It’s Friday, Friday Gotta Get Down on Friday

HELLO, RB TEAM!

This blog post about training from Week 6 is being written from Madison, Wisconsin.

Here’s what I did for last week’s trainings:

1. Attend a Twitter Chat!
2. Digital Marketer (EP) – Building a Promotion Gameplan
3. Attend a Webinar – Go Beyond Lead Scoring: How to Leverage Predictive Analytics starts in 1 Day
4. Code Challenge – Build a Landing Page with Bootstrap

#CoChat – 7/30/15

GAH! I love this so much. I was late to the chat, because I had the wrong hashtag…

I looked up #CoChat earlier and there was no announcement that I saw saying it was starting so I assumed it wasn’t happening but then checked again and VIOLA! There it was.

I was only on for 10 minutes and was toward the end of the chat. They were discussing SEO.

I love how fast it goes. It’s like organized chaos and it seems like they have a key group that are always engaged. I think it is a less valuable version of a slack community. Similar concepts. I think they should have a Slack Community.

Digital Marketer (EP) – Building a Promotion Gameplan

1 – Start Here

• From the Author
• Getting the Most Out of Your Execution Plan
• How to Use This Section
• Why Create a Promotional Calendar
• Why Track Promotions

2 – Understanding Promotions

• What is a Promotion?
• What Kinds of Promotions are There?
• Can I Run My Promotion Forever?
• Promotions Versus Evergreen Funnels
• Compiling Your Product List
• Building Your Promotion

3 – Creating a Promotional Calendar

• Creating Your Calendar
• Choosing Which Promotions to Schedule When
• A 1-Month Digital Marketer Promotional Calendar, Explained
• Advanced: A 3-Month Digital Marketer Promotional Calendar
• Calendar Planning Tips

4 – Reporting & Tracking a Specific Promotion

• The Basics of Promotion Reporting
• Understand the Promotion Tracking Sheet
• Report on Your Promotion (Visits)
• Reports on Your Promotion (Sales)
• Download Our Sample Promotion Tracking Sheet

5 – Understanding How to Improve a Promotion

• The Basics of Analyzing a Promotion
• Analyze Your Promotion Performance
• Turning Your Promotion Into Evergreen Content

What is a Promotion?

A promotion consists of you choosing a product or service that you want to focus on with your marketing. You then turn that product into an offer, creating a funnel, a sales pitch, and your hook.

Once that is built out, you direct traffic towards that message. How is that different than what you do every day? Because you’re only going to run this offer for a certain amount of time. That is what makes it a promotion.

Promotions are great because they focus your audience’s attention. They create mini-events when you have a reason to focus on some product and your audience has a reason to listen.

The fact that promotions are limited is what creates scarcity! This works for physical products, too – these can be limited by time or by a specific volume of merchandise you allocate for the promotion.

Scarcity is an important activator because it gives your audience a reason they need to purchase or opt-in now. When an offer is time-sensitive, deferring the purchase decision is no longer an option. Individuals can either act now and gain, or wait and miss out. There is no in-between.

The basic equation for a successful promotion is:

Product/Service + Offer + Scarcity = Promotion

What Kinds of Promotions are There?

Thinking about promotions can be a little overwhelming! That’s because there are an almost infinite number of ways to promote your products and services. Luckily, there’s an easy way to pick the right promotion for your business.

All you need to do is decide exactly what you want your audience to do, then design your promotion to encourage that behavior.

There are 3 key promotional categories:

1. Monetization
2. Activation
3. Acquisition

Let’s break down the goal of each one:

• Monetization promotions are about making money. These take your engaged list members and sell them your core offer or a new product you’re launching. These are the bread and butter of running a profitable business, though they need activation and acquisition promotions to build and warm up an audience in order to be successful. Affiliate promotions will fall into this category as well.

• Activation promotions are about engaging and exciting your email list. During these promotions, your main goal is to turn unengaged people on your list into buyers. You can also use them to excite your audience about a particular topic. At Digital Marketer, we often use Flash Sales as activation promotions. These big discounts on your products or services create value that subscribers find it hard to say no to. To learn more about Flash Sales, access the Facebook Flash Sale Formula Execution Plan here.

• Acquisition promotions are about building your list. Free giveaways and lead magnets make great acquisition promotions, because they provide low-commitment, high-value introductory offers. And by including a core offer upset, you can acquire leads and customers at a profit. An Acquisition promotion might only break even and may even take a short-term loss.  Remember, these promotions are intended to generate leads and low-dollar buyers.  Don’t worry, you can target these new leads with more profitable Monetization Promotions in the future!

These are not hard and fast categories. Activation promotions can also build your list and acquisition promotions can make you money. These categories are just helpful ways to frame your promotional goals and define what success will look like.

Advanced tip: you can stack promotions – use lower-commitment promotions to segment your audience and pinpoint the most engaged members. Then hit that segment with a monetization promotion related to what activated them. Often, the best product launches use an activation promotion to create an audience segment they later target with a follow-up monetization promotion.

A 1-Month Digital Marketer Promotional Calendar, Explained

At Digital Marketer, they try to plan their promotional calendar in terms of what they want to accomplish each month.

They try to fit in 2 monetization promotions, 1 acquisition promotion and 1 activation promotion so they can 1) make money, 2) grow our list, and 3) keep our list engaged. (They also send 4-5 promotional emails each week).

You don’t need to have that many promotions in each month, nor do you need to email that often. You should adapt your promotional structure to fit the way you already communicate with your audience.

It’s also worth mentioning that our most important channel is email – this is our largest driver of traffic. So when we put a promotion on the calendar for a specific set of dates, that indicates when we will mail about the promotion. We supplement this with ads, website banners and affiliate mailings.

Attend a Webinar – Go Beyond Lead Scoring: How to Leverage Predictive Analytics starts in 1 Day

Landing Page

Burk

Alex is probably thinking about food right now.