 Hello Aces, welcome back to module seven, lesson five, why promotions could literally bankrupt you. In this lesson, we're going to cover the three deadly pitfalls to completely avoid, and I'll give you a bonus three must do so that way you can run your promotions successfully. I'm not sure about you, but running promotions could be a very, very scary thing. As you can see right here, the single worst decision I have ever made, they had lost more than $10,000 in hard costs. Now, because they were using Groupon and Groupon is a thing of the past. So it is okay. For some of you don't don't know what Groupon is. It is completely okay as well. But the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because if you start doing promotions without understanding the pitfalls without understanding your why, then you could very well run yourself into a really big trouble and into a really deadly mistake. So today we're going to cover the three deadly pitfalls to completely avoid. First one is that other people are doing it, and that's why you're doing it. We should always, always avoid doing this because thinking that you're going to be successful just because you see someone down the streets doing it and they're super popular is a really, really common mistake. Way more than you know, because what do we know? We don't know anything. So we're just trying to copy what other people are doing. And at the end of the day, we don't know why they're doing these promotions. They might be doing it and they might be failing a lot. They might be failing to convert and they're losing a lot of money in their promotion. Yet they're doing it because they have deep pockets and on top of that, they just don't care. Or they're doing it for a very specific reason because they want to show off to an investor that might be coming through the doors within a week. You never know why they're doing what they're doing. And if you just simply copy them, you just copy a failing formula. So never, ever copy what other people are doing, especially when it comes to promotions. Second up, it is because running promotion on a poor foundation. If you do that without setting your foundations without understanding from what we have been doing in module one to module six, then you're going to be paying for ads that don't mean anything for you. You're going to have a very poor foundation to stand on. You're going to have a really, really high chance of failing. And the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because I'm speaking from experience. A lot of times the sexy things, the fun things are to run promotions, to run campaigns. I love doing it. And that's what we're doing. We're really, really good at that. But because we're so good at it, we often just focus on that. And a lot of times we forget about why we're doing it and we don't put attention and pay our dues in doing our foundation. And which is the reason why our second location closed down because we were on really shaky foundation. And I don't want that to happen to you. So definitely pay attention to this. It's really like going 100 miles in the wrong direction. Yes, you're doing it really, really fast. You're doing these marketing promotions and everything, but you're going in the wrong direction. What does that mean? That means it takes a lot more for you to fix that for you to come back to your original spot, fix your foundation and then go towards the right direction. Third up is that a lot of people, actually 95% of the students that I work with, they don't track their results. They don't track what is working and what is not working and how they can improve. If you don't track it, you'll never know. And you would never be able to do a better campaign, which is the reason why you should always track your results. Different ways to track would be online tools, such as Excel, Microsoft, or even your POS system. You can use promo codes to track how effective your campaigns are. Or if you really don't have different ways of doing it, manually tallying. We've done that multiple times where, you know what, we have a receipt and we just write down on the receipt what promotion it is. And at the end of the month, we just take up all the different receipts that we've collected that we have put notes on and we just tally it manually tallying it. It is because it is so, so important for us to make sure we track when we run our promotions. Once again, the pitfalls, the three most common pitfalls that will literally bankrupt you is that if you copy what other people are doing without understanding their intent, if you run promotions on really poor foundations or the fact that you don't have foundations, you haven't worked out your master blueprint, you haven't worked out anything and then you started running promotions just like everyone else is doing, then you have a very high chance of failing, just like even how we failed within our first time doing it. And lastly, not tracking your results, not tracking because you just don't know how or you're just too lazy to do so. It is super important for you to track the results that you're doing because now you would understand what channels are bringing in the most traffic, then you can double down on that. Without understanding that, how do you know which channel to invest in? Is it Instagram that's doing really well? Is it Facebook doing really well? Or is it Pinterest doing really well? Or is it just word of mouth? Understanding and tracking different source of your promotion is also very key in making sure you run a successful campaign. Now that we understand the three things that we don't want to do, I'm sharing with you the three must-dos when you're running your next promotion. Next up is fundamentals. Once again, get your fundamentals right. Make sure you have all the groundwork laid out in front of you. That's the reason why we cover module one to module six before we go into module seven, which is running ads. And I'm super excited that you're here. By the time you're here, you have done the work and make sure that you don't skip to here and forget about module one to six. It is super, super crucial. Identify your business model. Be clear who you're serving. What are the things that they need? What are the things that pisses them off? What are the pain points? What is their job to be done? I cover this all from module one to module six. What is your winning matrix? What is the item that's going to make the most money? What is your cash cow? Super important for you to identify everything before you start running your promotion because now you can communicate with your team exactly what you want to sell and what the objectives are. Now, objective is your campaign to generate profit or are you trying to gain awareness of the brand? Understanding that allows you to really streamline your focus on what you need to do. Is the campaign on to for branding purpose only or is it to generate attention at a cost? Be super clear what you want to achieve and make sure you always cross align that with your master blueprint. It is super important. It is because when you're running a campaign, a lot of times you're drawing attention to you. Now that you have attention to you, what do you want your customers or potential customers to do? Whatever you want them to do should align with your immediate priorities for your business. So understanding your objective and setting out all the course of action to do to align with that is key when running your next promotion. Next up, make sure you track your performance, track your redemption rate, track the signup rates, how much did you spend and how much did you generate without you understanding how much money is being coming in from Instagram. Why would you want to be investing more money into Instagram for the next campaign? You don't want to because you haven't tracked it. That's the reason why tracking your performance is so key when running promotions because at the end of the day, promotion should serve a purpose, whether it is to have more awareness or more profits or more branding alignments. So what are your goals? What are your objectives? Are you far from it? And make sure you always go back to track your performance and how can you improve it? Understand that so you can apply it for your next promotion. Now it is your turn to avoid the three deadly pitfalls and when you run your next promotion, to make sure you follow the three must do's for your next promotion. And once again, the resources is in the link for you to download underneath. And in this lesson, we just covered the three deadly pitfalls and the three must do's when running your promotion. What's up next? Next up, we're going to be talking about how you're going to be running 360 ads for your restaurant. I'll see you guys in the next video.