Why Every Entrepreneur Needs to Run a 5-Day Challenge
Have you ever thought about running a 5-day challenge? It’s a great tool that offers many benefits and is suitable for businesses of all sizes, in almost any industry. During a 5-day challenge, people work together toward a common goal over a short period of time. It’s a “challenge,” so it should be challenging. Through emails, livestreams, and/or videos, participants are given a specific new task each day that will help them achieve the overall goal. Read on to find out more about why every entrepreneur needs a Challenge.
Challenges are usually offered free of charge and used as a lead generation tool. There are a number of ways challenges can benefit your business and nurture leads. They can help you build your list, expand your community, boost your reputation, or guide participants to purchase a specific product or service.
Why 5 Days and Why is it That Every Entrepreneur Needs a Challenge?
Challenges come in all shapes and sizes. Why is 5 days an ideal length of time? There are several reasons. First, it’s easier for you. Longer means more complicated, so a shorter challenge is an ideal way for you to learn the ropes. Five days means less pressure and less commitment – for you, and your audience.
For your participants, 5 days is just enough time to learn something useful and get results. Some challenges extend to 10, 21, 30, even 90 days. In these challenges, people are establishing new habits that require more time to learn.
A 5-day challenge gives participants a quick win that boosts their confidence. They associate this positive outcome with you, which primes them to purchase future offers.
Why Your Business Needs a 5-Day Challenge
Every entrepreneur needs a challenge… a 5-day Challenge, more specifically, because it works for almost all industries and niches. It’s a method that doesn’t require a great deal of resources or tech, so even small businesses can use it. Your participants can benefit greatly from the value this fun and engaging opportunity offers, but there are some even bigger benefits for you.
Find Leads and Make Sales. The main benefit is that this is a low-cost and low-risk way to find leads, build your list, and sell your products and services. At the end of your challenge, your participants have made a positive change in their lives and it’s all because of you. They’ll be ready to discover what additional value you offer.
Boost Your Reputation. Your challenge will help you establish yourself as an expert in your niche. Your participants will get a quick win, which they’ll associate with you. As this audience of happy participants grows, so will your reputation for helping people solve their problems.
Build an Engaged Community. Your challenges build a community of loyal followers and brand advocates. They work together toward a common goal, holding each other accountable and offering feedback. You can keep these relationships going through online groups and develop other opportunities for further engagement.
Promote a Related Offer. Your challenge can be used as a jumping off point for a product launch or offer you’d like to promote. Align its topic with something you want to promote and you can upsell participants to your offer. The offer could be a product or a service such as coaching.
A Challenge Is Easy to Run. 5-day challenges are relatively easy to run. Your participants are doing the actual work while you’re there to provide feedback, guidance, and encouragement. There is some content necessary, but not a great deal, and tech tools make the entire process much easier. For example, you can pre-record presentations to use over and over again.
5-Day Challenge Pitfalls to Avoid
Does a 5-day challenge sound like a lead generation tool your business can benefit from? It’s a great and relatively easy way to create engagement with your audience and boost business, but there are a few pitfalls you need to avoid as you go about planning and implementing.
1. Don’t Overcommit
The first time you create a challenge, it will take quite a bit of work to set up and run. But each time you run a challenge, it will get easier. Your goal should be to deliver the maximum value without making it too hard on yourself. This includes things like taking advantage of automation tools or using platforms and tech everyone is familiar with.
2. Don’t Overhelp
It’s only natural that you want your participants to succeed. You may want to solve every problem they face, all at once. But remember that the goal is to lead them to further engagement with you. Your challenge should have one specific focus and not go beyond that. For further help, lead your participants to other content and offers.
3. Don’t Overcomplicate
Your challenge needs to challenge, but it shouldn’t be overly complicated. There should be a clear final goal and each day they should take a concrete step toward that goal. Also remember to keep the registration process, daily tasks, and tech simple, or else people may get frustrated and drop out.
4. Don’t Overwhelm
You’ll need to create content for your challenge, but don’t go overboard. Give your participants exactly what they need to get the job done, and no more. Don’t set the goal too high or assign too much daily homework. Your participants need to feel a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction every day.
5. Don’t Go Straight into Sales Mode
A 5-day challenge is a great way to lead participants to a product or service, but don’t do it right away. Your primary focus during the challenge should be helping participants achieve their goal, with no strings attached.
The challenge should showcase your expertise and build participants’ trust and respect. If you go directly into sales, this will erode their confidence in you. They’ll view your challenge as yet another sales job on the internet.
Giving participants something valuable for free will keep them engaged and interacting with you, and your content, long after the challenge has ended. Through this long-term engagement, you will be presented with plenty of opportunities to sell.
How to Get Started with Your First 5-Day Challenge
The success of a 5-day challenge relies solely on the results it gets for your participants. To make yours a success, you need to understand the needs of your audience and offer a solution to their problem.I believe wholeheartedly that every entrepreneur needs a challenge to connect more easily with our target audience and community.
If you haven’t done so already, start by creating an ideal customer profile. This is a profile that describes your target market, or the person who would most benefit from your expertise and products/services. Through this ideal customer profile, you can gain an understanding of the unique challenges your audience faces.
Once you know your audience and their issues, choose one problem to focus on. Think about your own expertise and skills. Where have you helped people in the past and delivered results? Find a problem you can either solve, or offer relief for, in 5 days and make that your topic.
When brainstorming ideas, remember that the whole idea is to give them a quick win. It doesn’t have to completely change their lives, but it should be enough of a change that they see you as a helpful expert and want more from you.
Once you have your challenge idea, you can start planning the content and marketing it to your audience. Create a schedule for the 5 days, mapping out how they’ll work through the issues step by step. Create any content that will help them achieve daily wins, getting them closer to accomplishing the overall goal. When I say that every entrepreneur needs a challenge, I mean that you will be challenged as well.
One of the great advantages of running challenges is that you’ll get real-time feedback from participants, learning more about them and how you are uniquely suited to help. A challenge will help you build a relationship with participants, growing an audience of engaged and loyal brand advocates. I hope you can now see why every entrepreneur needs a challenge, and why the 5-Day Challenge model makes sense.
I’m bestselling Wall Street Journal and USA Today author, marketing strategist, and entrepreneur Connie Ragen Green and I would love to connect further with you to help you to achieve your goals. If you are interested in learning how to optimize the syndication of your content, please take a look at my popular Syndication Optimization training course and consider coming aboard to increase your visibility, credibility, and profitability.
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