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SHOW NOTES

Today we’re going behind-the-scenes of planning for our upcoming live launch!

Team Hirsh is launching a course at the end of June, and we’ve been planning since late February.

In this episode, I’m detailing how we worked backwards from the numbers to increase + prepare my warm audience beforehand, plus how you can implement the same strategy for your launch.

This is basically an inside look at The Hirsh Process in action! I’m taking you behind-the-scenes of how it works in practice, within my own live launch!

I’m sharing…

• The most important live launch prep (+ what you need to do FIRST)
• How to prepare your audience (wayyyy ahead of time) for the sale
• How to set your team up for success (i.e. how to make a *realistic* timeline)

Tune in, and then head over to Instagram to share your takeaways. Tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout.

(P.S. Stay tuned for future episodes about how this planning phase moves into the implementation phases!)

Key Points:
[1:38] The course launches in June, but we started planning in late February!
[3:22] How to prepare your audience (wayyyy ahead of time) for the sale
[5:03] The most important preparation – what you need to do FIRST
[6:50] How to set your team up for success (i.e. making a *realistic* timeline)
[8:48] Here’s the VITAL components for a big live launch

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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.

Emily Hirsh: 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.

Emily Hirsh: Today, we’re going a little behind the scenes to talk to you guys about Hirsh Marketing’s launch that is coming up, and kind of what we’re doing right now to prepare for it, because it’s probably relevant to you if you’re planning a live launch or going to do a live launch. And it’s super fun. I haven’t done this in awhile, launched something. I, a long time ago, had a course on how to teach people how to become virtual assistants, but about a year ago, [I] went all in with my agency and my Facebook ad company, and got rid of that, because one focus is so important, one business. So I haven’t launched in a long time, and our entire team is preparing for a launch for our Facebook ads and marketing course. It’ll be a full, not just Facebook ads but marketing course. We’re teaching everything that we’re doing for clients, basically, in this entire course. It’s going to have a live component and a digital piece to it, and it’s not launching until end of June, but we have been starting to prepare for this since the beginning of March, maybe end of February. So that’s a huge gap. That’s an entire quarter, maybe a little more, that we are spending preparing for this launch, and so I wanted to kind of give you the behind the scenes of what we’re doing, because I think it’s what we recommend to clients, it’s how to set yourself up for success.

Emily Hirsh: Do it this way, and do it with this much preparation and time, so that you have a successful launch and that you know what you are getting into and what you are trying to accomplish. So the first thing that we’re doing with our launch prep is, obviously, planning. So, we put together … really my COO and I are managing this project together, and we’ve got our whole ads team … the reason why I can finally work on this … It’s been something I wanted to do for like, a year, but the reason why I can finally work on it is, my ads team that delivers to our clients is fully running. We’ve got an operations manager in there. We have senior strategists and ads managers who are all doing amazing work for our clients, and I don’t really have to be involved, and really neither does my COO.

Emily Hirsh: So now we get to kind of shift our focus while still knowing what’s going on in the ads department, but putting my day to day work into this content for this course, and the actual launch itself. So, we have put together an entire launch plan. That means date planning. I obviously planned out the course and all the modules and the content. So you first start with obviously planning, and like everything, working backwards works great, because then you can figure out, “Okay when do I want to launch?” and then work backwards, and work on the deadlines. With that planning also comes number planning, and this is like, the main focus of what I want to talk about today is, we’re launching something end of June, but right now we’re starting to prepare our audience so that we know our warm audience bucket. So, our email list, our video views on Facebook and Instagram, our social media following and engagement, and our web traffic, and even podcast listeners like you are beginning to go up right now, and we’re putting more and more time, energy, and money into increasing those so that when it comes time to launch, we’ve built these relationships and we’ve build this audience.

Emily Hirsh: And that is part of The Hirsh Process is that brand awareness and visibility piece, and we’re following our own process and really beginning to build that. So part of our planning was planning, “Okay, how many times am I committing to go live on Facebook and promote those Facebook lives every month leading up to the launch? And where does our list need to be to meet our sales goals?” And we figured out that number. So we know exactly how many leads we need to add into our list with our new lead gen funnels that we just launched in order to reach our launch goal. Sometimes, that can take a couple of months to get your list where it needs to be, and the mistake people make is they’re like, “I’m launching next month,” and you don’t have time to build that warm audience. Our course is not going to just be a $997 course. It has so much value and a live and digital product to it.

Emily Hirsh: And so it’s a little bit higher ticket. It’s not as high ticket obviously as working with us, but I really need people to trust me in order for them to buy this, and I know that, and so I am preparing for that. So we started with, “How many Facebook lives am I committing to? What do we need my list to get to? What kind of budget are we putting into promoting the podcast and planning the podcast content?” and building those warm audience buckets. And that is probably the most important thing if you’re preparing for a launch, because what you don’t want to do is go into your launch already below your numbers that you would need to meet your goal. So, how do you figure out your numbers that you would need to meet your goal? You would work backwards, and you’d say, “Okay. If my sales goal is $100,000, how many units would I need to sell?”

Emily Hirsh: Now if 1% or 2% of my entire list bought that product, there’s your number of how big your list needs to be going into your launch. And then you can also work backwards, which we are working on our actual launch model of, “How many people do we need to get into our video series and webinar and actually engaged in our launch to sell the course?” as well. And that way going into it, you can plan for that, and this allows us to not only plan those numbers and set goals, but then plan the budget, because we know, “Okay, if we pay average $2 cost per lead, and we need to get in 2,000 new leads a month, then here is how much we need to spend.” And actually, we have started reporting those numbers in the update on our daily huddle, so that I know going into it, without having to obviously go into my ads manager or go and look at it or ask my team. I just know the update every day as the CEO, “Are we on track to meet our goals?” [which is] basically, what our team does in their own daily tracking for our clients. So if you are doing …

Emily Hirsh: If you’re marketing, you should have consistent updates like this for it to be successful. So we’re planning. We’re building up our warm audiences. We’re planning exact metrics on where those things need to be. We have a podcast download. For us … again, your business is unique. You have your own metrics … so we’ve got a podcast download number, list number of actual leads, how many Facebook lives I need to do. And we know those, and then we’re able to then pull out our budgets, so then we’re budget planning. And then, the final thing is obviously operation planning. And so I throw this in here because it affects our team a lot. You want to have time. I’m talking with our creative director, who is going to do all my sales page copy and the actual copy to the opt in and the webinar and all those things …

Emily Hirsh: I’m talking to her now, preparing for this, because I don’t want last-minute work. So operational planning means really giving your team enough time to succeed. So whether that’s your ads team or your operations team or your marketing team, giving them enough time to succeed. So working backwards and planning those dates. And I’ll be honest with you guys, I wanted to launch this course end of March, no May, not March (that would be insane!), end of May, and we have a team retreat that I am flying my entire team here for the first in-person retreat ever at the beginning of June, and my COO was like, “Emily, it’s not doable. We can’t launch and then go into the team retreat and do all the work for the retreat and the launch and get it all done. It’s not going to set us up for success.” And I was like, “You know what? You’re right. Let’s push it to the end of June.” Because the other thing is, when you actually plan your launch when you’re opening the cart, then you gotta work backwards to, “Okay, when is the webinar happening, and then seven to 10 days before then, are we going to start ads?” And so really, ads start early June for us for the launch, but the actual doors will open towards the end of June.

Emily Hirsh: So I came into it, as most, I know if you’e a CEO listening, you get that of like, “Okay I am ready to go. Let’s go fast. I can hustle. I can do this. I can get it out the door. I am excited. I want to do it now,” and your team doesn’t always feel that, because they want to do a good job, and especially operation people like my COO, they should, and their job is to kind of check you, and be like, “Mmm that’s not setting our team up for success.” So that’s what she did. Easy conversation, and I was like, “You’re totally right,” and so, we made it end of June. And so that might be something that you have to look at, and it’s honestly something we have to look at with clients when we plan dates, because like I just said, your open cart date is one thing, but your actual starting ads date is usually a few weeks before then. And so if you are like, “Oh, I want to launch in two weeks,” you need to be starting out tomorrow, and then you’re like, “Oh wait. That’s not possible. My funnel’s not done.”

Emily Hirsh: So, to sum this up, we are launch prepping March, April, May. Our goal is to have mostly everything done by the end of May, so it’s taking us three to four months of prep, operation wise, but also building those warm audiences. So, you’ll obviously start seeing in my content that we’re going to start talking about the course, getting [people] excited that the course is coming, because we’re excited, and we want to build that buzz, and that’s strategic on our part. And that is what you need to do for a successful big launch. That’s what our successful seven-figure clients are doing. There’s so much work that goes into launches. There [are] some of our launch planning meetings where I come off and I’m like, “Holy crap, we have a lot to do. My head hurts.”

Emily Hirsh: Launches are a big deal. It’s not easy like, “Oh, I’ll just launch.” If you do it right, they are a big deal, operation-wise, getting your warm audience, budget. And you want it to be successful, especially if you are putting money into this, and you’re putting ad spend into it, set yourself up for that success, and do the pre-planning and pre-building of your warm audience, and it will pay off so much.

Emily Hirsh: If you ever want support with your launch, you are live launching, you want this support of planning your budget, planning your dates, planning all those little details of like, “When do my ads start, how many webinar registrants do I need to get, what will my conversion be, let’s pull the past data” … Those are all things we are doing. And I will do more podcasts showing you the behind the scenes of this, especially taking our launch data from the launch and then sharing that and like, “What are we doing moving forward?” because that’s a huge strategy as well is like, “Okay, now we’ve got data. This is a course I haven’t launched before. Now what am I going to do with that data for my next launch or turning it evergreen?” So if you want that support, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com and apply to work with Team Hirsh, and we would be happy to support you if you have that proven product or funnel.

Emily Hirsh: Thanks so much for listening today guys. I am so excited to share this course with you and to share the behind the scenes of our prepping and planning and actual implementation of launching this course.

Emily Hirsh: 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. If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review, so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.