[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Nothing gets me as excited as a live launch does.
From planning the strategy, creating the content, executing the delivery, the energy from my audience, the support from my team, I truly thrive in the midst of a launch.
I know that that’s not exactly the same experience a lot of other entrepreneurs have.
But it could be, as long as you know how to strategically plan and marketing a launch.
In today’s episode, I’m breaking down the 5 strategies that really pushed the needle forward for my recent launch that will help you multiply your launch results too if implemented.
I’m also sharing some additional nuggets of launch wisdom, including:
- Effectively pre-planning for your launch
- How to be intentional with your content and delivery
- The importance of being able to pivot mid-launch
If you’re ready to be a live launch queen (or king!), be sure to tune in and then shoot me a DM over on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) if you plan on implementing any of these strategies for your next launch. Need support in strategizing and executing your next launch? Apply to work with Team Hirsh today at helpmystrategy.com.
Subscribe To & Review The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast
Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.
Emily Hirsh:
Hello everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Welcome back if you’re a regular listener. I am so pumped about today’s episode because I’m going to be diving into five live launch strategies that will multiply your launch results. If you live launch, these are strategies we used in our most recent Ignite launch. And if you followed the launch, you might’ve caught some of these, but I want to lay out for you guys the strategies that I think really moved the needle for us and made the biggest difference. Some of them are strategies that nobody’s really doing. Some of them are strategies that some people do, but I want to emphasize on the importance of them and really just tie together all the things. And we, I will do a separate episode that will focus on the actual numbers and results of the live launch. I need to finish the recap with my team and get the numbers back. And actually we are very big on numbers, so putting everything in our spreadsheet and our reporting template and reviewing it and everybody kind of talking through it.
So we’ll do that mid-month and then I’ll share it on the podcast with my takeaways of what worked, what didn’t work, what I’ll change next time. I have so many, oh my god, because it was just incredible. Like I have so many takeaways, it was an amazing experience. My team put in 110%, like I put it in 110%. We literally spent two months probably planning for this launch. We pulled out all the stops and it also just showed, like, it was just amazing. It shined a light on so many things and made me think differently because of the energy of the launch.
So this week, when you guys are listening to this, I’m doing my CEO week to like finish my debrief from the launch, but I just have content and content and content for you guys that I think you’re going to get so much out of because of the energetic space I was in during the launch and where that put my brain. Anyways, so today though, I have five strategies I think you’re going to get a ton out of. These are things that we implemented in our launch, and I know moved the needle the most to being a successful, highly profitable launch.
So here’s the thing with launches. The first thing I want to say before I dive into the five strategies is the critical piece to a live launch is that you preplan, because you cannot just go into a live launch and hope that it all comes together and throw things, you know, each day. And honestly, we spent two months pre-planning for this launch and we could have had longer, like we still were going into it and I was like working some nights and it felt a little behind and we totally pulled it off and got everything done of course. But two months and I feel like we, I could have even had more time.
So the reason that I feel we were so successful is we were very intentional with every component of the launch, especially the content that went into the launch. If I compare the, like the big live launch I did a year ago compared to this one this year, that’s the biggest difference that moved the needle the most for us was how intentional we were about the actual content that went into it. So the content of the video series and the content of the webinar, and how that led to the actual offer, and the experience that people had throughout it, because sometimes people overlook that. You’re really focused on like getting people into an experience, getting them signed up for it, and then you get them in and you might give value, hopefully you give value. You give value, you put together your best presentation, but you maybe aren’t being as intentional as you could be with it.
And it’s so critical that two things happen. One, that as many people as possible actually engage during that time period of a live launch, because when they’re engaging, they’re building trust with you in the brand. So it’s critical that they are engaging. And then the second thing is it’s critical that the content is leading to your offer in a very strategic way. Meaning you’re walking the fine line of not overwhelming your audience to the point where they have way too much, and they need to go do it, and they don’t want your offer, and they’re overwhelmed, and they’ve got this to-do list, and you gave them too much. But you give them enough value that they build the trust and they feel like they need your offer by the end of it. It’s not easy to do, especially when you’re doing a live launch.
Like our model was three videos and a webinar, so there was a lot of content I was giving. And it was very hard to not overwhelm people and to keep it simple, but also extremely valuable. Because that’s, you know, a core value of mine that I give so much value, and it’s something that I pride myself in is when people participated in a free experience of ours, they can walk away from that free experience with things to implement and valuable information, no matter if they become a customer or not. And I have to do that. I don’t believe in doing it otherwise. And I actually think that’s critical to the success of the product selling, but you can very easily overwhelm people. And especially because you’re probably an expert in what you do, if you’re teaching it, especially if you offer a course or a service that does these things. And so it’s really easy for you to go like three levels deeper than you need to, and not even realize you’re doing it.
So I’m going to preface with that because that, you know, all of these things feed into that idea. But I think that was one of the most important things we did was we were extremely intentional with the content that it didn’t overwhelm people, but that it provided value. And by the time they got to the webinar where I opened the cart, it was the perfect sequence. It got them to where they needed to be in order to be ready for Ignite. And also it got them there, even if they didn’t participate in a hundred percent of it. But your goal throughout the experience of a live launch is for people to engage, build trust with you, and seed your offer. That’s your goal. So everything you do has to drive that. And so keep that in mind as I go through these. So here are the five strategies that we implemented that I believe were some of the important to the success of our launch.
First, we did a pop-up Facebook group. So the format, like I said, was we had video series that dropped about every other day. And then we did a live webinar, and the live webinar opened the cart. Now, anybody who signed up for the video series or the webinar, we are putting them in a pop-up Facebook group, meaning the Facebook group was only open during the live launch. So everybody in that group was highly engaged, was there for the launch, was participating in the videos. And it wasn’t, I do have another Facebook group, and this is like a whole other episode podcast, but I don’t think we’re going to even keep it open because it’s just hard to keep it engaged when you don’t have a big event. And I’m much more of a fan of this pop-up Facebook group, but the pop-up Facebook group was great because not only did I have that Facebook group, which was building a community of these thousands of people going through this experience.
And I also went in there and I did specific Q and A’s and additional videos that were less polished and scripted and content heavy and were focused on answering questions, direct one-on-one questions with these people. And that is what I think, moved the needle so that they saw progress, so they were able to implement a few things and build the trust. Now I’ve definitely done pop-up Facebook groups in the past, and one of the downsides that I’ve had was I get all these people in there who are asking content heavy questions, and I have a marketing team, but they don’t necessarily know the answer to Facebook ads. My marketing team, like my tech VA, my social media manager, she doesn’t know the answer to deep, heavy, you know, Facebook ad strategic marketing questions. So I was having to answer all those, which was literally taking in the past all of my time.
So this time around, I actually recruited two of my ads team members to come into the Facebook group and provide support so that when people ask these detailed questions, like they listen to video one and they did the workbook and then they had this really detailed, personalized question about their business and how that related to the content they just listened to. I had support in answering those questions, but by getting those questions answered, people were able to move, make progress, and not be overwhelmed. And so this pop-up Facebook group, I feel was very critical to building that relationship with people. Again, my goal is engagement, build trust, and seed the product. So I need people as much as possible. I want them to go through the content to go through video one and do the workbook and make sure they’re not stuck. This Facebook group allowed that to happen.
It also allowed me to build a deeper level of connection because I was able to do these Q and A calls and build this like, little mini community of everybody going through the experience. So highly recommend doing something like that. We link to the Facebook group. So we made it very enticing to join the Facebook group. We link to it on the thank you page of our signups. We link to it in emails, and then every time a video launched, there was a specific resource that people could only get access to if they were in the Facebook group. So I really heavily pushed the Facebook group. I wanted a lot of people in there because I knew the more people in there, the more they’re going to engage, see other people’s comments, attend the Q and A, build that trust. And it works.
And we did do a public Facebook group last year. I didn’t have those bonus incentive resources. So that definitely helped numbers. We had, I would say about 40% of the total registration sign up for the Facebook group, but we had probably 60% of the actual video series people, which those are the main people in the Facebook group, because they’re going through the longer experience that lasted over a week, the videos dropping. The webinar people didn’t necessarily go through that experience. So we had like 60% of the video series people sign up for the Facebook group. So very important for community building. Big fan of pop-up Facebook groups to build that engagement. And if you have, you’re expecting large numbers, getting support with people who can answer, not just like tech, basic like admin, “when is the training?” questions, but can answer content questions so you’re not doing it all yourself was very helpful for me and my own sanity through the launch.
And it also allowed me to show up to those Q and A’s and put my all in those versus spend a lot of time, you know, answering the questions in the group, because it takes a lot of time to read someone’s personalized question and write back, you know, even just a paragraph. It takes 15, 20 minutes. So just do one of those. So having support, that was really helpful and just leveraging that community as much as possible.
The next thing that we did was we put all of our recordings into a private podcast feed. So you could go to the video page and watch the video, you could go in the Facebook group and watch the live Q and A. But I also stripped, I didn’t, my team did, but stripped all the recordings of the video series videos, any live Q and A that I did, any additional like once the cart open, we did the webinar, and then we also did any like bonus live I did that was focused more around open cart. We pulled the audio from that and put it in a podcast feed with the goal of just people to consume the content. And sometimes actually sitting on a page to watch a video is hard to get people to do. They get distracted. So pulling the audio and putting it in a podcast feed, just allowed more people to consume the content. Once they downloaded that audio feed, then they got, you know, it just automatically updates in their podcast player anytime I added a new audio. So throughout open cart, I was able to add audios in there for them. So that was great.
We got a lot of great feedback on that, that people were able to actually consume the content once, but multiple times, that’s what people said. Like they were actually listening to the videos more than once, because it was in that podcast feed, which is what I want. Like, are you kidding me? If you’re going to listen to my 20, 25 minute video twice, I’m building that relationship with them even more and they’re getting even more value out of that. So putting it in that podcast feed, and I did, of course, still have the video page, still do the lives in Facebook, like a normal launch. This was like my additional piece that I added in just to try and increase the amount of people consuming the content. Okay.
The third thing we did was we really leveraged ManyChat. And I do this with any live launch, even if it’s just like a single live webinar. I always always put a ManyChat button on the thank you page. And I have an incentive for them to click that. So they opt in, they sign up, name and email for my webinar. Or in this case, it was our video series and then our webinar. And on the thank you page, there is a resource I give them that’s through a ManyChat button. Sometimes it’s a workbook. In this case, I didn’t want to give them the whole workbook that far in advance to the video because it was going to give away the content. So I gave them a preparation checklist that actually listed some additional content things they could listen to before the series started, all the things they needed to have, like ready to get the most out of the series. And so they got access to that via ManyChat.
And so that way we’re getting their name and email like normal in our CRM software. And then on the thank you page, we’re also getting ManyChat subscribers. We get about 50 to 60% of people hit the ManyChat button and do that as well. What that allows us to do is send a reminder emails, or not emails, but messages all throughout the process, which just have, I mean, our ManyChat open rates are like a hundred percent, Which of course, because everybody opens their messenger. You don’t want to abuse it and send too many, which is easy to do. And you’ve got to shorten them and make them to the point. So they’re different than email, but we did this with both ManyChat and text message, but we would send, you know, video one drop, video two dropped here’s the link, video three dropped.
And then the other thing I love doing is you can ask open-ended questions and actually start messenger conversations with people. So you can say “video two dropped, what’d you think about video one yesterday? Reply and let me know.” And so many people reply, and then you’re having this conversation with people, which again, our main goal is build the relationship, increasing engagement, build that trust, get them the little mini results. And that’s just going to be highly more likely if they’re having these conversations with you. And maybe they have a question, or they need another resource, or you’re just building that connection. So that’s what I love about ManyChat is one, it has a very high open rate so more people will probably see my content, see when the content releases so they can go to it. And then two, I’m able to ask those open-ended questions and start the conversations when the contents releasing. But also moving into the open cart period too, I can ask those about, you know, do they have questions around the course? Okay.
The third thing we did, no, I’m on the I’m on the fourth thing already. Okay. The fourth thing that we did, this is something that I’ve never seen anybody do, and it was very successful. So here’s what we did, super cool. And this, I actually have to give credit to Aandra on my team because she was a co-conspirator in this idea. So we were talking about before, like when we were strategizing the launch, like, okay, how do we give people during open cart, a slice of Ignite? How do we give them a slice of it so they can experience it? And a lot of people, like the common thing people do is they will let you have a free module or a free lesson, or like a little slice of their course material.
Now I don’t love that idea, and I actually think that strategy could heavily backfire because I just gave, you know, would have given people three videos, three workbooks, and a webinar to consume throughout my launch. Now if I give you a module, or a lesson, or lessons of my course as a sneak peek preview, I’m just giving you more content. That’s highly likely you’re not going to finish as a potential customer, and that is just going to then become an objection of someone saying, oh, I can’t even consume your free, you know, your free module. I can’t buy your course. Like I don’t have time. And so I didn’t want to do that. And so we were like, okay, what can we do?
So the idea we came up with was we gave people a 48 hour VIP free access pass into our paid Facebook group. And so they could come into the paid Ignite Facebook community, and they could look at the support call recordings that get posted in there. They could look at the threads and the questions being answered, the Ignite success coach supporting our students. And we timed it so the monthly training I do for our Ignite students happened during that 48 hours. So you also got a VIP access pass into the Facebook group and to come and attend my training. And of course I was very strategic with what that training was that it didn’t overwhelm them, that it was advanced enough, but beginner enough. And I taught about dissecting your ad and funnel results. People loved it. I had tons of people on live.
So this is after I’ve done the video series, the webinar, and now we’re in open cart. And these are the people who are still on the fence. We gave them a 48 hour access pass. And so they actually got to come into our paid Facebook group. We accepted them in and attended my monthly training for our paid night students. And I was of course, very strategic about all of this and strategic about the posts they saw, and all of that. But I mean, really, they could go back to the beginning of time and review our Facebook group. That’s the same Facebook group since I launched Ignite a year and a half ago, and you can review in there. So people loved it.
And I was a little worried. I was like, what if, you know, there’s like jerks who come in and are like trolls in the Facebook group. And I told our students what was going to happen beforehand, but I was worried. I was like, I don’t know how this is going to go. It could be a total nightmare. It could be good. It could be, it was great. And so here’s also you guys like I’m like drilling marketing strategy right now because here’s also how we did it. It was so brilliant. My team and I just, we came up with this, but it was so good. So to get access to the Facebook group, we didn’t make them opt in or anything. We used a ManyChat link because what we wanted to do was have conversations that were very casual and open-ended like, hey, noticed you still haven’t bought Ignite and you’re in the VIP Facebook group. We’re going to have to remove access on this day. Are you still on the fence? And have those open ended conversations during that 48 hour period, which allowed people then to be asking us in messenger, if they were on the fence.
And we converted a few people through messenger who were in the VIP experience and who were on the fence that happened. So that was an incredible way to deliver it. We weren’t sure at first we were going to do like a link and we didn’t know how, because I didn’t want to make them opt in, but I also needed to track who signed up so we could send them specific messages. So that’s how we did it. We did a ManyChat link that then sent them the Facebook group link via ManyChat. We accepted everybody in and then we would tag them in like a welcome post, like hey, and then I had three Ignite alumni who were in charge of answering questions.
They volunteered their time, three people who had been through our Ignite course. And they specifically like nurtured these VIP people in Ignite in answering their questions, telling them how great of an experience ignite is. And they even did a couple of them even did live videos into the group saying, you know, here’s my experience. So that was really cool. I had people, like I said, buy through messenger, but also to who specifically like came to the monthly training with me and then bought after that. And it was just another way to give them value and give them a taste of what’s inside of the course, but not overwhelm them because it was like, you’re just in a Facebook group, you just get to scroll Facebook. You get to kind of binge through that content and scroll through that, but you don’t have to like go through an entire module or an entire lesson and feel super overwhelmed from that. So that was super successful. It was one of those things I was like, I don’t know, this could be a total failure or this could be awesome. Ended up being awesome. And it was great. So, okay.
So the fifth thing we did that was highly, highly successful was we did a live chat on our sales page. So we had three team members of mine who were actually on rotation schedule to always be live, to respond, to chat. My friend and also sales coordinator, Aandra, always says time kills deals, so it’s critical when you’re launching and you have open cart that when someone answers and asks a question and they’re considering buying, you’ve got to answer as fast as you can because they’re considering buying and time kills the deal. Like if they wait three hours to get a response or busy, now they’re going to like, they’ve thought about it, they have their doubts. You’ve got to answer.
And so Aandra actually managed this and helped me help me manage it with my team, but we had a live chat on the sales page. And so somebody was always there to, you know, as people are scrolling the page, a little button popped up and it was like, hey do you have any questions? You know, do you have any questions about joining Ignite? Let me know how I can help you. And so many people chatted, like it was very busy and we had lots of questions on there and we converted several people in that live chat. One thing Aandra taught us in that chat was you always end the conversation with a question. So they ask a question, you answer the question, and then you say, are you thinking, you know, are you thinking about enrolling? How can I help you finish the process? Or how can I help you make a decision about enrolling in Ignite? And so you don’t just like answer the question and then walk away and hope that they just decide on their own. You help them get to a decision. Even if that decision is no, you still help them kind of commit either way.
And so that was also huge and that was credit to Aandra, but having a live chat, we used Chatport, it was Chatport. I’m not an affiliate or anything, but I know people are going to ask what we use. So we use that on our page. It was great. It allowed, I think there was an app that my team could actually manage the chat from. So they were live through the weekend, through the entire open cart period, they were live answering questions, kind of in shifts. They took shifts, managing the chat and we’re answering questions so we can answer them really fast. But if people are scrolling a sales page, it’s really important that they are able to ask that question and get an answer fast because they are a hot, hot, hot lead.
Okay. So those are my five launch strategies. I feel like I just gave you a lot in a short amount of time. But these were the things that I sat down and I was like, these were the critical things we did during this launch that I know pushed the needle the most and led to the most success. The last thing I’ll just add here and, you know, I can talk about this more when I debrief the numbers and the strategy and what worked and what didn’t work. Cause I have a lot to say about that in our two webinars we did and the differences in them, but you still need matter how much you plan, no matter how far in advance you do it and what you put together, you still need to have like a little bit of capacity and space to pivot when needed, because things will happen during a launch where it’s like, oh, that worked really well, we need to do more of that. Or this type of conversation is heavily happening in the Facebook group so we need to pivot just a little bit and speak to this.
We definitely throughout open cart, like changed emails that were already loaded and ready to go because we needed to pivot a few things around messaging based live feedback we were getting from the leads in the Facebook group or webinar chat or whatever it was. So no matter how far you plan, you still need to leave room for that as well. And I just want to say that because I think that’s critical and that’s something that you always have to really balance in marketing and business is prebuilt planning. I mean, as organized as possible, and then leaving like a 10% amount of room to pivot and change things and adjust as needed based on your audience’s live, you know, experience and response that you have throughout it.
So if you want support from Team Hirsh, if you want either our done for you or done with you support, I feel like we are masters at launches. And here’s the reason, some of my launch strategies came from things we’ve done with clients in seven and eight figure live launches. And that’s why I’m able to take this shortcut because I’m able to see like, oh, here’s what worked in those and here’s what did not work in those. And let’s do this and move this around. And we have a massive, like, we have a launch training in our done with you program. We do this for clients. We help them. We give them our SOP, where I’m working on an updated SOP from this launch that we just did, that all of our clients will have access to, all of our students will have access to. So if you think you need that level and that shortcut in your business and your marketing, you can see if you qualify to work with Team Hirsh at helpmytrategy.com. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I will talk to you guys next week.