How to Run a Successful Online Challenge
June 25, 2020
Online challenges are a great way of introducing potential clients to you and your work with the goal of bringing them on as paid clients to grow your health and wellness business. In addition to helping your challenge participants to know, like, and trust you, an online challenge can also bring awareness to a larger health goal and give participants a sense of the value you offer before needing to invest.
If you haven’t yet run an online challenge, think of it as a short group program with a very specific, short-term goal. These challenges give clients a quick win because the expected outcome or goal is small and doable which is great for morale and helps clients gain some initial momentum to improving their health.
Here are 5 best practices to help you get started with your own online challenge:
Before you start building your challenge, first it’s important to know what you’re hoping to accomplish with your online challenge and what you’re going to focus on. Knowing who your ideal client is the first step. What goals will you help them achieve? Without clarity on this, your challenge likely won’t hit your target market and you may not get the traction you are looking for.
In order to develop a strong understanding of your ideal client, ask yourself what problems are they facing and how can you help provide solutions to solve these problems? What are their interests? And what are their limitations?
Once you’re clear on your ideal client, you’ll want to strategically decide on what the challenge goal will be. Start with being precise about the overall journey that you want to walk your ideal client through beyond your online challenge. What are the topics that will be relevant to all (or at least the majority) of your clients? Once you have a shortlist of topics, further streamline that list to include topics that are popular within your community of ideal clients. What do they commonly complain about? What is one thing they’d feel motivated and good about?
If you’re unsure as to what your growing community is interested in, one surefire way to uncover what your audience wants is to simply ask. Using a poll or survey via email, Instagram Stories, or even a poll within your Facebook group can help take the guesswork out of your planning.
One final tip to take into consideration when planning is to consider any other factors that may be relevant to your audience such as the seasons, world events, or even life events.
Keep your challenge simple and relevant to help a participant see results easily and feel like they’ve reached a level of success. Here are suggestions for keeping it simple and specific:
Don’t overlook the content you’ll provide to your challenge participants. The format of the content for your challenge will largely depend on the specific outcome you’ve outlined and should be as engaging as possible. Since you’ll likely have different content speak to different participants, aim to provide a combination of material such as:
It’s important to focus on actionable steps that your participants can take each day, without a huge time commitment. Aim for daily tasks that take less than 15 minutes total and provide clients with an easy sense of accomplishment, ensuring to keep engagement high.
Utilizing a delivery system for your challenge that is organized and easy to access contributes to your client’s success. Here are a few different ways you can choose to run your challenge:
Participant engagement is a key aspect of your challenge. Without strong engagement strategies, participants are more likely to drop off partway through your challenge. To keep your participants’ attention and to boost motivation, try these tips:
Once your challenge is over, it’s helpful to have a follow-up plan. To get feedback from participants, you may want to send out a survey and comb through the group engagement for things that participants loved and where they struggled. This will help you make improvements to your challenge the next time you run it! The benefit of running your challenge multiple times is that you can refine it each time, making it better and better. As well, you can get your participants and community excited about it ahead of time, furthering its success.
If you’re unsure of how to fill your challenge once you’ve created it, check out some of these simple strategies to help!
Offering online challenges in your practice is a great way to engage with your community, exemplify the value that you can provide as a practitioner, and support your practice. Take these best practices into consideration when creating and running your challenge, to really set you up for success!
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