This year, I explored and experimented with some new marketing ideas to see what works. I’m happy to report these six fresh ideas for your marketing that you can use immediately. I’m also adding some recent news that will help you rethink your marketing for 2024.

1. The Refresher – It’s always a wise marketing move to re-engage your existing audience member who doesn’t open, click or reply to your email broadcasts. Recently, I invited people who had been to my Mastermind Group Facilitator Training workshops years ago, to come back to a live Facilitator webinar as a “Refresher” for free. I invited students who had been in the class from 2003 through 2020. I figured, if they came to the Refresher, it was proof they were still interested in the mastermind group topic. About 60% of my previous students took me up on the offer — and some of them have purchased further classes or mastermind group memberships from me after attending the Refresher. It’s a way of re-engaging with both virtual students and students from in-person workshops. You can also do this with previous private clients and invite them to a roundtable discussion or group coaching session. It typically doesn’t “cost” you anything to have more people in a virtual meeting, and you can re-engage with people you haven’t talked with in 3 or 4 years…or more. I had one student come to a Refresher who I hadn’t talked with in 10 years! It was lovely to see familiar faces, and it simply feels good to gather your community around you, right?
2. Best days of the week for mastermind group meetings and workshops/webinars – People always ask me about the best days for live meetings like classes and mastermind groups, so I did some experimentation and some surveying in 2023. Professional and business people seem to prefer Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. They didn’t want to meet Monday mornings or Friday afternoons — Monday because they’re just getting back to work and Friday afternoon because they’re getting ready for their weekend. (They didn’t mind a 9:00 am Friday meeting, as long as they were done by lunchtime. Early morning virtual meetings can also be good if you have participants from both the USA and UK, Ireland or the EU.) For those who run personal development mastermind groups, members also enjoyed Saturday morning meetings.
3. Best days of the week for email marketing – You have more competition now for your audience’s attention than ever before, so getting in front of them with your email message at the right time is crucial. According to statistics that came out in October 2023 from Hubspot, the best day to send email newsletters and promotions is Tuesday to get higher engagement (open rates, click-through rates). The best time of day is the morning, 9:00 am to noon. This is true whether you’re doing B2B marketing or B2C marketing.  You might have been taught to send out your emails at 4:00 am to be in their Inbox when they wake up. What we’ve learned is that while people do look at their email first thing in the morning, their goal is to delete or archive anything that’s not important…then to come back to their Inbox around 8:00 or 9:00 and read through the remaining important emails. You can get more details from Hubspot’s October results on their site: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/best-time-to-send-email
4. SEO hack – Getting high rankings on search engines like Google is a tremendous way to get traffic to your site. In 2023, Google made some changes that can be helpful to you. For instance, Google used to show 10 results per page; if you were on “page 2” of the results, you got very little traffic. Now Google has switched to continuous scrolling of results and that means you will be seen by more people — especially for long-tail keywords. A strange case in point: I noticed last month we were getting a lot of traffic for the phrase “video tutorials for business models” to my website dedicated to all things “mastermind group.” I don’t have a video tutorial for general business models on this site — so why were we getting traffic for this phrase? With continuous scrolling, people were scrolling past the YouTube videos in the Google results and finding my text blog post “Mastermind Group Business Models” and curiosity had them clicking to learn more! If you haven’t explored your Google Search Console performance report lately, now is the time to dive in and mine for gold.
5. Increasing engagement (and SEO hack) – People don’t just want information, they want insight: How to reach their goals in the shortest amount of time with the least use of resources. Naturally, some goals do take a lot of time, money and energy — so don’t lie to your audience and make unrealistic promises. Other goals or tasks can be completed in a short amount of time. All goals can be achieved easier with a shortcut — that’s where you come in. Whether your audience’s goals are bigger or smaller, I’ve discovered that people love templates, worksheets, scripts, cheatsheets, and checklists. The good news is that providing these is good for both SEO (you stand out from the crowd) and for audience engagement (more people click on your emails or respond to your social media posts). As with all content marketing, you have to decide on the dividing line: what will you give away for free, and what proprietary information do they have to pay for? It’s unreasonable for your audience to always expect everything free from you and most people are willing to pay for the next level of knowledge, insight and support.
6. Facebook announces multiple personal profiles – In the past if you sold private executive coaching sessions to the general public and also sold leadership training workshops to corporations, it was difficult to keep these two brands and marketing messages separate in your Facebook profile. You had to create separate Facebook pages, which didn’t get the same amount of traffic and reach as your personal profile does. Recently, Facebook announced that you can have multiple personal profiles under the same login ID. This way, you can have clearer control over your branding and core marketing messages. If you have two or more audience segments, this can be a game-changer. Read the details on the Facebook Help page: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/09/you-can-now-have-multiple-personal-profiles-on-facebook/

I hope one of these ideas is a keeper for you and you’ll use it right away! Now more than ever, you need to use multiple marketing vehicles to get the word out. Don’t rely on just one source of traffic — select several that can work in concert, and create an integrated marketing plan.

Want to learn how to start a mastermind group? Click here to get my free video tutorial on how to create a mastermind group of your own.