Let’s Plan Your Biggest Revenue Spike Ever for Back to School Season

Hey, CEO, teachers. Welcome back to the show. Let's plan your biggest revenue spike ever. This back to school season. I love nothing more than a back to season push. And we wanted to give you a little bit of extra time to get all of your ducks in a row for this special back to season plus. We have an entire month in July planned for you to revamp some of your products that you already have created and figure out exactly how to use SEO in your advantage for this back to school season. So let's plan your biggest revenue spike ever and get this party started. Hey, teachers. Welcome to your home away from the classroom, whether you are a full-time educator just getting started and thinking about the possibilities to advance past your current day scale or you're a seasoned CEO teacher looking for extra strategies to make money online. You're in the right place. No impressive tech skills or marketing experience necessary. Just the passion and desire to transform your life by doing what you love. Leaning in to your unique teaching magic. I'm Casey Morris, a former eighth grade ELA teacher myself, mom at a five teacher marketing expert. And while I am the visionary behind the CEO teacher movement, this amazing community is continually being built by you. One beautiful dream at a time. Coming your way every Wednesday as an extra credit bonus exclusively for teachers. Welcome to the CEO teacher podcast. Maxim LaGasse said marketing is understanding caring and helping, but it's also engaging, influencing and transforming. And Megan Anderson said, don't push people to where you want to be, meet them exactly where they are. And that's what we're going to do today. I live for these back to school stories. This happened to me. It's happened to multiple students. And I just love that whenever you are feeling a little down, you can use this to your advantage. It's no surprise that June and July are not our best months as teachers in the online space because if you live in the States, we're not in school in June and July. So it makes sense that our ideal customers are not shopping. So what can we do? We can plan for when they are. And that normally starts in August. Our best months here are in August and September on websites like teachers pay teachers and Etsy our blog traffic goes through the roof and all guns are firing and all cylinders are a go. So make sure all of your eggs are ready to go inside of whatever basket that you choose in the online success path of a CEO teacher because August is that month that I hope that you decide to show up and make $20,000 like a lot of our students have done, which is really, really fun to see because they had everything in place. They followed our systems and our processes perfectly. And they send me screenshots all month long. So that's you. And in August, send me all the screenshots. Go to Casey Morris on Instagram. And I live for our conversations when you're like Casey, I cannot believe that I just made $18,000 this week. Like what? Yes, I live for it. So let's get this party started and get focused on how you can do that too. School start times vary throughout the United States from late August to also early September. All aboard the CEO teacher train that's coming by right now, which means back to school promotions can start really at various times. What we know about websites like TPT is that they do have a back to school sale and usually they have like a double dose of it in August because even though not everyone is back in school in August, they are coming back to school in September. And so teachers are back in that buying mode. Sales can begin anywhere from mid to late July if you're going to create one yourself and continue through August and mid September. More than 38% of people consider back to school spending essential. I know for my family in particular, I spend as much money on back to school season as we spend at Christmas time because my children, especially my middle schoolers have been hit with all the hormones over the summer break. And they've grown two and three foot sizes. They're they're they're just there's tall as I am. Like I'm not I'm not ready for all this. So we have to buy out new clothes. We have to get all new school supplies. And often that cost as much as our Christmas budget. So back to school advertising historically though peaks the week of around August the seventh if you're looking back for years and years of marketing research in the past major retailers spend half of their back to school advertising budgets between July the 24th and August the 27th 25% of people consult Facebook for back to school shopping inspiration 27% of back to school shoppers use Pinterest to organize their shopping lists and brand loyalty is an important factor for at least 30% of buyers. So think about not only do you buy stuff for your kids if you're a parent, but also you're buying things for your classroom. And when I was in the classroom, I knew that the TBT sellers that I loved buying my novel studies from. I knew the Etsy sellers that I loved buying classroom decor from. I knew that schoolgirl style was going to be the place I looked to for inspiration. Now you can buy her stuff at Target. That's that's so freaking cool. You know I feel like I feel you know if you ever felt like you're part of the brand from the beginning to where it is now. So I just want to say kudos to her if you've never checked her out schoolgirlstyle.com will blow your mind what an amazing talent that she is and just wanted to give her a huge shout out and so happy for her success. She deserves every single bit of it. Okay but 35% of consumers use social media to decide what to purchase in their back to school season. Before we get into our action tips, I might bust your bubble today because I'm going to give you tips and tricks, but hear me out. There are no shortcuts, especially with our teacher based audience. It takes time to build that note like interest factor. It takes consistency, but oh once you do build all of that your people are not going anywhere. I mean unless you do something catastrophic which we're going to not even put that into your energy field right now. The region impact that you have by being inside of someone's inbox should never go unnoticed or overlooked or taken for granted because they choose you. They choose your brand. They choose your content to connect with and now it's your responsibility to nurture them through your worlds. And there are typically four parts to marketing as as we lay it out in a hole. First it is building your brand which is an ever evolving thing. It is also generating leads which is getting people into your world usually through an email list subscription of some sort. It is educating the market. I am absolutely obsessed with stalking people that educate their market as I chatted about on last week's show brand and then I met that's the co-founder of Tacovas. I'm like in the thick of learning about how they educate their market. I also want to give a shout out to a company called Florette. I bought their their wildflower course about a year ago and I haven't had time to take it but my husband and I are about to start on it and I just found out that they also have a series on Amazon Prime in it to win it baby. I cannot go wait to popcorn after I record this show and go watch how they educate their market. Okay off topic back on topic. Building your brand is number one. Generating leads is number two. Educating the market is number three and customer retention is number four. That's actually our word for the year in 2023 is retention. How can we get you to love us and stay forever? Decide how you will show up this summer and begin to set the stage for your back to school season. You can also include some fresh tips to spike your revenue. We love a good cash injection around here and now is the time to plan. So are you ready for our action tips which is what we're known for here. Okay number one update your marketing content calendar. Take a renewed look at your marketing calendar right now and see how you can make this back to school season sales push your peak times for your audience. Go look at when your audience is online. Go figure out when they normally open their emails. If you don't have a marketing calendar or plan now is the time to create it. All you need is Google Drive or Google Calendar to do this guys. We're not talking about spending money here. Next I'm currently in the thick of it right now. If you're watching this on YouTube I love a paper calendar. I mean I'm going to put this in Google Drive. I haven't started writing on it yet but this is my June and July calendar so that we can plan all the things like figuring out exactly when we're going to post on social media. Spoiler alert. This is what I love. People assume if I fill out this calendar right now and I say I'm going to show up on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays on Instagram that I'm recording all of those in that moment. I'm not. Sometimes I do but if I especially now that I've lost my phone and it's been out of my I haven't had a phone for seven to nine days the value of being present is far beyond anything more that life can offer. It is. And so I'm going be more cognizant about recording things to post later on in later on as back to school season gears up. Create a new Pinterest pin and get ahead for the season so on Pinterest you can schedule post to go out if you're inside of the CEO teacher membership. You know all about that but scheduling your post to go live on Pinterest when it's back to school season is a unique thing that you should be taking advantage of. Users are going to Pinterest to organize their back to school ideas when they're laying by the pool. They're creating their list. People say I'm a teacher. I don't think about school while I'm on summer break. I don't believe that's true. I don't. We're teachers. We're planners. We may not think about our kids or think about what we're going to teach but we're thinking about how cute that one's going to look or at least I was. My friends are we're thinking about what our new color coordinated plan for next year is or how we can be a better version of ourselves and that's okay. So create optimized pins for your business and allow them to lead to value based posts where they can purchase from you when they're laying poolside. Next up on our action tips for planning your biggest revenue spike ever for this back to school season is boost the convenience factor. Combine your own products and resources and I love this offer complimentary product bundles. So for example when I was mainly focused on selling on teachers pay teachers I had a lot of historical figures that I sold. Georgia is big on history in teaching and elementary school and so I studied all of the standards and I knew which historical figures were the most important to teach in what grade levels and then I also figured out which ones became my best sellers and when they became my best sellers I would bundle them with other historical figures. However I would never put two best sellers in the same bundle. Why? Because I knew that that increased the odds of someone purchasing two bundles because this person was number one on my best sellers list and this person was number two and if you want three other historical figures to go with them in this product bundle you can purchase this but I'm not going to combine them together because I want to increase the likelihood and the spending purchase amount per each customer to increase their average customer spend. That was a lot of marketing talk but I hope you hope you're still with me. So how could you offer things that complement one another? Maybe they're grade level specific, niche adjacent or a well-rounded way to kick start the back to school journey. So maybe it is admissions passes and also how to decorate your classroom. Think outside of the box and create different offers and resources and lessons that your audience could benefit from or you can even go live on Facebook with the back to school season to answer questions regarding the topics at hand. One of our most successful launches we did teacher TV when I went live during COVID when the teachers were back in at home and trying to teach I ask every teacher that I knew to come and do teacher TV with me and we went live for like two months every Monday through Friday and the response was amazing because teachers needed us then. So could you go live every day? That's a lot of work. I hope that if you decide to do it it pays off handsomely. Okay. Next up on planning your biggest revenue spike ever tips and tricks is offer future use coupons. I don't I don't like coupons but think about how this could be used in December. So if we're looking at ways to boost our revenue this is a way to do it. When you spend a certain dollar amount then offer them a coupon to come back in the new year and grab things that you may not offer just yet. So it could be like an incentive. If you purchase this then I'll give you a coupon to get a free resource in January. So I love it. I love it. It could be a logistical nightmare if you sell a lot of stuff and you don't have a great system in process on how to help people with their coupons. I say this from experience because I am not a logistical thinker. Thank goodness we have team members that that have that brain but use future use coupons to incentivize people to buy from you in August and September. So grab their email address that you can send out these future use coupons to encourage your customers to return in January but be sure to mention this as a major selling point. Please remember our number one core value be a good human be good to all people and say what you mean me what you say. So if you are to use this tip and trick please I beg of you do not fall through on your promise because once you lose your customers trust you can never ever get it back. Another example of this is when you say you're creating a growing bundle and you don't have the capacity the power the motivation you just don't care anymore been there done that as well. Don't be that human only make promises that you can keep and I'm saying this from experience. Alright another tip is offer this is a great one and our students use this and they do really well back to school school kits. This is a great idea for teachers for parents for administrators. You could bundle everything in your store or everything on your website for what people need for back to school or you can partner with people in your grade level that are also offering things and you do one huge kit. Four of our students made $20,000 in 48 hours doing this exact thing they split it four ways but what they did is that they knew that they all helped kindergarten teachers. So one person was really good at sight words one person was really good at decor one person was really good at doing 10 frames and things like that for math. So they bundled this back to school toolkit together and then they all used their social media channels to promote it and it went crazy it went crazy. So I love this idea offer a brand new piece of content as well as maybe an additional bonus to throw in with the toolkit to get people excited or to incentivize them to buy from you. Next is run a last chance sale. So maybe it's time to retire some of your well-loved products and resources so that you can update them. So allow them to go on sale before you redo the content and allow people to purchase them now so that they get both versions when they are complete so you can buy the upgraded version for this price. Place offers behind a paid password protected page on your site and allow people to keep them like a resource library. Show your audience why they need to grab the item before it goes back into the vault. We do this with our coaching calls very regularly. Hey we only give our coaching calls a 60 day window and then they are retired to the vault but when we have a sale we sell the vault and people can go back and watch those. They can watch hundreds of coaching calls and the price that we put on that is so cheap it is to us is a no-brainer to go back and to be able to watch those calls. So sell the transformation so that they understand the importance of your well-established products. And last but certainly not least refer a friend. Back to school campaigns could offer existing customers a special discount if they successfully get a friend to join your world. You will need a way to bring in affiliates utilizing websites like Kajabi or something else. If you are interested in checking out Kajabi you can go to kcmores.com slash kajabi to start your free trial today. So if you thought about selling your courses or a membership and you haven't yet found a platform that's right for you. I love Kajabi. I've always used them since I started selling my programs. There's a 14 day free trial offer going on right now. You can also use them for affiliates if you're wanting to share that back to school coupon. So go to kcmores.com slash kajabi if you're interested in signing up that is a referral code. So I do get credit if you decide to join Kajabi for the long haul. This type of marketing which is technically word of mouth marketing by referring a friend is a great method to gain social proof as well. Remember customers trust their friends and their family. Word of mouth is even more effective than paid ads and can result in five times the sales. I cannot wait for you to see what we have coming your way in July. If you are ready to nerd out on all things search engine optimization then be sure to check us out here at the CEO teacher podcast every Wednesday in the month of July. Thank you so much for listening. As always remember the best is yet to come and I'll see you next week.