13: How to Set Up your 5-Day Challenge for Success with Zach Spuckler

Welcome to the Course Creators MBA podcast. I'm your host, Destiny Kopp. And in this podcast we're covering actionable tips to grow your online course business. And I have a special guest with me today, I have Zach Spuckler. Zach is the founder of Heart, Soul and Hustle and host of a podcast by the same name where he teaches business owners how to leverage Facebook ads and launches to strategically maximize leads, conversions and sales, ultimately profit. At just 25, Zach has helped his students execute six figure launches and create sustainable sales funnels that leverage Facebook ads that allow them to work less and profit more. Zach, thank you so much for joining me. I'm so happy to have you here with me today.

Hey, Destiny, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here too and.

I know I have tons of questions for you guys. We are going to be talking with Zach about five day challenges and I have a lot of questions. But before we get started, why don't you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your journey and how you got started and how you got to where you are today. Sure.

So my name is Zach Spuckler. Like you said, my company is Hard Soul and Hustle. And we were founded on the basic principle that anything can be done with heart, soul and a little bit of hustle. And so I started my company back in 2015 when I had been in the online marketing space in several different forms for a number of years at that point. So I've done everything you can imagine online, from website flipping to Amazon affiliates to direct sales. I did a food blog, and I've dabbled in so many different things. And in 2015, I really sat down. I was running a relatively successful food blog. We were doing a couple hundred dollars a month in revenue, a few hundred dollars a month actually. And things were going well. We created digital products, we had a course, Everything was going really well. We had built up a really great Pinterest following. We still get traffic to that website from Pinterest. And I kind of sat down and said like, you know, the food blogging had burnt me out. I was doing a couple of recipes a week, one to two recipes a week. I was doing all the editing, all the photography, all the writing. I was doing everything myself. And I really started to burn out. And I said, what is keeping me going with this food blog? And when I got really honest with myself, it was the marketing and the promotion. That's what I loved. And so I kind of pivoted and said, I'm going to teach People how to market the way I market. And so what I did was I started using a live streaming platform. At the time it was called Periscope. Now Facebook Live has sort of eclipsed that, but there was a live sharing platform where I basically went on every day and I taught what I knew about Facebook advertising. I've been running Facebook ads for a little while then, and I had used them for my food blog, to fill up my digital programs, to sell some of my products. And I basically started doing Periscopes, talking about how I was running Facebook ads. And that led to me landing a number of clients over about 30 day period. And people started asking me, how are you landing clients? What are you doing? And one of the core values that we have at heart, soul and hustle, is transparency. And I said, look, I can't show you how to make a million dollars. I can't show you how to make a six figure business. But what I can do is show you how I've landed four clients in the past 30 days with Periscope. Is that something you'd be interested in? We threw together a program checkout page. Really it was just a PayPal button. We did a live stream and we made $1,200 of people who are interested in learning how I was using live streaming. I literally went live on Periscope, asked people if they wanted it, they said yes. And I was like, okay, cool. Created a PayPal button in real time and we did $1,200 and then over the weekend we ended up doing $2,200 of that product. Well, fast forward, that became a six figure product. We launched a second six figure product and now we have a product that's done that. We have now we have a flagship product that's $1,000 that has over 600 students in it, where we teach people how to leverage the power of five day challenges. So the business has really grown and evolved from these little mini $97 courses to a flagship product that's a signature system, a signature offer, and really teaches people everything they know about leveraging or needs to know about leveraging. A five day challenge.

So you kind of just walked me into my first question. As you know, we have lot of course creators that listen to this podcast and I really want to ask you, and I know you have a lot of experience in five day challenges. I want to ask you what makes five day challenges so appealing for course creators and when should they consider a five day challenge? Maybe over a webinar or even maybe doing a Video series or what are. So what are the, I guess the pros, if you would, about five day challenges?

Yeah, that's a really great question. And here's the thing I like to say. Look, I always like to lead with the disclaimer that everything works okay? Webinars work, video series work, email marketing campaigns work. It all seriously works, okay? It's just a matter of what works best for your business. Now, like I said in the intro, and I always like to mention that I have a signature course on five day challenges, so I'm biased. So when you listen to this episode, listen through the lens of, look, this guy has some skin in the game and he obviously thinks five day challenges are the best for a reason. Right? All of that being said, what I really love about five day challenges are, number one, they are really great for warming people up. So if you got a small audience or a big audience, you can walk them through five days of content that really provides value and creates a deeper connection with them. So unlike say a webinar or a video series where it's perfect and it's scripted and it's tailored, yes, that's good and it has a time and a place. But in a five day challenge, for those who are still learning copywriting or sales persuasion, just by showing up every day and providing value, you can lead people towards wanting to purchase. The second thing is they're ridiculously forgiving. I always like to tell the story I have of a client who ran a webinar. They had three thousands of people registered for this webinar and 20 minutes out, 20 minutes in, it cut out. And it's like, what do you do?

Right?

And they had to scramble and luckily they salvaged it. They're strategic, but that's just the thing. They had to salvage it.

If you're doing part would actually. I don't know what would happen. I think I would panic in that.

Yeah, it's like you would panic, but with a challenge. Let's say an email doesn't go out, okay? You fix it up and you send the email out a couple hours late. A live stream doesn't work, no worries. You throw a post up and say, hey, my live stream is going to be at three instead of two today.

Right.

So it's like, it's very forgiving in its nature that if you continue to put out relevant content over the course of five days, even if it's not perfectly timed, people are going to connect with and enjoy that content. And then the last thing that I like is it's highly conversional. So we see people convert anywhere from 2 to 4% on cold audiences and 4 to 6% on warm audiences with when they run challenges. And when I say cold and warm, what I mean is people who are already in your fold as warm, like they like your website, they visited your page, they've opted into one of your content, they're on your email list versus people who have never heard of you before but see a Facebook ad and join your challenge. It's highly conversional and it works. So that's kind of what we love about five day challenges is highly forgiving, highly engaging, and highly conversational.

So you sold me on it. So let's just say that someone, they've decided to do a five day challenge, they know it's going to probably be the best funnel for their business. What would you say are their first steps?

Yeah. So the first step to getting your five day challenge right is to figure out what the topic of your five day challenge should be on. And we follow what we call the PSP model and the PSP stands for problem solution problem. And one of the best examples I can give is one of the challenges that we actually ran where we were selling our Facebook ads program. Now, if you're listening to this, don't go googling it. We don't sell a Facebook ads program anymore, but we used to sell a Facebook ads program where we would teach people how to leverage Facebook ads successfully, to grow their email list, to build their opt ins, you know, et cetera. And what was really great is people were saying, you know, hey, I want to learn Facebook ads. But they weren't telling us that that was their problem. So problem solution. Problem stands for the problem people think they have the solution they want and the problem you know they have or the root problem. So people in my audience weren't actually saying, oh, I need Facebook ads. Oh, I need Facebook ads. Don't get me wrong. Did they know about Facebook ads?

Sure, sure, Right.

But what they were saying was, I'm not getting enough sales. I need more sales. How do I get more sales? And so what we said was, okay, if you want more sales, set up a sales funnel.

Right?

And so the solution is a sales funnel Problem. No sales solution. Sales funnel. But that leads to a new problem. I don't have any traffic. And then we can enter our Facebook ads offer because there's now saying, I need traffic. And they know Facebook ads generate traffic versus me saying, you need traffic by my Facebook ads program. Just to give you another example. In the non marketing niche, it's like if you're doing a clean eating challenge, sure, your audience knows about clean eating, they're aware that clean eating can help them, but are they actually trying to eat clean or do they want to lose a pant size? Right, so the problem is I want to drop a dress size by my wedding. The solution is here's a five day eating plan to help you drop a dress size and then the new problem is, how do I sustain this clean eating?

Right.

And if you're not sure about this kind of methodology, think about it like this. If you solve the problem that people tell you they have, would you rather be told what your problem is or would you rather have somebody offer you a solution? So many of us, especially in the marketing space, are used to being told what our problem is instead of being heard. And being heard can make a massive difference. So it's the difference between saying, I'm telling you what your problem is, buy my thing and I hear you, let me help you solve that problem and then we can go deeper if you want to continue.

I love that. So problem, solution, problem. That's how we come up with our challenge topics. What do they do next? Let's just say they have the challenge topic, they know it's the right one. What is their next step? How do they go about developing this challenge?

Yeah, so the next step is to basically say, how do I create that solution in five steps or less.

Right.

So you're basically going to walk people through and say, here is how to get these five days of content.

Right.

Or here's how to get these results in just five days. So once you do that, you then can go through and say, okay, now that I've got the content, I'm going to write out five emails. So every day you're going to send them an email during the challenge and it's going to be about five to 10 minutes of content and five to 10 minutes of action. So every day during the challenge, we want to get people into micro actions. So let's use that sales funnel example that we mentioned earlier. Every day we gave people a template and had them fill out the template to write a really short email. It could be done in about five to 10 minutes if they really sat down and focused.

Right.

So we did the five day sales funnel challenge. Super simple, super straightforward. The second thing is, every day you're going to do a supplemental live stream. So you're going to do content inside of the email, but then you're also going to Invite them to a daily livestream where you just provide supplemental content. So maybe day one is like, here's the email to write and then day one's livestream is, here's why that email works and here's how to install that email on your autoresponder service. Right, so you want to do that each day and then finally you want to invite them to join you on Facebook. So you want to invite them to engage with your posts and your group. You will set up a group for your five day challenge as well. You want to invite them to engage with the post and the group on your Facebook page so that people are engaging with the content, creating organic reach, and ultimately engaging with your. Your content. So you're kind of hitting them from three different angles. A daily email, a daily livestream, and a daily post on Facebook.

Okay, so let me just ask you this question because you talked about getting the participants engaged and you know, a lot of challenges that I've been involved in or had access to, people start out like really, really excited and then it kind of tapers off as you go through the week. So, so what are some of your tips on keeping the participants engaged? Whether it's through email or in the Facebook group or however you're doing it through the lives? What are your suggestions for that?

Yeah, so in terms of keeping engagement up, look, we have what we call the engagement ratio. And what that means is for every hundred people that sign up for your challenge, about 40 to 60 will join the group and of that, about 5 to 10 will engage. So the first thing to know is that, look, there is the reality that engagement is going to drop as you continue the promotion.

Okay.

As you continue, things are going to fall off. Okay, so that's normal. That happens. We don't need to stress about that. But ways to keep engagement up are doing that content pushing people. Sorry, let me say that again. The best way to do that is to make sure that you're putting that content out there on a daily basis. So give people the opportunity to engage via Facebook. Give people the opportunity to engage via email. Give them the opportunity to engage via livestream. Everybody digests content in a different way. And so if you give people multiple opportunities to engage with and connect with you, then, then that's going to help you the most. That's what's really going to bolster the engagement. You can also do some advanced things like run retargeting ads to people in your challenge with your content. You can also do things like using messenger bots to Enhance the experience. But all of that is advanced strategy to get started. Just focus on those three types of engagement and continue to push them out there.

I actually had this on my list to ask you about and you mentioned messenger bots. Tell me a little bit more about that. Is that working? How would you set something like that up?

Yeah, so messenger bots are a little advanced and that's like a whole loaded topic that we could go down the rabbit hole of. But basically what we did with our messenger bots, and the rules are changing come July 1, so you have to be really in the know, is that we would simply invite people to come join us on our daily livestreams. So we would send out a post every day that says, hey, I'm going live at 12pm Here's a link to come join me live. Hope to see you there. And then we would pre schedule our live streams first thing in the morning so that people could actually, people could actually come in and see that the live stream was coming, subscribe to showing up for the live stream and then we would have a larger viewer base when things happened. So that's kind of how you use messenger bots. I know that's really, really high level, but like I said, there's so much that goes into a messenger bot that it's a little more than just like, hey, here's how to throw it together.

Absolutely. So you had some great tips there on a lot of different ways to engage people, whether it's through email, through the live stream and the Facebook group, and even kind of contacting them through the messenger. Bottom. Any other ways to deliver the challenge content or is that pretty much what you've seen that has worked?

Yeah. So I mean, to me, those are the three big ones. So here's the thing. I have a mentor who likes to say, be innovative, always be innovating.

Right.

The biggest thing you can do is pay attention to what people are doing and be different. So I'm giving you the skeletal structure of how we run a challenge, how we structure them, what to do. But the reality is, if you have an idea of doing something totally different, then run with it. If you think, oh my gosh, I'm going to set up a YouTube channel with a playlist and I'm going to run YouTube ads. I've never seen anyone do that. Go for it if you've got the know how, the ability and the basic system down. So that's kind of what I come back to is, look, we've got people who are following this Basic structure. We just had somebody go through this who teaches house flipping, and she had her first successful challenge where she profited over $1,000. And we were super happy about that.

Right.

But here's the thing. She followed the system first. She followed the system to a T, and then she got more advanced with it.

Right.

So it's like, if you want to get more advanced and you want to add some advanced strategies or you want to start thinking about advanced strategies, there's nothing wrong with that. And in fact, I encourage you to to get more advanced, however, start with the basics.

Very good. So let's talk about, I guess, the marketing plan piece of it, which is filling up their funnel. What are your tips and strategies for how they should do that? And also how many in the calculations of how many people they need to get into their funnel to actually meet their revenue goals?

Yeah. So let me just make sure I understand the question. You're saying, like, how do we actually figure out how many people we need in the challenge to hit our goals?

Right. So let's just say their revenue goal or they want to sell, you know, 25 courses. Let's just make that up. How many people would they, you know, based on your expertise and knowledge and what you've seen and all the challenges, how many people, what they generally need in that challenge to meet that revenue goal? And then what are your suggestions on how to get people into their challenge?

Yeah, so the first thing to do is realize that you're going to average about a 2 to 3% conversion the first time you do a challenge. So what we do is we reverse engineer the numbers. So if you want to get 25 people into your challenge, you can actually take that number and divide it by your conversion rate of 2% or 0.02, and it'll spit out exactly how many challenges you need. So if you want to get 25 course sales and you're going to get a 2% conversion, you need 1250 people into your challenge. If you're going to get a 3% conversion, you need 833. Now, let's say you already have a warm audience and you're going to get a 5% conversion. Well, then you only need 500 in your challenge. So lots of things to consider. But basically, take the number of challenge sales you want to have and then divide that out by how many or, excuse me, what you're going to convert at, and that will spit out how many people need to register for the challenge. And then that's just the cold, hard data now, sometimes you convert higher, sometimes you convert lower. But it's nice to have that cold hard number where you can actually look and see like, okay, here's exactly what I'm shooting for. And that gives you a goal to reach for.

Okay, so we have, we have some options there. Anywhere from like 1200 all the way down to 500 if we have a warm audience there. Let's just say that, you know, we need people. Let's just say we're, you know, setting up a pop up Facebook group and we need to get people into that challenge. What are some best practices and ways that you've seen that work successfully?

Totally. So we say there's three types of traffic. Organic, paid and referral. And organic traffic is basically posting on social media, posting on Instagram, posting on Twitter. People still use Twitter, but basically sharing more about your challenge in a really organic way. The second is paid traffic. And that's gonna be your Facebook ads, your Google Ads, your YouTube ads. For 99.9% of us, that's Facebook ads until we learn some more advanced strategies or hire someone that understands the GOOG ad platform or the YouTube ad platform and can have somebody produce an ad for us. And then finally there's referral traffic, which is basically affiliate traffic that is asking people in your challenge to share it. That is creating shareable links inside your emails. So basically, you know, anything that refers people to your challenge. So anytime you say, I want to get more traffic, you do one of those two things, organic, paid or referral. And it really comes back to, it's that simple. You're either doing one of those things or you're not. To drive more sales of your challenge and your product.

Very good. So let me ask you this, and I know that, you know, when you're looking at, you know, like a webinar sales funnel, one of the ways to, you know, encourage that sell at the end is to create that urgency and scarcity. You know, obviously we need to do that too with a five day sales, five day challenge when we're presenting our offer at the end. But my question for you is a little bit different. And what about the content itself? Should we put a date in terms of, you know, this five day challenge content is going to be available until X date and then it's coming down or what? What are your recommendations on that?

Yeah, so the content should be available for the five days, obviously. And then we also make them available through the weekend.

Right.

So once they digest the content Monday through Friday, we also give them the opportunity Saturday, Sunday and sometimes Monday to go back through that content and digest it. So we want to give them time to actually go through, engage with the content, enjoy, digest the content and kind of go from there. So, you know, that's kind of what we do. Like we want it to be available, but we also don't want it to be available forever. Because the reality is people need deadlines to take action. So we're encouraging them to take action before a certain deadline, but we're making sure that they have ample time to get through all the content. That's another reason that we say, okay, your content should be no more than 45 to 60 minutes a day with your email, your action and your live stream. Because if they can't get through all of that content content in just a couple of hours, come Friday, they're not going to go through it.

And how would you suggest somebody presents their offer at the end of their challenge? Should they do that in a separate webinar? Should they do that, you know, in the Facebook Live when they're, you know, after they deliver the day 5 content? What are your suggestions on how to approach that?

Yeah, so when it comes time to sell, we like to promote it on the Day 5 livestream. So we send out an email, it's got a daily task, it's got content. And then we drive people from the daily livestream into our sales page. So we're actually doing like a mini webinar. But it's not a webinar. Right? It's not like a full blown 60 minutes. All these slides. We're saying look for about three minutes, introduce yourself and your content, go into a five to 10 minute pitch and then answer questions. So think about it as the tail end of a webinar because you've done all the legwork that a webinar would normally do content wise, the five days prior. So you're just bridging from the content to the pitch.

I love that. Zach, is there anything else that you can think of that the audience may be interested in that I did not ask you about today?

You know, the last thing I'll say is that this interview has been awesome. It's been so great being here. At least I think it was awesome.

Absolutely. I've learned a lot. And as I mentioned to you, but before we start a recording, I do have a five day challenge starting on Monday. So I was very excited to talk with you today before it actually started.

So yeah, I love it. So the last thing I will say is like, look, we've given you lots of tangible, actionable tips, but it only works if you take action on it. So if you're listening to this and you're like, I'm thinking about running a five day challenge, the best thing you can do is pick a date four to six weeks out, commit to doing it and run with it. Because seriously, it's going to make a world of difference if you just take action. So I will leave with that little nugget of like, just take action, set a date, start creating your content. And whether your challenge has 10, 100, a thousand, 10,000 people, it's going to be an absolute success because you did it and most people don't.

I love that, Zach. So can you tell us how people can find you? And I think you have a special gift for them also.

Absolutely. So if you want to connect with us, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com and we've got some great resources. But if you really loved this training, or I shouldn't call it a training, but maybe we can get away with that.

We call it a training. If you want, we can call it a training.

Right. But if you like this podcast, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com challengebook and we have a free little step by step workbook to help you plan, fill and execute a successful challenge launch. It's got my simple formula for creating a challenge that gets people to opt in. It helps you figure out your marketing plan. It helps you map out your daily topics for your challenge. All of that is included inside that workbook. So if you head over to heartsoulhustle.com challengebook, we've got that free resource waiting for you.

Very good. And I will make sure that that link is in the show. Notes for everybody. And I hope you enjoyed this episode today. We'd love it if you could rate and review our podcast on itunes. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.