Expert Essentials: Rebecca Wardlow

Rebecca Wardlow,  a digital marketing professional who runs her own six-figure business, spoke today at Olivet Nazarene University. During my Social Media Strategies course, her topic was: Creating a Promotional Calendar. Here is her process for creating a promo calendar:

1. Roadmap and Budget
You need to figure out how you're going to communicate with your audience and how much revenue you estimate your promotion will generate.

2. What is a Promotion?

Picking a product service + offer + scarcity = Promotion

Three Key Promotional Categories:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Monetization

3. Step One: Acquisition

This includes areas like free giveaways where contact information is entered to win a prize and lead magnets, an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value.

There is also a program called Woobox where users can enter a contest with a hashtag and once they are entered it gives the company their email address as well (to create an email list).

Goals of Acquisition: Take users from social media to becomes a lead magnet then get email subscribers

4. Step Two: Activation

This includes areas like flash sales, which are a big discount sale companies can offer and member-only specials, which can make subscribers feel special.

Goals of Activation: Move email subscribers to low dollar offer, then to a customer

5. Step Three: Monetization

This includes area like activation, which means offering the new product or core offer and high dollar sales. This is the bread of butter of the format leading into a promotional calendar.

6. Steps to Building Your Promotion

1) Determine Product/Market Fit

2) Choose a Traffic Source

3) Offer a Lead Magnet

4) Offer a Tripwire

5) Offer a Core Product

6) Offer a Profit Maximizer

7) Create a Return Path

If you don't know what a tripwire is, it's where there is a low-cost offer made to a customer that can lead to a larger purchase later on.

6. When and Who...12 Month Plan and Monthly Planning Worksheet

Things to include: month, goals, set projections, revenue goals, monetization strategy

Things to include in monthly planning: month, name of promo, goal of promo, who will receive promo emails, start date, number of emails, projected revenue, back-up promo

7. Plan Your Promotion Content

The content funnel stages are awareness, evaluation and conversion.

• Awareness Content-freely available that entertains, educates or inspires (blog, social media, videos, infographics, photos, podcasts)
• Evaluation Content-incentivized content asking readers for contact information (education resources, downloads, etc)
• Conversion Content-building a relationship with the reader to help them make an informed purchases (demo, free trial, customer story, comparison)

*Bonus Tip!: Have your company write down 100 questions they receive or are most often asked...these can be converted into blog posts!