of you might have eight months of offers, some of you have six, four, two, one. That's up to you how often you're selling, how often you're committing to campaigns. But we took the time to say, alright, September I'm doing this, December I'm doing this, February I'm doing this. Whatever that looks like for you, you've set that plan in motion. We also took a look at what all of your marketing assets are. The different audiences you have. The different media distribution channels that you use. The stories that you have to tell. The seasonal tie-ins that make it easier to sell your products or services. And the communication strengths of your brand. We looked at all of that and we started assigning those to the different months of your year. So that you started to see, alright, this month when I'm doing this offer, I can use these particular assets. We started to see how it's not so overwhelming. It's not at the whim of each new fad, or tactic, or technique that comes out. But instead is up to you. You're in the driver's seat, you're in control because you have a plan. And not only do you have a plan but you've taken inventory of all these assets you have at your disposal. Then we looked at how to actually construct each campaign from brand awareness to lead generation to conversion. We looked at how there are all these different things that you can do in the brand awareness phase of your campaign to get as many eyeballs looking at your lead generation offer as possible. So that as those leads raise their hand and say, "Me, this is, "you are answering my problem, "you are solving my need." Those people are lining up ready to see your pitch. Ready to see that offer, ready to convert from prospects into buyers. And we also talked about how this whole campaign needs to tell one story. That's why we start with the end in mind, we start with the sale in mind. So that we know how the whole rest of the story needs to unfold to get people ready to that point where they're going to buy. But now we need to look at what does this actually look like. It's been pretty theoretical at this point. We've talked about some specific things, maybe some specific blog posts you're gonna write, or videos you're gonna create, or posts that you're make on social media. But I have a feeling you realize there's probably some, you know, best practices with this. Or maybe there's some different ways that you can kind of reorient yourself and construct these campaigns creatively, depending on what kind of products or services you have. So, let's take a look at some specific examples of what a campaign might look like. How many of you have digital products for sale? You're thinking about campaigns for digital products. Yeah, so about half of you, about a third of you. This is what a digital product campaign might look like. I'm not saying this is what you should do, I'm saying this is what it might look like. You've got all these things over on the left, blog posts, Facebook Lives, Instagram posts, interviews, however it is that you reach out to your audiences and use your media distribution channels. And then maybe as you work through this campaign, your lead generation is that you're asking people to opt in to a free video series. Something that's answering a particular problem that they have, or a solution that they're looking for. And at the end of that free video series, you pitch your products. It all tells one story, that story is driven by the sales page for your product, what it's gonna take to actually get people to buy. But all of that energy goes into that one place. From all your brand awareness to your lead generation to conversion. That's a digital product campaign. A SaaS campaign, so software as a service. Does anyone have SaaS products that they're looking to sell? Anyone wanna develop a SaaS product at some point, yeah. Might look something like this. Instead of blog posts and Facebook Lives, maybe they're doing referrals. So user referrals, affiliates, maybe they do an ad campaign, maybe they have a conference booth. These are all ways of generating brand awareness in a much more brand orientated type of business, as SaaS companies tend to be. And from there, maybe their lead generation offer is a demonstration. You've probably seen that on a lot of the tools that you use. Maybe you've signed up for these demos in the past. You know, I think right on Convertkit's home page, there's a button that says sign up for a demo, right? That's the kinda thing I'm talking about, Crowdcast does the same thing. So all the referrals, the affiliates, the ad campaign, the conference booth, all of that energy is targeted to getting someone to sign up for a demo. The idea being if you sign up for a demo, you are much more likely to convert on the product. So, all of these brand awareness pieces leading to the demo, the demo leads to the pitch. We're getting someone to sign up. Maybe you've got a group coaching program. How many people here have group coaching programs they're trying to sell? Yeah, couple people, alright. So this, in this way we might go back to the same kinds of content marketing we started with at the beginning. But in this case we're heading towards a webinar. Webinars are great ways to find leads for group coaching programs. It's a great way to build more trust and to create more brand awareness and familiarity even as you're in that lead generation phase. And from the webinar you move on to pitch your product. Make sense? Alright, let's take a look at another one, this one is for a physical product. I'm sure there's people out there right now saying, "Okay, Tara, what does this look like "for a physical product?" Again it's a lotta the same brand awareness pieces. Whatever that might look like for you, blog posts, podcasts, videos. Then you might move everyone to a wait list, maybe for your physical product you release a collection every few months. Or you have a big new product coming out. Or maybe your product just has a lotta natural scarcity to it, right. My friend Megan Auman, who makes all of my fabulous jewelry. A lot of her work is one of a kind, especially the things she's doing with stones. If you don't know when she's releasing new products, that perfect ring, that perfect necklace, that perfect pair of earrings for you might be gone by the time you land on her website again. So in that way having a wait list is a fantastic lead generation tool. So instead of asking people to sign up for a free this or a free that. You just say, "Hey, I know you're interested in this, "I know you want one of these. "You want the one that's right for you. "If you want free shipping, "if you wanna be the first person "to hear about this new collection, "you need to be on the wait list." Simple, simple, simple lead generation, highly effective. Maybe you don't build a huge list from that but you don't need a huge list because you have a list that's full of people who are likely to buy. As opposed to a list of people who are unlikely to buy. Which is what most of us have, right. Okay, so you're moving from brand awareness into lead generation with the wait list, and those wait list people cannot wait for you to pitch your product, right. They cannot wait for that new collection to hit. They cannot wait for that new set of rings to hit. Whatever it might be. Alright, now let's take one more, and this one I totally messed up on switching the, the title for this, this is not for a SaaS campaign, this is for like a high-end one-on-one service. My bad, complete opposite. Anyhow, for this for brand awareness, sure, maybe you're blogging but I bet you're also going to a lotta networking events. And maybe you're having conversations about those itches people are trying to scratch at those networking events. Maybe you put together a local talk for your chamber of commerce or an organization that's local to you. And maybe you do a lot of podcast interviews too. Those are all great ways to drum up interest and brand awareness for that kind of high-end, high-touch service. From there, your lead generation offer can simply be a free consultation. Click here to book your time with me. Apply here, applications make a great lead generation tool. And then from there of course, pitching your service. So again, brand awareness to lead generation in the form of free consultation to the pitch. If you guys see how this is, it's all the same, it's just different pieces depending on what your offer is, what your communication strengths are, what your audience is, what your media distribution channels are. This really is now the culmination of everything we've done to this point. I didn't teach all that stuff at the beginning to like leave ya hanging. I taught it because we have to layer things up, we have to build the foundation so that then you can see just how clear and easy building a campaign really can be. Now throughout the last couple of days I've been saying how marketing is easier when you reverse engineer the process. Well it's the same thing with planning. It's not just the messaging that gets easier, it's not just the pieces of the puzzle that get easier when you're reverse engineering. It's the plan itself. You wanna create your schedule from end to start. Just the way you wanna create your messaging from end to start, okay. So, we're gonna look at this diagram again. I am gonna drill this into your brains, you will be sleeping this, dreaming this diagram in your sleep tonight. This is going to be our path for the schedule as well. We need to schedule out all of these things. We need to schedule this thing, we need to schedule that thing. If we don't schedule it, guess what? It don't happen. (laughter) Gotta schedule it out so it happens. And we've gotta schedule it out so you can plan ahead, so you can get ahead. How great would it be if you had this so scheduled out that you had your complete marketing campaign done before it even started? That you could have that complete confidence that each piece of the puzzle was gonna fire just when you needed it to fire. So you weren't going to be distracted, unfocused, harried, hurried anymore. No anxiety, just watching the pieces fall into place. Alright so, now we can reverse engineer the schedule. And I'm gonna show you this from a couple of different directions and then get you into actually building the schedule itself. Which is on page 25 in the workbook. 25 in the workbook, you can write this out, you can use a spreadsheet for it, that's where we're headed in just a couple of minutes. So first I wanna look a calendar. And this is my very generic calendar of nothingness. But imagine that this is a calendar for the month that you're in maybe or the month that you're planning your marketing campaign for. The first thing I wanna figure out is when my on sale date is going to be. When is my pitch going to happen? Okay, when am I going to alert people that the thing is for sale? Starting with the end, right. That's my end, that's my goal. Everything I do needs to aim for that date. So that's the date I choose first. So I start there. And then I start working backwards. And the next thing I need to figure out is when my lead generation event is going to happen or when the period of time where I'm generating leads is going to be, actively generating leads. Maybe that's the time you're actively saying, "Hey, apply for a free consultation now." Or maybe that's the time you're actively promoting your webinar. Or maybe that's the time you're actively advertising your free course. That's your lead generation, you put that on the calendar next. Then you start thinking about all the other pieces of the puzzle. Okay, this is promotion for my lead generation. And then here's all of the things I'm going to do to build brand awareness. Okay, think that worked the way I wanted it to, yes, okay. So from here, from that pitch date to my lead generation date and then I backfill in all of the brand awareness stuff. So one, two, three, good? Okay, that's one to look at it. That's ultimately when I'm looking at my calendar, this is the way I want it to planned out. But this isn't the only way to think about it. We might also bring up this handy dandy chart that you are also having drilled into your eyeballs today. We can reverse engineer your schedule from the customer awareness spectrum. So I might say I need all of my customers to be product-aware or prospective customers to be product-aware by August 20th. That's gonna be my on sale date. Which means I'm gonna have follow-up in the most aware side of things from August 21st to 25th. Just as an example, these are not, don't write this down as like a these are when these things need to happen, it's just an example. People can get really literal here. That means lead generation in the solution-aware area is gonna happen between August 15th and 20th. I need to have everyone who's going to be solution-aware to be solution-aware by the 15th to 20th. And then I'm gonna layer in the other pieces of the puzzle, so that I'm moving from unaware to problem-aware and getting people where they need to be in the rest of the schedule. So again, I reverse engineered it in this direction and then I filled in the brand awareness with all the work that I'm going to do to get people ready for this piece of the campaign. Does that make sense? So now we've looked at it from a calendar view and we've looked at it from a customer awareness view. So that I know how that story needs to unfold. Don't just know what I'm going to be doing but I know how the story has to unfold to get the most amount of people ready to see my offer. Then I can turn that into a schedule. So the schedule is where I'm gonna break things down little bit by bit. What I like to do with this is start with that pitch date, the date where I'm actually going to put the product on sale, make the pitch, make the offer, I make that day zero. This is just the way I do things, you do not have to do this way, you can number it all in sequence. But I like to have that as day zero and then I lay out my follow-up from there. So, days one, two, three, that's my follow-up, and then back from there is sort of like my countdown. Like liftoff in T minus 10, nine, right. So that's what I'm doing here. That may be because I'm extremely nerdy, that this is the way I like to do it. You can do it however you wanna do it but this is how I lay it out. And just in the same way that I laid it out in the calendar and I laid it out on the customer awareness spectrum. When I go and lay out my list, the list of the plan, I'm thinking about, alright, I'm moving people now from unaware to problem-aware, problem-aware to solution-aware, solution-aware to product-aware, product-aware to most-aware. And I'm adding a purpose to each of the pieces of this puzzle too. I wanna introduce the problem, I wanna talk about the itch that they have. Then I'm going to use these pieces to create the call-to-action for my webinar. Then I'm gonna pitch. Then I'm gonna send out a case study, a brand promise email, an FAQ. And then I'm gonna document what channels I'm doing each of these things in as well. So I might put a post up on my blog and also send it out in email, might follow that up with a Facebook Live like Lisa talked about yesterday. And I'm gonna layer those things all out so that I'm covering as much territory as possible and so that as I cover that territory I'm moving people in the direction I want them to go. Make sense? Any questions about that? No, alright, great, you guys are so smart, yes. For products that are evergreen, that are available all the time, do you suggest that we pick a couple of times a year and follow through with this process? Or how does, I guess, how does evergreen plug into this? Yeah, so you could plan an automated campaign in the exact same way. It's just that the day, you know, T minus 10 essentially could happen, that happens the moment someone signs up for your list for instance. Then you automate that campaign through the number of days, day zero is when they get the automated pitch email and then they go through an automated follow-up. If that's how you construct your evergreen campaign, you're gonna get a lot higher conversion rate out of that than either just waiting for people to buy it or suggesting it every so often. Even when you have an evergreen product and even if it is truly evergreen, you're not closing the cart ever, you're not reopening, you're not doing a launch. You still wanna construct that story, that peak and valley piece of the campaign. You wanna lay things out so that you're moving people from where they are when they initially sign up to where they need to be to buy your product. And then following up from there. If you don't do that, you're leaving tons of money on the table. Okay, great question, yeah. If you're running ads for this campaign, do you, are you trying to like really boost your ads before lets say day 10, so that everyone is already aware of you and you're taking them through. Or are you still running ads on day minus three, like is it uniform across all that or-- We can get so much fun with this, okay. So if I'm running ads on this. I'm gonna spend most of my money from here to here. Okay. So I'm spending most of my money getting people brand-aware, warming them up essentially. And then I'm spending tons of money on taking people who are warm or even people who are on the chillier side and presenting that CTA for the webinar to them. In fact I might, I'm going to present these pieces of content to them and I'm also gonna re-target them with an offer directly to the webinar. And again, you can remix this for different types of campaigns. This is the one that I run most often, which is why that's what you're seeing here. And so I'm spending most of my budget here, I'm gonna reserve a small amount of my budget for advertising in this area because I wanna reinforce those follow-up messages just to the people who've already seen the offer. So essentially, your biggest audiences for advertising would be up at the top, maybe these are look-a-like audiences but in a Facebook parlance. These audience, the people that you're targeting with these, with these ads might just be your pixeled audiences. So warm people, people who've landed on specific pages on your site, on your site in general, people who have seen different offers of yours. And then the audience for these ads are going to be just the people who land on the sales page. And that way you're not wasting any money advertising to people who aren't interested in the product. So you're taking it from, you're spending a lotta money where you have the potential to reach as many people as possible with exactly what's on their mind right now, exactly what they are going to Facebook and being interested in, even outside of your campaign. You're reaching more people with that piece of your budget and then you're shrinking your budget as you get smaller and smaller audiences. Make sense? Yes, thank you. Yeah, that's when things get real fun. (laughter) So with advertising, and I think the thing to remember with advertising is that the goal isn't to do something extra from what you're already doing, it's to reinforce the marketing that you're already doing. If all you're doing is, or if you're thinking about your ad strategy outside of your overall marketing plan, you're going to waste money and you're, and it's not gonna be very effective. If instead you use advertising to amplify your excellent campaign, your excellent plan. You're gonna get a lot more effectiveness out of that and it's gonna be more a lot more cost effective as well. Lisa do you have a question? So you've got the FAQ on day three and I'm curious to know is that, that's not your sales cart close date though is it? No, I didn't actually, I can only fit so much before your eyes would've gone twitchy. So this is just an example. Okay, yeah. This is not a, don't copy this down into your schedule, that's not the point. The point of your schedule is to make your schedule. So yeah, I would, I mean follow applies. If I've got my cart open for a week, that might mean I have 10 follow-up emails. I'm big on follow-up. Yeah. So, this could keep going. If my cart is only open for, I did a campaign last, two weeks ago, that was just 24 hours long and I sent four emails. Wow, so from event to, to the whole cart open was 24 hours? Yes. And four emails. Okay, so in this example that's kind of like threeish day or three days to a week. But a week is usually maximum 'cause I think I extend that way too long and I know that's one of the mistakes I do. It really depends on what you're selling but by and large I think most people leave their carts open too long. They leave that buying window open too long. It zaps all the energy, so again, this is all building energy that you're releasing right here. And you don't, when you release that energy, you are releasing the vast majority of it. And the longer you leave that cart open, the less energy you have to get to the very end. And that's not just for you, that's for your customers too. They care less at the end of your cart open time when your cart is open for so long. So yeah, I think for, you know, for a course, a week is fantastic. You do not need more than a week. If it's a retreat or a conference on the other hand, your cart may be open for months. And that's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. You wanna take that into account when you're building your schedule and think about some creative ways you're gonna get, you know, you're gonna create energy in the middle. But no, by and large I think more people should shorten the amount of time that things are available. If they have that kind of open, close element to what they're offering. If it's evergreen, you can find some kind of creative ways to create urgency in the follow-up period. But even just following up, even if you don't have the opportunity to send a last chance email. Just following up and giving more people, more chances for people to follow through and actually buy is huge. I mean how many times do you get a pitch email, and I'm not just talking about digital products and online business education. I'm talking about the pair of shoes that's brand new at Toms that you really liked. How many times does Toms send you an email about the same exact pair of shoes before you decide to buy it? Oh, those fabulous green shoes I had on. I got a gift certificate for them, went to the site, obviously got pixeled. Gave them my email address. Started getting emails from them. It was probably 30 emails with the same pair of shoes in it before I bought them, right. I didn't even open half of them, didn't matter. Every time the, it popped up in my inbox I was remembering, hey, I really meant to buy those shoes. So you gotta remember and trust the process, that by the time someone actually sees your offer because you've built your campaign this way, they want to buy your offer. So following up with that, we're gonna get to this when we actually talk about follow-up. But when you're following up, it's not, you're not bothering them. You're reminding them about something they already want to do. Because you've gotten rid of all the other people in the flow of things before you get to that follow-up. The other people who don't wanna buy, you're not talking to them. You're only talking to people who genuinely want to buy. Not all of them will, in fact the vast majority of them won't. But you're only talking to people who do want to buy. Michelle. So, I'm a one-on-one service provider. And obviously as one-on-one service providers, we have capacity. Yes. And I was wondering how does this work when you're, because there's sometimes where I'm at capacity and I'm generating a waiting list and then there's sometimes when nothing is happening. So how would you recommend planning out your schedule when you're dealing with capacity issues and you're not exactly sure when the dry spell is gonna hit and you need to do some serious lead generation? Yeah, I think there's a couple of different ways that you could approach this. One of them is making sure that you're actually driving people to a wait list on a regular basis. And so your campaign is maybe built more around a wait list than it is actually purchasing from you. So that's one way to do it, you kind of truncate the process at the wait list. Or you make the conversion of it the wait list and not just lead generation. I think another one is that you have a campaign planned and maybe it doesn't go on your calendar but you have the campaign all scheduled out so that if you're like, "You know, I haven't really hit my lead goal for this month, "or I haven't hit my free consultation goal for this month, "I think it's time to deploy the plan." And then you're like, "Okay, no problem, these are my posts, "these are my emails, these are the things that I do "when I'm driving new leads." And so you've still got it planned out, you're still taking a lot of the guess work out of it. You're just waiting for the right time to deploy it. My preference would be that over time you develop a feel for how quickly new leads are coming in from how quickly your capacity is opening up. And you build campaigns on a schedule that means your pipeline is regularly getting refilled so that you never have one of those down times. Make sense? That totally makes sense. Lacey, now we've got the questions coming, I love it. I just wanted to follow up with that because I'm in the same boat. And my plan has been to use that capacity as an urgency, a sense of urgency. So I'm going to be doing a campaign saying a lot of people come to me fourth quarter. I have eight spots, now is the time to book. You know, and I'm gonna be doing that like in the end of August because I want that wait list. So I'm gonna plan my campaigns quarterly I think and use that I only have X number of spots quarterly, please get on my list right now as the urgency. Yeah, yeah, and so you can do a campaign like that to your overall audience, your overall list, get them on a wait list and then take that wait list and do a campaign to the wait list that, and it can be an extremely short campaign because these are people who are extremely ready to buy. Where you say, "Alright, spots are open, "as a reminder, here are all the reasons you need to hire me." And then kind of create a couple of follow-ups if necessary and get those spots booked. But yeah, I mean in a business like yours where you've only got eight spots to fill, or you only have three spots to fill, or you only have 10 spots to fill. Even though those are very high ticket items or can be very high ticket items and it seems really daunting to get that many sales. You only need eight sales, right. And so your sales cycle, your campaign can probably be much shorter. 'Cause the people who are signing up are interested already and you only have eight sales to make, so like let's just make that happen, okay.