🏴‍☠️ Stop spreading your marketing like cheap peanut butter 🥜

In partnership with

THIS WEEK’S LESSON

🥜 Peanut Butter is great for sandwiches, but not for marketing.

You taught your students that focus beats scattered attention every time. Yet when it comes to marketing your education business, you might be falling into the "spread everything thin" trap.

I know because I've been there too 😅

Let me paint a picture of what peanut butter marketing looks like in our world:

• Posting daily on every social platform (🫣)

• Running tiny ads across multiple channels

• Creating content for anyone with a pulse

• Trying to attend every K12 conference

• "Building your personal brand" (classic ME DISEASE)

Sound familiar?

Here's the problem: When you spread your marketing (and yourself) too thin, you end up exhausted with weak results across all channels. It's like trying to teach every subject instead of focusing on your expertise.

The Lightning Strike Alternative

Instead of playing social media whack-a-mole, concentrate your marketing into a lightning strike.

Educators make their biggest decisions:

• Back to school season

• End of budget year

• Summer PD planning

• Winter conference season

These are natural moments for lightning strikes. But most Former Educator Founders miss these opportunities because they're too busy doing their daily social media dance 💃

What Makes a Lightning Strike Different?

A lightning strike is a highly coordinated, high-impact marketing campaign that:

• Targets your superconsumers (those most likely to buy and tell others)

• Happens in a concentrated time period

• Creates memorable moments

A real example from last summer:

Last July,I hosted a live event in Nashville, TN and stacked it with Principals United. This created a supergeo (a location with a high concentration of superconsumers).

My goal was to deliver great value and invite the audience to join my newsletter for free.

From there, I executed a 7-week digital launch

Results:

• 📧 I sent 41 emails in total to 4000+ audience

• 💰 1% converted (38 new members = $38K)

What I’d change for next time:

• Leverage my podcast — duh, I was being lazy

• Run free webinars during the launch — when I do this I ALWAYS get more sales

• Do something outrageous and remarkable in person to drive WOM

• Grow my email list (1% of a larger list = more cheddar 🧀).

• Create an affiliate offer

• Run ads

• Improve the copy

How to Plan Your First Lightning Strike

Step 1. Choose Your Moment

I covered the big 4 moments earlier in this article.

Step 2. Concentrate Your Resources

This is where most Former Educator Founders get scared. You need to put 70-80% of your marketing budget into your strikes.

"But Daniel, what about all my other marketing?"

Trust me. It's better to matter to your superconsumers 2-3 times per year than to not-matter to everybody, forever.

Step 3. Stack Your Marketing Elements

Stack different elements and create "the multiplier effect":

• Email campaign

• Social proof from past customers

• Limited time offer

• Live events (virtual or in-person)

• Partner promotions

• Content that can be repurposed

Each element should multiply the impact of the others.

The Real Reason Lightning Strikes Work

When you concentrate your marketing into strikes:

• Your audience actually pays attention (because you're not always "on")

• You create FOMO (fear of missing out)

• Word of mouth happens naturally

• You can focus on delivery instead of constant promotion