[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Our course launch is officially complete – and I’m happy to report: We crushed our goals, EVEN with an unproven product!
This episode is all about how (with some “take action” advice for anyone trying to sell a brand-new product in an experienced marketplace!).
Let me just say, when you’re deep in course creation, it’s sometimes hard to differentiate What To Do Now v. Every Great New Idea – right? In this episode, I’ll walk you through why this particular launch was so successful, plus the questions I asked myself to keep me on track.
Tune into this episode for more about…
- How to build trust *during* a launch (i.e. what to prioritize)
- The difference between VALUE and over-delivering information
- And BONUS: how my first-ever Facebook Live helped sell my course!
If you’re launching an unproven product, this episode is a must-listen. Tune in, screenshot the show, and share with your personal takeaways on Instagram stories (tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout!).
Key Points:
[2:06] The #1 thing we did really well during our launch
[4:44] Here’s the reason we crushed our goals with an unproven product
[5:51] Remember that you’re the expert – how can you speak to your ICA?
[9:16] Here’s how my first-ever Facebook Live resurfaced (+why it helped sell my course!)
[13:36] Value is not about over-delivering information
[14:11] If you’re an influencer, people want to see you as a real person.
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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 multi-million 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 client 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, hello, everybody. I am so excited to be recording podcast again. I batch-recorded last month a lot of episodes, so I haven’t done this in a while, and I always love brainstorming content for you guys and planning out these episodes.
Right now currently recording this, we’re still in launch mode, so if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you know we’re launching our IGNITE course, but by the time this episode comes out, the doors will be closed, and it won’t be available anymore, so I just wanted to share like I’m in the thick of it right now, and I plan on doing a more in-depth launch recap with our numbers and number statistics of what we learned in terms of our strategy for the launch. But so far, I have a massive takeaway from our own launch that I just want to share here and give you the backstory on what we did in our launch and what’s worked really well. We are currently crushing our numbers. We have two more days until the cart closes, and we should hit our goal by, probably surpass it.
I feel like the number one thing that we did really well during this launch and that we planned for and that we stayed consistent on during the entire time leading up to the cart opening and during the cart opening is we really prioritized value and connection and really building relationships with people.
Just to give you a little backstory of our strategy that we did, so we did a PLF launch. We did a three-part video series, and then a webinar, and then the cart opened for seven days. In during the video series, I delivered a ton of value. There was my three videos that dropped one day after the other. People asked me, “Why did you have them drop so close together?” I thought about it. I was like, “Well, is that overwhelming for people?” but my concern is and the thing I didn’t want to have happen is if you do every other day, I’m afraid I’ll lose a lot of people because that’s six days of just videos dropping, then you have the webinar, then the cart opens. It’s a long time. I mean, yes, it gives people enough time to catch up on the content, but we left the content up all week until the cart closes, and then we take it down. They can go catch up on it.q
But during that time that the videos were live, I also went live on Facebook live twice a day. Each day, I did a training on Facebook live that was a training, actual like me teaching related to the topic that came out that day. Sometimes it was repeating or reiterating the most important points and encouraging people to go watch the video that came out. Then we had a popup Facebook group. This is where a lot of the relationship building has happened.
About 50% of the people who signed up for the mini course joined our free popup Facebook group, so popup Facebook group meaning we’re only keeping it open during this launch. It’s a Facebook group, private Facebook group for everybody going through the video series during the launch, and we’re going to archive it at the end of this week so that we don’t have to keep managing the group. There’s like 2,500 people in that group, and it’s really awesome to see the relationships building.
What I did is every day also when the video dropped, I did a live Q&A in that group, and those were awesome. I didn’t know how many people would show up and ask questions, and every day for like 30-45 minutes, I just got on and was like coming out with me and ask questions, and people loved it, but I could see what was happening was people were really, like that trust was building up with me in an incredible amount leading up to when the cart opened.
The biggest thing that I take away from this, and the reason why… We’re crushing our goals, and this product is completely unproven. We’ve never launched this before. It’s an amazing product and offer, like it’s a no-brainer offer, so I know that’s why we’re selling really well, but also, it’s not like I have a bunch of testimonials of people who have gone through the course or… I haven’t launched this before, so you don’t know. I didn’t have the data. I was in this situation where you might be where you’re like, “Well, I don’t have data to go off of to know how my launch is going to go.”
That’s where I was. I think… I don’t think I know the reason that we’ve done so well is because we’ve prioritized the value. I gave a lot of value during the video series. Between the actual videos, we gave workbooks with every video, and then my bonus trainings and Q&A calls that I would do. During all that time, I’m not just giving value, I’m building relationships and I’m building trust and I’m helping people feel connected to me. That’s really what you want leading up to your car opens because then your cart opens and you’re asking for a sale, and it’s easy because people trust you.
Now, I will say this too. Giving value doesn’t necessarily mean dumping as much information as you possibly can on people because honestly, when I created this mini course and I worked on the scripts for the videos and the content for the videos and what we’re going to teach in the workbooks, probably for 20 hours, like a lot went into that and the scripting of it because we’re probably going to reuse some of it. I put a lot into it because we did a real production for it, and a lot went into it.
I was so close to it that I started having thoughts of like, “Man, is this actually enough value for people?” because you have to remember you’re the expert, a lot of times, when teach something to somebody who’s not the expert and this is a more beginner thing for them and they’re just starting out or they don’t live it and breathe this every day like you might, you can teach the basics, and it’s a lot of value.
The key that you have to have and that you’re trying to achieve is how can somebody go through your content during this experience, whether it’s a mini course, whether it’s a video series, whether it’s a webinar, and have takeaways and epiphanies and small wins? If you can do that, you’re delivering a lot of value. It’s not about overwhelming people with information because I even had the thought, and this is normal if you feel this, of “this doesn’t feel that deep of information. Is this going to be enough value?” Then the feedback I’ve gotten during the week is “this is more valuable than a paid course I’ve taken. This has so much information and so much value, it can’t even describe it.”
I’m feeling one way because I’m an expert and because to me, it is basic, because I live this, I’ve lived and breathed this for three years every day all day, but to somebody who doesn’t, you don’t want to overwhelm them. That’s that one thing. Giving value doesn’t mean you’re overwhelming your audience. It means you’re helping them see things in a different way or see that it’s possible or have a breakthrough or have a small win. That is giving value, so how do you have to set up your content to do that? That’s what we did. We did give tons of value.
I even gave away a Facebook ads planner that we use internally that’s a spreadsheet that I paid hundreds, probably thousand dollars to have it created by our team, template, and I gave it away because I want to give away some of our best stuff. I want them to see the value, but I didn’t overwhelm there’s a difference. You can’t think, “Oh, I gotta give away so much value. I gotta overwhelm people,” because if you do that, it will be a mistake. They won’t buy. If they won’t overwhelmed, and they’re like, “Man, I gotta go do all these 25,000 action items that I got from this week, I can’t buy the course,” or, “I can’t buy the offer,” then that’s not good.
You have to… There’s a fine line and a fine balance in the way I define it, and I look at it as “can I help this person have a win, can I have this person have an epiphany, have new way of thinking, or a small… ” they realize something’s possible they didn’t think before. You simplify it for them. You get them a process.
One thing that we did, and I didn’t plan this, it kind of just happened throughout the week, is one of the… Well, I planned this one part, and then more happened. I planned… I truly believe if you listen to my content, how much of a fan I am of visibility and brand awareness content, so Facebook lives are a huge part of that and getting on video online and showing up and building your influence.
On one of the days, my challenge to somebody was, to the people watching, was go on your business page, do a Facebook live, and I want you to promote it for $25 to your audience of people, of people that you think… of new people, not your followers, of people that you think are going to be… that your followers would follow. I said list some pages they would like because that’s the most accurate way. I challenged people to that. I really emphasized it in the bonus trainings I did and the Q&A, and I got 15-20 people, at least, go and do their first Facebook live and put ad spend behind it and then see that it’s possible to grow their following that easily and promote it to people who didn’t know who they were and get a reaction from it, which is an amazing, small win that they got, that they saw was possible.
What I did was I actually talked about the first times that I went live on Facebook and how nervous I was and that I was in my car because I didn’t have an office. This is all true. I didn’t have an office so I had to go live in my car because that was the only quiet place if I didn’t want to my toddler to be in the video, and my first Facebook lives and how I thought they were so terrible because they were, and just vulnerably shared that with people.
I actually went as far as going to find my very first Facebook live and shared it into the Facebook group to show people, like, “Hey, if I could do this three years ago, look, this is not that great a video, you could do this too right now.” People loved it. I didn’t plan that piece, and that is what came out of “I was on live video,” and I was like, “You know what? If you’re in the Facebook group, I’m going to show you my first Facebook live. It’s so embarrassing. I’m going to share it in the group. If you go live, I want to help you guys.”
That was really cool to see, but also, what it did was it created that trust with me because if people see that I’m just a regular person like I was starting in the same place that they probably are, it makes it seem so much more possible for them to achieve what I have or what our clients have. In your own business, think of that. In every free experience you create or nurturing or value experience that you create that’s leading somebody to a sale, you want to create value, and you want to create and give information, but it’s not about the overload of information. It’s like how can you break it down for them so they can see that something’s possible that they didn’t think was possible before or they see the clear path or they see what they were doing wrong all this time because if you can make somebody have that mindset shift and that click in their brain, you will earn so much trust from them, and that is what I did.
I’m really proud of it too because I was able to get all those people to go put themselves out there in a massive way that’s really scary for a lot of people. I get it because I was there. Side note, finding stories, then my video got like, I don’t even know, like 800 views in 24 hours, people commenting on it, so then my first Facebook live, because the algorithm pushed it back out in the newsfeed from the new engagement, resurfaced, and everybody saw it. I had people commenting and liking who weren’t a part of the mini course who probably thought it was a video I made last week if they didn’t look at the date. That was fun, but I didn’t really care. It was fine.
Then we gave a prize too. For anybody who actually went live, promoted it, and sent us the screen shot, we gave a really small little prize to them because we really wanted them to do that. I focused on what’s that win they could have that they can realize something’s possible they didn’t realize before. By creating a Facebook live and promoting it to a new audience of cold traffic that doesn’t know you, you’re building your influence, you’re building your brand. It’s that easy. You don’t even have to have the funnel.
I want you guys to think about, if you’re planning a launch or even if it’s in your evergreen funnel or if it’s nurturing your existing following, value is not about over-delivering information and just packing on so people are overwhelmed, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh. This is so much. I don’t even know what to do with it. I’m so overwhelmed.” It’s about creating that mindset shift for people because if you can do that, it’s more powerful than anything.
Overall, to add to that for my launch, the popup Facebook group was great, and me going on live video very casually… like one of them my so came in on the video, which is a little distracting, but it was fine, and people love that stuff. Just remember that, especially if you’re an influencer, people want to see you as a real person. They want to see you, they want to know your journey, and you can’t show you and just show up this end result that’s happened after three or four whatever years that you’ve built up and just talk about that and how to do it. You have to show them you were them or your clients were them one day, and create that relatable relationship and open up to them as a… If you can do that, the trust is incredible that you create, and trust creates sales, trust creates the buyers.
That’s what we’re trying to do in all of our marketing. If you can switch the way you think about it and switch when I market, when I nurture, when I give value, I’m trying to create trust and build those virtual relationships with people because then I’m creating buyers. We all know what we want, but instead of just focusing on the sales… because we all want sales, we’re running a business.
I’m not afraid to say that either. I straight up say that in my content, “I am doing all of this to get sales because I am a business owner, but I want you to trust me to buy from me, and I want you to trust that what I deliver when it’s paid, is even better than my free content, and I want you to experience the value and the knowledge and the information and the process and everything that I have as a company and as a brand so that when it comes time for me to ask you to buy something you don’t even hesitate because the trust is there.”
That’s my number one day takeaway so far. We’re still in our launch, and I will definitely do a more numbers-oriented takeaway after, but I wanted to give you guys an overview of our strategy and what I think honestly worked really, really well. Just to add one more small thing that’s, I don’t know, not not related, but it’s related a little bit is we had a live chat on my sales page, and my team managed it. I haven’t done that before or really been a part of… Well, we don’t manage that for clients, so I don’t really see if that’s there, but it worked really, really well. A lot of people would come on live and be asking questions, and we had a dozen, at least, people that while they’re live on the sales team, they’re chatting my team, and we convinced them to buy because we’re answering their questions. It’s that personal touch.
The other thing I did was I recorded Bonjoro, it’s an app, videos for all the students who joined a personal video of me. It’s like 30 seconds. I’m like, “Hey, welcome. We’re so happy you’re here,” and sent it to them, and then students started sharing that with people while the doors were still open. Again, those personal touches, relationship-building, trust, what can you do to really incorporate that in all parts of your marketing from the marketing and the delivery because the delivery, and I’m going to talk about this in a different episode, but the delivery, when you do that, leads to referrals and organic traffic, and that matters too.
All right, you guys. Well, the doors are closed to IGNITE now once this episode comes out, but if you think you’d want to work with Team Hirsh one-on-one, we do have a few client spots open. We had a few people come in through IGNITE, so that filled up a few, but we have two, about, spots left so you can go to helpmystrategy.com and apply to work with us. I’ll see you all next time.
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