Launch Your Next Marketing Effort With A One-Day Intensive Workshop

We’re all busy, right? I feel it. From the minute I get into the office until when I go home, there’s no stopping. Some tasks can seem to take impossibly long even though they were meant to be simple (I’m looking at you Facebook Business Manager). 

If any of this feels familiar, you aren’t alone. The Content Marketing Institute’s recent B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks showed that most marketers today are being asked to do more with less and typically work on a team of three or fewer people. That means there isn’t a lot of bandwidth to go around.

The challenge is when this reality of small teams with limited time bumps up against the constant state of change of the marketing industry. It’s not good enough to keep doing the same old things. New efforts must be launched, the question is, how?

Enter the one-day intensive workshop. This is a workshop in which all of your team sequesters themselves for a single day sprint that results in launching something new at the end of the day, whether it be a website section, a new social channel, or whatever else.

This is one of our favorite approaches to pushing a new effort live, because it can be achieved quickly and without disrupting too many regular tasks. Let’s take a look at how it works.

Block the Time, Determine Your Desired Goal, & Set Smart Milestones

The first thing to do is to block a day off of everyone’s calendars. Since calendars fill up quickly, you may need to do this months in advance. After you see the benefit of your first workshop, you may want to commit to doing it quarterly, which will allow you to block out times even further ahead. These workshops work even better if you can find a place to meet that’s away from distractions and interruptions. Before COVID, we called this offsite. 

Once you have time on the books, it’s time to do a little bit of planning. First, define what the desired goal is for the day. This could be launching a new feature on your site, like a blog, or it could be developing an optimization plan and implementing the first few tests. Whatever the goal, make sure it’s clear and achievable. You want to be able to celebrate at the end of the day.

Once goals are in place, it’s time to think through the milestones you’ll need to achieve to meet the goal. This will give you the broadest contours of the work that will need to be done and how it will need to be divided up for success.

Start Your Day with a Work Plan, Then Get the Work Done

Once the big day has arrived, it’s time to get focused. If at all possible, unplug from things like email and Slack so that you can fully focus.

The first task of your day should be huddling together to create a work plan. Review your goal and the milestones together, then identify who will be doing what and what they’ll need to be successful.

With a clear plan in mind, each member of your team can work solo or in small groups to complete the tasks on their plate and make some serious progress towards your end goal. We recommend finding a time every couple hours to come back together as a group and review progress. This will allow you to make adjustments if your original plan wasn’t quite correct or to shift additional people over to a task if it’s taking more time than expected. Always remember to encourage collaboration to come up with the best ideas.

Ship By the End of the Day

The most important thing to do is to commit to shipping whatever you’re working on by the end of the day. Even if you know by lunch that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew, huddle together and determine what a minimum viable product could be that could ship by the end of the day. You want to be able to share a drink and celebrate with the team when you’re finished and your goal has been achieved.

And that’s what an intensive workshop is all about. Building something meaningful in the span of a short amount of time. Remember, even the smallest teams can launch something new if they approach it in the right way.

I can’t wait to hear about what you achieve!