“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
~ Henry Ford
In this blog, I want to talk about launching. Not how to launch, I have a workshop coming up on that. I’d like to shed some light on the possible reasons why launching may not have worked for you in the past. Either in that not enough people signed up for your offering or nobody at all did.
I believe there are 5 possible reasons a launch wouldn’t get the results you were hoping for or expecting.
1. What you offered wasn’t something your people wanted or needed
This happens when we create something we think our people need but we do so without consulting them about it first. I see this time and time again, business owners creating what their would-be clients need without taking the time to figure out what they actually want. Doing some simple audience research can solve this problem.
This could be in-depth audience research calls to find out what people need from you. I wrote a whole post on my approach to these calls here. If you are worried that asking what your people want won’t get the results you were hoping for I have something you can do instead. Instead of asking open-ended questions about what your people need support with, instead create a rough outline of thing you want to launch and then run it by some of the people in your audience who you think might be a fit. If they are willing, jump on a call and ask what you could do to make it a no-brainer for them to join. This is exactly how my yearlong mastermind got started.
If what you are offering doesn’t warrant a load of in-depth calls (because it’s a low-cost offering). it could be a simple post to say I’m thinking of launching this thing, what do you think?
My usual rule of thumb is to not launch anything unless I can think of 10 actual people in my audience who I believe would be a fit for what I’m launching.
2. You didn’t communicate the offering in a way that landed
Sometimes we spend so much of our care and attention on creating the thing we’re trying to sell that we have little left to give when it comes to the marketing. How we communicate our offering is crucial to the success of our launch.
Often people leave one of two things out of their communication. The problem itself — i.e. the problem your offering solves for people (pro tip: if it doesn’t solve a problem, you’ll have a hard time selling it) OR what life will be like after the problem is solved. Tad Hargrave refers to this as Island A and Island B. Island A being where you’re would-be customers or clients currently are and Island B being where they want to get to. Your product or service is what will get them from A to B.
It’s important that you include details of both of these in your launch communications.
It’s also here that we want to make sure that we are not pitching an offering that focuses on what people need versus what they want.
I often use the example here of a relationship coach. If someone is single and in search of their soulmate, even though you might know that what they need is to focus on loving themselves, marketing your offering in this way is unlikely to get you clients. A great example of this is the book “Calling In The One” which is marketed as a book to help you attract your soulmate, but the content of the book is very much focused on self-love and creating your best life.
3. Not enough people saw your launch announcements
This is very common with my clients. because most people have small audiences and at the same time a fear of bothering people, meaning they put 1 or 2 announcements out and hope for the best. It is possible to have a successful launch without bombarding people but that also gets the message out there.
In order to maximise your chances of having a successful launch it is crucial that you are marketing your offer effectively. I offer a 3-part strategy to maximise visibility of content which is to create (make valuable content), repurpose (re-share that content in as places as possible) and promote (use paid promotion on social media) to make sure your people see it. If you are just creating and publishing once, you are really missing a trick.
It’s also important to note that most people buy at the beginning and the end of a launch. Often if we get few or no sales at the start of the launch, then nothing in the middle, so we give up and don’t bother to let people know that our launch is ending. I’ve consistently found that at least 50% of my sales come from my “final call” emails and posts on social media, which typically go out 24 hours before the deadline to buy. It’s important that your marketing efforts don’t peter out because you’re feeling low about the numbers.
Another way to solve this issue is to make personal 1:1 invitations to people in your audience who you believe would be a fit. That way you can be sure they know that you having something on offer and you’re not solely relying on your marketing copy.
4. You’re heart isn’t in it
This can happen when we’re launching something because we feel we should be launching something. Perhaps we are launching something we think can make us money rather than the thing we really want to be doing or we don’t want to be in launch mode right now but money is tight and so we do it anyway. Whatever the reason, our energy is off and we’re showing up to our launch in a way that doesn’t serve the goal.
It may sound a bit woo, but so much of success in business, as I see it, comes down to energy and intention. I wrote a whole piece on this which you can read here.
Or perhaps we love our product or service and feel very excited about it but our heart isn’t in the marketing. We have a lot of bad feelings about “launching” or selling and because of that we just don’t do it in a way that supports our launch goals. This is common if you’ve been trying to sell or launch the “conventional” way but if you can reframe how you think about marketing and selling, you might be surprised how much you can come to enjoy it.
5. Your audience is too small
I’ve had many clients complain to me that they only got 3 or 4 people from their launch but when we analyse the numbers that’s actually a great number for their size of audience.
Allow me to share with you some math.
Let’s say you have an email list of 100 people and an open rate of 50% (which is high). That means that 50 people have read your launch email.
Of those 50 subscribers, it’s said that on average 2.91% will actually click through to the sales page for more information. This equates to 1.4 people who have actually bothered to head over to your sales page. Of those the average sales page conversion rate (according to my research on google) is 2.4%.
2.4% of 1.4 people is: 0.0336.
Which means if you got 1–3 sales from a list of 100 people you should be celebrating big time!! And if you got zero sales, that’s exactly to be expected.
Does that mean we shouldn’t bother if our audience is small? No of course not, it just means we have to adjust our definition of success and build in strategies that get our offer in front of people outside of our own audience.
My hope is that if you’ve had a failed launch in the past, that reading these 5 possible reasons gives you some hope that your next launch could be different.
Introducing Loving Launches
On Friday 21st July at 5pm CEST, I’ll be kicking off a workshop series on how to execute loving launches. The idea being that launching needn’t be painful for you or your audience and can actually be something you and your audience look forward to.
I’m running this in July so that you can feel ready and prepared to launch in September/October time should you be planning to do so.
In this class I’ll teach:
- How to reframe your launches from painful to joyful.
- How to be strategic in your launch rather than throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping for the best.
- 9 big launch ideas
- A 6-step strategy for launching
- Different types of launch content you can use in your loving launches
- And I’ll also share a ton of templates and planning tools (as usual :))
If you know you want in, click here to register.