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SHOW NOTES
When you’re in a live launch model, all your time is spent launching or preparing to launch. Which means, you have to be organized to really maximize your results.
Yes, live launching can be incredibly exhausting. But if you don’t dive into launch reports pretty soon after, you’ll lose momentum – and your next launch won’t be the best it can be.
So, take a breath, and get to work!
In this episode, I’m detailing our behind-the-scenes launch prep for the second round of IGNITE. Of course, I use The Hirsh Process in my business, too – so you’ll get those details right here!
Listen in for more about…
- The miracle master document that keeps us on track
- “Super Thinking Sessions” + team brainstorming sessions
- And the 3 parts to our pre-launch plan, happening now!
If you’ve been waiting for a deep dive into everything you hear right here… you’re in luck! This Thursday, I’m hosting a masterclass all about the 3 secrets to exploding your brand (without blowing your ads budget). You’ll learn our *proven process* that’s generated over $90M in revenue for our clients! Save your spot right here.
Key Points:
[3:11] The first launch tells you what you need to know
[5:07] Because you’re always preparing for the next one
[6:13] This time we made a miracle master document with all the details, prioritized by month
[8:35] My version of “Super Thinking Sessions”…
[10:29] And then a fun brainstorming session with the whole marketing team!
[12:19] Our pre-launch is broken down into 3 sections
[13:11] Now my job during the launch is just.. showing up!
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[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Emily Hirsh: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention innovators, influencers, creators, and game-changing entrepreneurs: your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise.
We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launch multimillion dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind the scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success. Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.
Hello, everybody. Hope you’re all having an amazing week. This episode will be coming out in October, one of my favorite months, my birthday month, and also probably one of my favorite months even more now because one, I love fall, but also two, in Texas it’s going to be cooling down. It’s finally… Everybody’s like, “It gets better in October.” So I like this month even more now.
Today, I’m going to dive in. So I did this a lot around our last launch. I like to give you guys behind the scenes when we are doing our launch, so you get to see what we’re doing to prepare for the launch internally. So, we’re going to be coming up on a launch of IGNITE, my course, again, at the very end of this month into November. So right now, as of recording this episode, and also when it comes out.. but when it comes out, we’ll be a lot more in launch mode… but, we’re doing a lot of pre-launch planning, and we have been doing pre-launch planning.
So, I want to give you guys that behind the scenes and just tell you what we’re doing, and you might get your own takeaways to be able to implement and take over to your own business, depending on if you do live launches or not. If you don’t do live launches, a lot of these preparation things can be carried over to evergreen in different ways, but still very important points to make.
So the first thing is, we have had lead goals since… As soon as our last launch was over, we did a whole launch report, a recap, and we looked at the percentage of people who bought, on our list. We looked at everything, all the numbers, the email open rates, the sales conversion, the webinar conversion, the live attendee conversion, the landing page conversions, the ad conversions, ad spend, ROI.
We did hit our goal. So our goal was 50 sales last time, and we did hit that goal, pretty much right on. So that was really cool, and it was profitable. We did put a lot into it. It was a profitable launch, but then I put it all into this next one basically, almost all of it.
As soon as that was over, we then said, “Okay, for the next launch, now that we have this data, what do we want to accomplish in the next launch? Where do we need to get the list in order for that to be possible?” Because the first launch tells you your sales percentage. So our whole list, about 1% of the whole list converted, if you looked at the number of sales compared to our list size. So then we knew, “Okay if we want to convert that again, and we want to increase the sales, where do we need to get our list?” That gave us a number of where we needed to get our list.
So then, that gave me a number when we broke it out. So that was in July, and we knew we had July through October. So we’re able to break out how many leads per month we want to add on average, the budget, and… do you guys see, I follow my own process here? I’m not just pulling a budget out of my hat. I am doing it all based on numbers. So we’ve been building the list.
We have a funnel that also has a Tripwire to try to be as self-liquidating as possible. We pay for about 40% of the ad spend with that Tripwire. So that’s pretty cool, because we’re list-building, and we’re just trying to cover some of that ad spend, and we’re happy with that. If we can cover even half of it, I’m honestly happy with that. It’s only a $27 product.
So, knowing your lead goals is really important, because if you do have a live launch model, when you’re not launching, you’re planning for the next launch, and it’s why some people hate the live launch model, for that reason. But you’re always either preparing for the next launch or in your launch mode. I won’t be in this forever, I won’t be doing live launches forever, but right now I like to do it this way with IGNITE. I also like the way it is with just having a whole round of students come in at the same time. It’s powerful [from] the delivery standpoint.
If you’re doing Evergreen, you’re doing this month over month. You’re planning the numbers this way. So, we knew our lead goal. We knew what that needed to be, and we’re tracking that weekly and monthly. I have an ads manager on my team who’s in charge of my account. He runs our ads just like a client. He sends me weekly reports. I look at them, I give feedback. We have a cost per lead goal just like we would do [with] a client.
So that’s really important, though, that you don’t like .. I think what sometimes people do is, they’re so exhausted from their launch that they just shutdown and they’re like, “Okay, I made the money. I’m just not going to worry about this for a couple of months, and then I’ll launch again whenever I’m planning on it.” Then by the time they get around to starting to plan for the launch, it’s almost too tight and too close to try to get their leads where it needs to be for that launch to be as successful as they want it to be.
So really, right after your launch, you need to go into report, recap, and a plan between now and the next launch. Because if you don’t do that, it sneaks up on you really fast, and then you’re not setting yourself up for success. That’s the first thing that is really important and we’ve been doing continuing to do. Then we go deeper into those numbers, and we say, “Based on the last launch, how many people do we need to get signed up for our video series, for our webinar?” So we go into that launch with those numbers, and we know that.
So the next thing we have that… this is actually not something we normally do for clients. We have a campaign planner, but obviously my team is also building all the funnels for this, and the emails, and managing the entire launch. We made this master document. It’s amazing, and we did this for the last launch and we just are updating it for this next launch right now.
It lays everything out. We have every piece of the launch that needs to be done, from the landing pages to the emails. We have a dates where we know every single email that’s going to go out throughout the whole launch, every single Facebook live I’m going to do, every single post we’re going to do in the Facebook group, all of the details.
It’s all broken out day by day. Then also, we have a massive “to do” list. What we did was, we made a to do list and prioritized it by months, because there’s so much to do for the launch, and it’s really easy to have a massive “to do” list and then just get super overwhelmed by it, and be like, “I don’t even know where to start. I’ll just start on the thing I want to do.”
Sometimes there’s things that are like more priority. For example, your sales page usually isn’t as high priority as like, your landing page to your video series or your webinar, because that has to go out way sooner than your sales page does. If you prioritized it wrong, you could leave yourself in a stressful bind. This is obviously getting into operations and team stuff, but for us what’s worked really well is having a master sheet, and then breaking down all of the big pieces and projects of the launch into really small, every detail, so everybody knows what they’re responsible for.
There’s a date attached to every single one, and we know if we’re on track or not every single week when we sit down on Mondays [when] we have our marketing meeting, and we know what we need to do. Tasks and projects are also a metric, and we have to measure that as well. That’s something just [about] prepping for the launch, because a big mistake I see is, people don’t leave enough time.
The way we see this is, it obviously affects the ads if you’re getting a landing page late, or you’re getting things late for the launch. For the team as a whole, you want to plan ahead and make sure that you get that content. The earlier you can and the more prepared you can be, the better everyone’s going to be set up for success.
And I will tell you, the more I’ve worked with higher and higher level influencers, the more I see them doing this really well. Those teams really do it well, they’re on top of it with all of their projects and tasks and things that they have to do for their entire team, so that you know we as the ads team are set up for success.
This is another idea that I’ll throw out here that we just did with our team, which is, a brainstorming session. This could be fun with your team. It can include your team and your ads team and whoever wants to be a part of it. But basically I first sat down for about an hour with a blank piece of white paper, and I just wrote everything that came to me in terms of some new ideas for the launch, because we’re launching the video series again, and I don’t want it to feel like the same launch.
So I want to have new elements and new things that we do and really new creative ads and just have some fun with it, because we’ve done the foundational piece, and now I want it to also feel different and [like] an even better experience than the last time for people going through it. I sat down with a blank piece of paper, and I just wrote out every idea I could think of, like ad ideas, some fun ideas I could do in the pop-up Facebook group during the launch, email ideas, things we should highlight, ways we should position things. I just wrote it all down in a huge brain dump.
That’s one of my favorite ways to just do that. I call it “super thinking sessions.” I actually think Brooke Castillo said that, so I want to make sure I credit her. I don’t think I came up with that. I heard it somewhere, and I loved it, but I do it my own way, which is I just sit down with a blank sheet of paper and just write down everything I can think of. I keep on also asking myself like, “Okay, what else?” Really pushing my mind to think further about it.
It’s really powerful, because what I’ve noticed is, if I don’t create time to do something like that, I’d never have the capacity to think in that way. So my ideas feel like, “Man, I know we could have done better,” because I knew in the back of my head, I didn’t create space for that time and that brainpower. So I did that. Then we also had an hour meeting with our team where we did the same thing.
In that one I didn’t talk as much, but I let, you know… We invited, we said it was an optional meeting. It was mandatory for the marketing team, but optional for my whole ads team. So we said, “Anyone who wants to come, come, and just throw out ideas,” and it was so powerful. And you could definitely do that with your team.
I have a really great advantage, because I have a marketing team who’s behind the scenes of massive launches every month. But it was just so powerful, because you come up with ideas that you maybe wouldn’t think of before. So, regardless what it is that you’re brainstorming or problem solving even, it’s really powerful [for] your team to just set aside an hour and just be like, “Let’s just throw stuff out there. What are you coming up with? Let me hear your ideas.”
Creating that space for your team is also not only really beneficial and powerful for you, because you’ll probably get ideas that you can think of, but it also allows them to really play a part and be heard. I want my ads team to, in their own way, always play a part in IGNITE, because it’s a part of our company. I’m always trying to blend it together, because I say, “IGNITE wouldn’t exist without the ads team, because the ads team is the foundation of IGNITE and the information in there.” I want everybody to feel together with that.
We did that, and it was awesome, got some great information and ideas. So we took that and turned those into “to do’s.” If you have a launch coming up, or you’re launching a new funnel or a project, or even have a problem that you need to solve and you don’t necessarily know the answer, that could be a great way for you to solve it, for your team, is just, “Let’s just have an hour brainstorming session and just talk it out, throw out ideas.
There are no wrong answers. We don’t have to use everything that comes out,” and then take those, and turn them into “to do’s” of actually, what you want to implement. Okay? Then the final thing that I’ll say that we’re in the thick of right now for our launch planning is having basically every piece… we broke it out into sections, so we had our lead gen piece, which was happening over the past few months before this. We have our actual launch prep time period where ads are not live yet, but we’re fully in launch prep, prepping for the launch.
Then we’ll have our, in the actual launch, there’s two main phases, actually probably three. There’s the lead gen happening before anything is live and you’re just getting people signed up for your launch experience, whether it’s a video series or a webinar. Then there’s actually when that’s happening, so when the video series is dropping and the webinar’s happening. Then there’s the open cart phase. So there’s really three main phases with the live launch, and then there’s the pre-work building up to that.
It’s really helpful if you breakdown all the “to do’s,” and not just to-dos, but for you influencers and content creators, the content you need to create. Because I am telling you, being prepared with what Insta-stories do I need to make, and Insta-story ads, and preparing my Facebook live topics, and all of that, is super helpful when it comes time to launch. Because my job when it’s launch time is just that, content.
A lot of times, you end up pushing things back if you don’t do them as much as you can ahead of time. So for us, we basically map out all the “to do’s”, all of the content, everything everyone’s responsible for in those different phases. Then my marketing coordinator who’s the head of all this just updates everybody on the weekly marketing meeting with their responsibilities. Everybody’s clear what they have to do. Everybody’s clear what they’re contributing, everybody’s clear on the deadlines, everybody can clear up questions.
This has been really important for us, because otherwise, honestly, I’d feel so overwhelmed. Until I get this out, and we break it all down, and I can see it coming together, and that we’re on track or not on track, I feel super overwhelmed. Those are all the things we’re doing right now for launch prepping, and as of recording this, I still have about two months before we actually open the cart, but I have about a month, just over a month and a half until we’ll actually start ads.
That’s pretty far in advance, I want you guys to realize that. I’m not two weeks out throwing everything together, because that just sets nobody up for success, and there’s no way you can do as good of a job as you can if you’re way ahead of the game.
I’m so excited for you guys to be a part of this launch, this upcoming launch. I definitely will be mentioning it on the podcast, some really cool, innovative stuff coming out, really cool content. I can’t wait! If you want Team Hirsh’s help running your ads during a launch, we are pretty pro at that. We’re in the middle of a lot of amazing launches with our amazing clients. We have these processes and systems down pretty well. You can go to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with us, and I’ll see you all next time.
Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind the scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com.
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