169: Your Minimal Summer Vacation Marketing Plan

Foreign welcome to the Creators MBA Podcast your go to resource for mastering the art and science of Digital Product Entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. Destiny Kopp and I help business owners generate consistent revenue from their digital product business without the need to be glued to their desks or constantly live launching or worrying about the social media algorithms. I hope you enjoy our episode today. Hi there Destiny here and I am so excited about our podcast episode topic for today here in Atlanta. We're in our last week of school. My high schooler had his last exam today and my middle schooler had has his 8th grade graduation tomorrow and then we are done. I cannot believe how fast this school year went and that my youngest is going into high school next year. Now in the summer I do like to take it a little easier now, now that my knee has recovered from knee replacement surgery, I definitely would like to get back on the courts and maybe trying out a little tennis again, but definitely getting into pickleball. I also like to spend time in our pool and just be outside. We have several trips planned this summer for travel, baseball and vacations and I know that my time is going to be limited, but at the same time I know that I cannot take my foot off the gas pedal because if I do it will definitely affect my revenue and business growth for so basically what I'm doing now, I will see the results several months down the road. And I'm bringing up this topic because we are moving into summer. But just know that everything I'm covering today can also be applied to your business at any time that you want to save time or just stop being overwhelmed, which, if I had to guess, is pretty much all year long. I think the key for the summer months is finding the right balance between streamlining your processes and continuing to focus on growth strategies that will set you up for success in the fall. So if there's one thing that I don't want you to stop doing even over the summertime, that is focusing on growth strategies for your business. But in this episode, I want to give you some ways that you can streamline your digital product business this summer while keeping your foot on the gas pedal to ensure that you are setting up your business for a strong finish for the year. So the first thing I want to talk about is streamlining your operations. This is essential for any business, but it is even more critical during the summer when you're taking vacation or you just want to work reduced hours. And one of the best ways to streamline your work for the summer is to outsource as I was outlining this podcast episode. I realized, you know what, I, I need to practice what I'm preaching. And this is when I came to this realization. I have some goals. I have made very little progress on this year and it's getting close to the end of the May, so the year is almost halfway over. And it's really just because I've been too busy to work on those particular goals. So instead of keeping putting them off, which is what I've been doing because I haven't had the time to focus on them, what I really need to do is to outsource these tasks. But this is really more than just reducing my overwhelm or freeing up my time. I know by leveraging the skill of freelancers or maybe even hiring a virtual assistant to do some of this, I, I can offload these time consuming tasks, but more importantly put my focus in a more strategic part of my business. So I want to give you a specific example here. One of my goals this year is to build out our two Shopify stores and use Pinterest and SEO strategies to drive traffic to these stores. So my core strength is not uploading 300 plus new products into a Shopify store, which will require me to create the images, optimize the images, write the product description, make sure everything's connected to ConvertKit, making sure that the product download is working correctly, and, you know, going through and making sure that everything is optimized for SEO. Yes, I need to manage the process. Yes, I need to guide somebody on this on exactly what I'm looking for. But really, quite frankly, my time is better spent elsewhere. So I have decided that this is something I need to outsource over the summer. So that way I can make progress on one of my key goals for 2024, but it's also going to free up some of my time. Now, the next way to streamline your business for the summer is, is marketing automation. Now some of this you can also outsource, but I'm going to primarily focus on you kind of doing the work but you know, making sure that everything is automated. And I would have to say that your marketing is a gold mine for automation. And if you, like I said, if you don't have the time or the skill to set up some of the automations that I'm going to be talking about, you can get somebody who is skilled in those areas to either do the do it for you or help you do it. So you can automate your email marketing, your lead generation, your social media marketing, and of course, sales funnels. So marketing automation and having this set up over the summer can help you maintain a consistent presence, but also nurture your audience while freeing up time more for you to focus on something that's a little bit more strategic or quite frankly, just taking time off for the summer. So at a minimum, I'd love for you to set up your email newsletter so that they are ready and waiting in your email service provider to go out every week at a set date and time. And before we end our conversation today, I'm going to give you access to my super simple spreadsheet to help you plan out your email newsletters this summer and other content and marketing promotions that you are going to do. And if you don't already have this set up, I also like you to have a sales funnel set up so that when somebody signs up for your lead magnet over the summer, you have this tripwire where you can gain an instant customer and you have a sales funnel set up on the back end. So how you can set this up when they, you know, you have the lead magnet, they sign up for your lead magnet and then you have a tripwire on the next page and then if they go to check out, you can have an order bump and upsells on the back end of that tripwire. Now if you don't have that tripwire set up, even if somebody signs up for your lead magnet, you're going to have like an email welcome sequence to nurture them. And you can still eventually promote one of your courses or your digital products or maybe even, you know, some products that you are an affiliate for. You can still promote them in that email sequence and it's all automated for you. Now next, I want to talk about planning out your content for over the summer and batch production, which will help you streamline your processes and continue to nurture your audience even while you are working reduced hours. And I'll be honest here with you, I am not great at batch production, so I typically don't sit down one day and do a bunch of podcast recordings in one day. That's just not typically what I do. I tend to create content when I'm inspired or have a message to communicate, but I definitely see the benefit, especially when we're moving into the summertime, to block out a dedicated time to produce multiple pieces of content in one sitting, whether that's recording a series of videos, writing a batch of blog posts, or producing your podcast episodes. So that is my goal for the next couple of weeks is to batch produce some podcast episodes so I don't have to worry about them in June and July. So not only will this batching help me maximize productivity, but it's also going to help you plan and see schedule your content in advance. So you have to have this done before you can work on the other stuff that I'm talking with you about. So by having a content calendar in place and you can use the content planning column in my super simple spreadsheet that I'm going to share with you today to make sure that you do this. So you can make sure that you have a consistent flow of very valuable content for your audience throughout the summer months, even when you're taking a well disturbed break. But also which is just as important, I want you to consider repurposing your content. So maybe if you've been doing this for a while, maybe you don't even have to create new content. Summertime is the perfect time to dust off some of your highest performing content, whether that's an old video or podcast episode, and showcase it again. I highly doubt that anyone in your audience will remember and even if they do, they're not going to care. I promise you. You can repurpose this content into multiple formats. You can take a blog post turning into a video. You can take a video turn it into a podcast episode. You can take any of your content, quite frankly, and turn it into social media updates. And all of this will save you time and effort while providing a ton of value to your audience across those various channels. Now, I don't want you to forget about your promotional calendar in the summer. Even though you may be working reduced hours going on vacation, you can see still schedule a summer Flash sale or have some visibility promotions in place. You want to make sure that you're always focused on audience building, whether that's participating in a bundle, speaking at a summit, doing a freebie spot swap with one of your peers, any type of audit, you know, visibility type promotions. You still want to have those in place over the summer. And I don't want you to forget about affiliate marketing this summer. This can be a great way to tap into cash and get a revenue stream where you don't have to deliver the product or service. Now to help you with this over the summer, like I said, I want to share my super simple Google sheet that I use to plan out my email newsletter any affiliate promotions. I use it to track visibility collaborations that I'm a part of and making sure that I'm a of part appropriately promoting them. I use it for the Flash Sale. And if you want to grab it, I'm going to put the link in the show notes. I want to forewarn you because it's super, super simple, but it works for me. And I'll go take just one second and go over with you what I'm referring to. So in this Google sheet, I have a column that basically lists out anything that I'm promoting that week for my email newsletter. So it might be a visibility collaboration that I'm doing an affiliate promo that I'm doing, could be one of my own programs of courses. It could be any flash sales that I'm doing. So I have a column for that, and that's what I use to track everything that I'm promoting in my business. So that column is very, very important. The other thing I just want to say there is. It is also a way for me to track anything that I've committed to. So if I am speaking at a summit, I'm participating in a bundle, and obviously I need to help promote those. I will put those in this column to make sure that I am, you know, promoting them like I committed to, but also tracking it. Now in the next column is where I plan out my content. So I'm doing podcasts, you might be doing YouTube videos or blogs or whatever. So in that column is column C in the spreadsheet. That is where I put my content title. And a lot of times that will tie into what I'm promoting that week. And then I have a lot of different sections in my newsletter, and I'll give you some examples here from my hobby school newsletter. So the next section in my newsletter, in hobby school, I promote upcoming workshops and events and I have a, you know, a section set up in the newsletter, and that's where I pop all of that into. So it might be one of the events that we are doing, but it also might be something that I am promoting as an affiliate. So I think in the last email newsletter that I sent out for hobby school, we were promoting a webinar for somebody and we were also promoting, promoting an upcoming summit. So that's what I put in that section. So I plan that out in this particular spreadsheet. Going on to the next section in my newsletter is called Featured Product Products. So that might be something that we are promoting as an affiliate, but also might be one of our products that we're promoting and maybe sending our audience to our Shopify store. And Then in section 3 in the newsletter for hobby school is called Get Creative, this week's prompt. So in that particular section. A lot of times what we're doing there, if we're working with any type of sponsor, we might send them to one of their blog posts or their YouTube videos or maybe even a podcast episode, or it just may be one of our past speakers that, you know, they have great content and we want to promote them no matter what. So we'll promote them in that section of the newsletter. And then in the next one is where we kind of point our audience in our email to somewhere on social media. A lot of times it's the Facebook group for hobby school, but it could be Instagram or somewhere else that we're pointing them. So we have a section there where we kind of highlight what we're doing on social media. And that's a really, really great way, way to get engagement on our social media posts. So a lot of times what I try to do, and this doesn't always work out, but a lot of times what I try to do is post that on social media right before we send out our newsletter. When we send out our newsletter, we're driving people to that social media post that really, you know, kind of drives up the engagement. So it kind of points to or helps the algorithm say, oh, this is a really, really great post. I'm gonna show it to more people. Helped us tremendously. And I'm actually going to incorporate that strategy a little bit more in my other brands. And then the next one could be how to Work with Me, where you're directing people on how to work with you. And there's other things that we have in the spreadsheet. There's a place in here where you can put the email, the link to your particular email. So like in ConvertKit, they will give you a specific link for that if you have published it to the web. I love doing love that feature. I love tracking that. You can also track your number of email subscribers that that particular email went out to. The email responses, the open rate, click, wait, click, rate in number of clicks. So I hope you enjoy this super, super simple Google sheet to plan out your email newsletters. It's definitely helped us in our business and you can use that to plan out your content this summer. So kind of going back to our episode here, I really want to end and just emphasize that consistent marketing and audience engagement should stay a priority with you throughout the summer. And I know a lot of us, me, I'm gonna put me in this bucket too. I know a lot of us will be tempted to take a break and just say Oh, I don't need to send that email this week. But maintaining a consistent presence is crucial for nurturing your audience and staying top of their mind so that when you are ready to sell to them in the fall, they will remember you and know exactly how you can help them. So don't forget to focus on those audience growth strategies that I mentioned to you this summer. Whether that's participating in bundles, speaking at summits, doing a freebie swap with a peer. Visibility initiatives should always be a priority throughout the year and you can even schedule promoting these initiatives like I've just walked you through how I do that with my super simple Google Sheet. You can do that with your marketing automation. So just to summarize, to help you streamline your digital product business this year for the summer, you need to focus on outsourcing where you can automating your marketing and batching your content production or even repurposing your existing content. So by implementing everything that we talked about, these streamlining strategies and growth initiatives, you will not only optimize your operations for the summer months, but you're going to set the stage for a strong finish to the year. So as the fall season approaches and when we're getting ready to go back to school school, you my friend, are going to be well positioned to capitalize on the momentum you have built, launching any new products or services that you want to launch in the fall and continue to drive your digital product business forward. I hope you enjoyed this episode and you will have to either email me back or contact me on social media. You can DM me on Instagram or @Destiny Cop. I would love to know what you are doing this summer to streamline your digital product business. Bye for now. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode today. If you love the show, I'd appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. Have a great rest of your day and bye for now.