S3E12 | How a free challenge can increase your group engagement

“There’s a lot of advantages to doing a challenge, you’re growing your group, growing your list, increasing engagement, increasing your reputation and your visibility of being known, having an offer, and creating revenue for whatever it is that you’re offering.”

I absolutely love running challenges. I think it’s fun to see people engage, implement, and get results. And other great side effects of that are growing your group, growing your list, and monetizing that challenge. 

Some of my previous challenges had people asking me how I ran my challenges, and how I was able to get such great results. After one challenge I had a membership launch, and it was so successful my inbox and messenger notifications were dinging nonstop. Clients, participants, members in my membership, and other entrepreneurs were begging me to teach them how I designed, planned, filled, and then converted that challenge into 142 new members to my membership program. So I created the Challenge Workshop to show my process! 

Just to illustrate how effective this challenge was, let me give you some numbers. 998 people joined my challenge, and 740 new people joined my free group. (The other 250 were likely already in my group.) I then got 142 members into my membership, 50 annual members and 92 monthly members. So from that post-challenge launch there was a $21,000 revenue. 

Wow, right? All that from one challenge! And in addition to that boost in income, holding a challenge also really increased engagement in my group. 

About a month before I held my Engage and Grow Your Group Challenge, I went into my group and asked who wanted to be notified when we started the challenge. From that post, we had hundreds of people saying they wanted to join. So when my page for the challenge was ready, I went to every person who replied and commented “Hey, I’m so glad you’re interested in this, here’s a link to sign up!” That post alone boosted engagement, because not only did it get a lot of comments, but I boosted it by acknowledging everyone in the comments. (Quick tip here, don’t send the link to your challenge more than 3 weeks beforehand, or it will increase the chances that it will slip their minds!)

Another part of the challenge that really drove engagement was the kickoff party. I found that when I ran my challenges, on the first day of the challenge, people would start talking about it in different groups, and it would stir up the excitement. And people would start to join, but oftentimes they would join too late, when most of the challenge was already done. That got me thinking about how I could increase the anticipation and boost engagement before the challenge started, and I came up with a kickoff party so we could bring in people a little earlier. 

The kickoff party was basically me on Facebook Live letting people know what the group was, what the challenge was about, and what great results people had gotten in the past, which was why I was running it again. I also went over some logistical things, like what they should do if they can’t find their emails, or what they should expect. 

So we did our challenge every day, there was a little bit of homework, something very easy for them to do. On average everything took about five minutes to do, though some tasks took a bit longer. Then participants would come back to the group and acknowledge what they did. It was so great to watch people implement these strategies and get results!

These acknowledgement posts, where people would report back to the group and share their progress, made the engagement in my group explode! And those posts also got people who weren’t in the challenge yet to consider joining. 

In addition to these homework posts, you’ll also have people creating their own posts in the group because they have questions. Challenges are a great way to get people to post on their own in your group. During a challenge everyone is on the same page, they’re all doing the same assignments within your challenge. When they’re doing that, they’ll be more comfortable to go into the group and ask “Hey, has anyone else had this come up?” It just opens things up completely. 

These are just some of the reasons I LOVE challenges. In our next episode, I’ll be covering how you can monetize your challenges, even after they’ve passed! Thanks for tuning in!