From the marketing perspective, a challenge is an activity that takes a fixed time to complete and takes a user from point A to point B. As a SaaS company, you might think using this or that tool is already a difficult task and it’s not worth overwhelming your users with another challenge. However, challenges or hackathons are meant to simplify the life of your users, help them achieve something meaningful, and do it in a fun way. And in case, humans tend to welcome challenges and participate in them as they help us understand our potential, become confident and accountable, and have that nice feeling of reaching a goal. So today we will cover the following sections in our post:
Checklist: Your 7-step guide on how to create a viral challenge (+ BONUS example)
A challenge is a marketing campaign. You need to have a clear plan for organizing and managing it, be specific with what you are trying to do and achieve. Here is a 7-point checklist that will help you make sure your challenge is ready to go live:
Now it’s time for the BONUS! I am bringing a practical example of what a 7-day challenge will look like. Imagine we are organizing it for an SEO and content writing tool. The goal of our challenge is to help writers create an SEO-optimized blog post in 7 days. Our target audience is limited to freelance and in-house writers who want to create content that ranks. Our challenge is free and will last for 7 days. A company could launch a 7-day challenge like this: Day 1: Sign up for the software and create an account (with screenshots, short demos, and instructions) Day 2: Do keyword research and decide on primary and secondary keywords (keyword research tool and process recommendations) Day 3: Create an outline for the post, understand the optimal word count, optimal number of sections (+tips/templates for a perfect outline) Day 4: Research the topic and all the sections you have decided to include Day 5: Write the article Day 6: Optimize and finalize the article (meta description, URL, title, improve readability, add images, etc) 7 tips to promote your challenge and make it go viralYou decided what your challenge will look like and now is the time to think about promotion strategies. Here are a few ideas:
Use these promotion ideas as they are the answers to how to create a viral challenge. 6 SaaS companies advice on how to create a viral challenge: Key takeawaysThis post wouldn’t be practical if we didn’t interview SaaS companies on this topic. We asked them what challenges they organized, what results they reached, and what is behind a successful challenge campaign. Our first contributor’s company operates in the health technology sector. They organized a challenge to help people build a positive attitude. #1 Joe Stafura, CEO at the Affective Health, Software solutions for healthcare“At the time we launched the Happiness Challenge we felt that some people might benefit if we gave them a “window” into the good things that were going on in the midst of unsettling times. We approached it like most programs on our GoThrive.io platform, developing a program that generated thoughts and perspectives that might typically remain uncovered, using the principles and process of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. The Happiness Challenge program was sent to a variety of groups, with a completion rate of 71.43%. We didn’t drive new business as much as awareness of our company during a time where marketing new ideas were particularly difficult due to the uncertainty and palatable risk that everyone was feeling throughout 2020. In summary, we set out to show that Affective Data can provide a useful understanding of your situation and the options that provide the greatest opportunities for one chance of achieving “Better Days”. In our view of our new rebranding as Affective.health, the reason to have a challenge is to create a new way for customers to see the benefits of what you do in some way that delivers perceivable value or benefit.” Our next contributor’s company frequently organizes challenges and contests for their followers on social media. #2 Alina Clark, Co-Founder & Marketing Director at CocoDoc, Online PDF editor“We often run monthly challenges on our social media platforms to push for more engagement, and more onboarding. Our most frequent challenge has been the eye-pretzel challenge. Essentially, we print a full graphic on our social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. The users simply have to find the candy nestled somewhere within the graphics. We’ve also tried our hands at social media challenges. For instance, we offer free lifetime subscriptions to users who creatively use our Saas tools in their daily jobs. Such a challenge is often based on the amount of engagement that a user can get to their idea. Works great for our engagement and brand positioning too. So far, similar initiatives have driven valuable user feedback, new sign ups, increased user loyalty. To succeed, your marketing challenge should be simple enough, yet still interesting enough to attract users. A complex system will confuse and push away prospective participants. The easiest challenges are those which engage them. Besides, there’s no point in having people participate in a challenge on your site if they complete the challenge and leave the site. A game should always direct the participant to other pages of your site. This will drive product awareness to the side of the customer”. Our next author talks about the role of incentives in participant activation and engagement. #3 Emilia Korczynska Head of Marketing at Userpilot, Product Growth Platform“Postfity, a social media marketing tool, has A/B tested an onboarding checklist built with Userpilot with and without an incentive. The new users have a challenge to complete all the onboarding tasks (leading to key activation points) within 2 days in order to get a 50% discount for any plan they choose. The checklist completion rate went up from 27% to 40%. This shows offering an extra incentive to complete a task has a positive impact on user activation.” Our next author shares a quick but important tip on how to bring your challenge participants together. #4 Timothy Robinson, CEO at InVPN, VPN reviews“I recommend making a private Facebook group for your challenge. It’s a great method to connect with participants throughout the challenge and stay in touch with your community after it’s over. Make a catchy name for the group that corresponds to your brand or expertise. Make sure the privacy settings are set to ‘closed’ so you can restrict who has access to the group and protect your members’ privacy as much as possible. If you’re concerned about a lack of participants, keep in mind that you can encourage friends and relatives to join the challenge and group! People who support you will usually be delighted to be a part of your community.” Our fifth author’s company organized a challenge where business/tech experts helped nonprofits with free advice and showed some ways to improve their operations. #5 Frank Bauch, Director of Communications at Tonkean, Adaptive business operations platform“Tonkean users include some of the most advanced biz operations professionals in the world. They tend to work at big, enterprise companies, helping them reshape business processes to run more efficiently. Their knowledge of systems and workflows is elite. Unfortunately, nonprofits, despite their passion and amazing work to affect change, never have access to these expensive biz professionals. So, we decided to inspire our community of users to help those smaller orgs in our communities who are making a true societal impact. That’s why we helped to create “Changemakers”, a week-long hackathon where we (along with our other sponsors) connected some of tech’s smartest minds with the nonprofit projects that needed their help to run efficiently. Nonprofits who needed operational/technical help were paired with ops experts from tech companies to work with them for a week to revamp their operations. It became a big success, with dozens of ‘makers’ helping 17 nonprofits from around the world. It was so successful we decided to make it an ongoing event to connect nonprofits with the operational experts they need, for free.” Our last contributor talks about a contest that helped their client get user-generated content and increase Facebook engagement. #6 Brenton Thomas, Founder at Twibi, Digital marketing agency“At Twibi, we’ve run a number of challenges for our clients. Most notably, we ran a challenge targeting business owners on Facebook. We challenged them to share a snapshot of a reporting dashboard they created using our client’s software. We then reposted the most impressive dashboards. The outcome has led to some of the most liked social posts of all time on our client’s Facebook page.” Final thoughtsThe success of your challenge, like any other marketing campaign, needs to be measured. And you can do it by tracking
Would you like me to help you create a viral challenge for your users? Let’s chat. The post Viral challenge: An underutilized growth tactic for your SaaS company first appeared on Natalie Luneva. from https://www.natalieluneva.com/blog/how-to-create-a-viral-challenge/
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Natalie Luneva is a growth and leadership coach for SaaS founders. She worked with over one hundred companies. Drawing from her 10+ years of marketing and team leadership experience, Natalie helps bootstrapped SaaS founders scale their startups, get unstuck and grow as successful leaders. ArchivesNo Archives Categories |