Let’s talk about live launches.

Whether you’re new to live launches or looking to refine your process, this episode offers actionable tips to help you get the most out of your next launch.

I’ll walk you through six key strategies that are guaranteed to improve your results, from aligning your pre-launch efforts to nurturing leads and creating post-launch momentum.

If you’re ready to take your live launches to the next level with clear goals and effective nurturing, this episode is for you!

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh: 

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having an incredible week. I just had a great weekend. It was the first days in Texas that were, I think we had a low of 58 degrees. And growing up in California, I never appreciated the transition into fall. And now living in Texas, it’s like you celebrate those days. Like it’s a big deal when you have to wear a sweatshirt for the very first time. So we were literally outside all weekend and just like wanted to be outside. It is going to heat back up a little bit, probably cool back down, but it was a beautiful weekend with my family. I finished an entire novel, did some soccer games with my daughter and got a little bit of, I love to do like brainstorming on the weekends because everything’s quiet and I always am a little bit more creative. So I hope you guys had a great weekend and lots of exciting things happening. Definitely keep an eye on your email if you are subscribed to our email list as well as my Instagram several really exciting announcements coming one this week later this week. So definitely keep an eye on that so today’s episode is going to be pretty tactical, pretty marketing strategy tactical. 

I felt inspired to do an episode all about live launches. I really haven’t done that in a long time and live launches are their own not beast but their own specific strategies that go into them. And so I have six strategies, six things to consider if you are live launching that will improve your results. So first of all, the way that I define a live launch is if there is, it’s date based. There’s a webinar happening on a specific date. There’s a challenge happening on a specific date, two part series specific date. This wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. Some of them are, but not really for like launching a new funnel. You might consider, oh, I’m launching this new funnel. It’s the first time I’m launching it, but that’s not a live launch if it’s an automated evergreen funnel. And from a strategic standpoint, I think that every single business should have both, should have an evergreen automated strategy that runs every single day and brings in leads, converts those leads into sales, creates consistency for the business, and should leverage live launching at least once a quarter. 

Because it will almost always, if not always convert higher than an automated evergreen funnel. Now you can’t do them every week and so that’s why you need both, but the sales conversion because of the live energy and the live experience and the engagement, it always converts higher. And so it creates an opportunity for a cash infusion for the business and you can invite all of your existing leads. So I recently did a podcast episode where I talked about one of the strategies being creating your marketing ecosystem and then doing something every month. It doesn’t have to be a live launch, but doing something that re-engages your audience and your leads and your following because you’ve already worked to bring them in your world. And so live launches are that. So that’s just kind of prefacing with, I think live launches should be a part of your strategy. And that’s how I classify something as a live launch. So here are six specific strategies as it relates to live launching.

So the first one is aligning your promotion everywhere in iBreak live launching into two main categories and then a third category for the actual lead signed up. So you have your pre live launch and your post live launch. And then the third category is you have nurturing for the lead to sign up for your live launch. Let me explain. So let’s just say you’re doing, to keep it easy, you’re doing a live webinar on the seventh of the month. Then seven to 10 days before that, you would be in your pre-launch where you are inviting people to that live experience. You’re inviting people to sign up for that webinar. So this means aligning your social media, your email marketing and of course paid ads to all be driving for somebody to sign up for that experience. And this is one of the biggest things that people do not understand. And I actually train my team this when we have a new team member, especially an ads manager come on because you can’t treat an evergreen funnel the same as a live launch because you have a window.

So you have seven to ten days and the reason I say that is if you go farther than that, people are going to forget what they signed up for. So if you start promoting something three weeks out, it can work if you have a lot of nurturing and it depends on the audience but typically I say seven to ten days because that allows you to have enough promo window to get people to sign up for the event but not so long they’re going to forget about what they signed up for and not show up to the live. The entire time during that is to is to get registrations now you have a window So if you need to get 500 people signed up in order to hit your sales goal You have seven days to do that Which means you need to know exactly how much you need to spend day one out the gate Because it’s not the same as evergreen where you can launch it and you can kind of slowly scale up once things are working because you you don’t have a deadline basically. And so when I train our ads managers, when we train them in our program, it is very clear like live launches are treated differently because there’s a limited time window. 

So you go out the gate with a daily budget and you have to spend that budget because if you don’t spend that budget the next day you’re behind and it gets harder and harder to make that up. So back to this point of aligning your promotion everywhere for the pre-launch and then so let’s say you have the webinar on the 7th. So leading up to it from, let’s say October 1st to October 7th, everything that you promote, your email list, if you have a podcast, your ads, your social media, it’s all driving people to sign up for this webinar. We’re getting as many signups as possible. Webinar happens on the 7th and now we’re in post event phase, which is promotion. Now we’re promoting the offer that you pitched on the webinar. And typically, like there are nuances to this, but typically I promote it to the whole list. So even to people who did not sign up for the webinar, they’re getting the promotion. You’re aligning again, your social media, you’re aligning your email marketing, and you can even run retargeting ads to target the people on your list and your entire warm audience.

Now you’re driving people to that sales and that is the focus. And then the third piece is the nurturing, which I have as a separate point, kind of some strategies on it, but you will want to have nurturing for people who sign up in between when they sign up and the event actually happens. So if you start promoting October 1st, let’s say webinars, October 7th, in between that time period of first to the seventh, there needs to be nurturing to get them excited to come To the event so those are the phases so every single time my team strategizes a live launcher I run a live launch we break the promotional assets that we need to create into the pre invitation phase the nurture phase for the people signing up for the event and the post promotional phase.

Now, if you want to get fancy, and I know Amy Porterfield teaches this, there are people who do like the month-long runway of like content related to the live launch. And they might refer to that as like the pre-launch phase, but I’m not really talking about that. Now you can absolutely do that. Do I think it’s necessary? No. I really focus on, okay, what’s the promotional period about a week before the event? The event happens, the post event.

And again, everything should line up. So that also typically means that if you’re running ads, You turn off your evergreen funnel ads while you’re doing your live launch. You want all the focus in all the platforms to be on this live event. This is true if it was a challenge. If this was a three day event, same thing. You just would have three days of delivery and then go into the promotional phase. So that’s the first thing, aligning your promotions everywhere across organic email marketing, paid ads. And the next thing which kind of leads into this is knowing what your goals are going into a live launch is super important. So that should be really driven by your sales goal. So if you’re doing a live launch and you’re like, I want to make 100 sales. I’m going to try to use easy numbers because we all know I can’t do math as I speak on the fly. So I want to make 100 sales and you go into a live launch and you say, okay, and I have a $500 product that I think I can sell 3% of all the leads who sign up. So now we backtrack that. I want to make a hundred sales and I can sell 3%. How many leads do I need to get? I can’t, I cannot do this math. Oh my God. How many leads is that? I don’t know. I literally can’t do it as I speak or I’d have to pause for like five minutes. I’m actually going to do it. And then I’m going to talk again.

So those numbers that I chose were not easy to do math with. So if you want to get a hundred sales and you feel that you can convert 3% of all of your leads, you would need 3,333 leads. Now I did another one that’s a little bit easier. Let’s say that you want to get 10 sales in your live launch. And you feel, let’s say you have a $2,000 offer, it might be a little bit lower of a sales conversion. Let’s say 1% of our total leads who sign up for the event we feel are going to convert, we need a thousand leads. So my point being that going into a live launch every time, even if you don’t know for sure, because you haven’t run this live launch before, you need to have projections because the projections are going to drive your ad spend goals. So let’s say we determine that you need a thousand leads that you want to have sign up for this live launch. And I know for some of you that might feel high. It’s not going to be that high if you have lower goals.

And you have to take into consideration, okay, I feel that I might be able to get 200 from my organic audience, from my email list, from my social media, or maybe you feel like you’ll get 50. Take a guess how many you feel you could get from your organic audience, and then the rest has to come from ads. So then we estimate, okay, let’s say I’m going to spend $2 cost per lead or $3 cost per lead. Take our lead goal. We times it by that. That’s our ad spend goal. I understand for some people that this for your first time will be a guess. Then you get the data though. And the next time you live launch and you have actual numbers to create projections off of the point being, we need to have a sales goal that drives our lead goal that drives our ad spend goal. Because now if you have a promotional window of seven days, you know, okay, I need to spend X amount of dollars every single day for the seven days. And this is my lead goal. And so now you’ve got this target and the legal is really, really important because if you go out the gate and you have a very low ad spend budget, and you didn’t really think this through. And now you’re two days out and you’re like, oh my gosh, I want more people to show up to my event. I need to increase my ad budget. It’s hard to ramp it up in two days. So it’s going out the gate knowing this is my total budget, which means this is my daily budget and this is how many leads I need to get. I’m estimating to be able to get my sales. So knowing your goals, which should be driven by your sales goals, going into your launch, super important. That’s the second strategy.

The third strategy, I kind of talked about this, but I want to touch on it again because I do think this is missing from a lot of people’s live launch strategies, which is nurturing the leads who sign up for the event before it happens. But it has to be nurturing that doesn’t create overwhelm. And this is a very important thing. So I’ve seen, I’ve seen one or two things happen. Either somebody doesn’t have any nurturing, they have you sign up for the event and you don’t hear from them until the event happens. Or I’ve seen people who have nurturing but it’s so overwhelming. It’s like, go here and click this thing and I’ll give you this download and then go over here and do this and here’s this and they give people like four things to do in between when they signed up and the event happens and they’re overwhelmed.

So whenever we’re creating marketing assets such as emails, nurture emails in this case, what I always come back to is what’s the intention of them before we create them. What’s the intention of a nurture email? What do you guys think it is? It is to get somebody excited and committed to coming to the live experience, to showing up. So if that’s our intention, what should our communication be? It should be getting someone excited, telling them why they should show up live reminding them over and over and over again, the date and the time and how they can access it. Because you don’t just say it one time, you say it everywhere. And so that’s what the nurture emails do. And usually we will find a couple of key points that are angles that we can use to get somebody excited to show up. And then it’s just a reminder. It’s happening at this date and time. Do not miss it if you’re serious.

Be there live. I can’t show up live for you, but I’m going to give you everything you need to be able to achieve XYZ outcome. So having those emails, usually it’s about three to four depending on the window, and that will help you get people to show up because it’s a very important piece to a live launch. You know, a hundred leads, but a couple of people show up. That’s a problem, right? We need at least 20 to 30% of your leads who sign up for the event to be on it live. All right. Next strategy is your thank you page. So once somebody signs up for this live event.

They’re going to land on a thank you page. And I’ve talked about this before, but on all funnels, all marketing strategies, the thank you page is prime real estate because everybody sees the thank you page. Not everybody clicks on an email. Not everybody opens an email, but every person sees the thank you page after they sign up for something. And so this is not a place to just put thanks, see you there, have one clear call to action. Usually what I do, typically, is I have a video on the thank you page because that’s nurturing already. And I say, I’m so excited. You’re signed up. Here’s a benefit or an outcome of signing up. I’m getting them excited to be there live. I tell them I want them to be there live. And then we have a button where they can add the event to their calendar.

And then it puts it right in their calendar with the link of, you know, if it’s a Zoom link or whatever it is on how to join it live. So usually I keep it to that. You can do all sorts of different things, like think about what would make the most sense. For some of my clients, it means going to a Facebook group. I’ve done a keyword on Instagram to DM a keyword. You can sometimes do something like book a call or fill out an application, but it might be a little early to do that. They’re not fully nurtured, but do something. Have one strategic, simple call to action on that thank you page after somebody signs up. And I do recommend recording a quick, simple video if you can, because if anything, that’s just a really great form of nurturing. They’re going to hear your voice, see you, connect with you, which is the entire point of a live launch. All right. Two more strategies. The next one is as you plan a live launch, I mean, I could talk about so much more like the topics and how I come up with those, but I’m going to save that for a different container.

As you create a live launch and you create the content for the live launch, make sure you really consider the feeling that you are trying to create within the experience. A live launch is an experience. Think of it like an event, a webinar, a two-part series, all those things. That’s an experience you are creating. It can be thought of as an in-person event, but it’s virtual, like it is an experience where you want someone to feel something. You want someone to have epiphanies and realizations and clarity, right? You don’t want them to feel overwhelmed and you don’t want them to feel confused and so I feel that I do a very good job at this and I think it is one of the biggest contributing factors to my success in live launches is the way that I teach. I really work hard at making sure when I teach, it creates the three things we’re trying to create in the experience, which is clarity, connection, and confidence in myself and my company.

So I’m trying to, no matter what the topic is, I’m explaining something. I’m teaching something and I’m usually teaching it in the format of a roadmap or steps or secrets or mistakes not to make. Something that will lay out a pathway for somebody to have clarity on what they were either doing wrong or what they need to do and to get their end result they want. Connection to me. Connection to me in how I teach and the credibility I have and overall connection to me and my brand because that’s necessary to move someone into a sale. And then confidence. Confidence that my methods work Therefore, my offer is going to work. So even though when you’re teaching in a live launch, you’re giving value and it’s a free experience, free content, it’s important for you to realize it’s seeding the offer.

Like I do not think people realize enough how much the content and the experience of the free webinar of the challenge of whatever it is plays a part in the sales conversion itself. A lot of people look straight to the pitch and they’re like, well, I didn’t get sales. It must be my pitch. But really the content is setting you up for that sale. And if when people get to the point of you’re now talking about your offer and they’re confused or they’re overwhelmed or they’re not feeling confident, they’re not gonna buy. So that’s the job of the experience. And so really think that through as you plan out the content of your live launch.

Final strategy that is always necessary is urgency during your sales period. So I love to have something that’s like a 24 hour or buy on the webinar itself that day bonus to push people to take action right then. And then also something that they can do, either the doors are closing or it’s like a five-ish day window after the webinar, because that helps drive, and I say webinar, this is true for challenge, two-day series, whatever your event is. But you want to have something that’s driving the push for somebody to take action. Sometimes that can just be doors closing. Sometimes it can be a discount going away. Sometimes it can be a bonus disappearing. Sometimes you can use multiple of these. But humans take action when there’s urgency, and this will help push you to, or push them to take that action. Now, all bonuses, if you go the route of a bonus, need to be associated with, I will get to my end result faster and easier with this bonus.

So I’ve also talked about this before on the podcast, but I want to bring it back because it’s a core foundational thing, which is if you leverage bonuses and you say like, you’ll get this course and this extra course and this thing and this extra video training, what do you think someone feels when they hear that? What would you feel if you heard that? You’d feel that’s more for me to go through. The more time for me to spend on content to get to my result, more overwhelm. That’s not me saying, oh, that’s such a good bonus. That’s going to help me get to my end result that I want faster and with less effort. So your bonuses should be something that that’s why it’s great to do audits or one-on-one strategy calls or whatever would be relevant and you’d be able to deliver, but something that If they hear it, it’s like, oh, that is just going to support the offer that I just heard and make it so I can get my end result so much faster and with less effort on my part. So bonuses don’t mean more. That’s not valuable to somebody. It’s how do I get there faster and with less time? That’s the key.

Alright, you guys. Well, I hope you found this helpful. I love live launching. My team loves live launching. I would argue we are one of the best teams at executing live launches and a part of that is because I do so many myself. So I test a bunch of things and then I bring those right into our client strategies. So I have tested some very unique angles and different ways to live launch and the things that work, we bring it into our client strategies. so If you are planning a live launch or want to do a live launch and make it really epic, you can go to helpmystrategy.com to chat with our team. We have a done for you and done with you ways that we support you. Either way, you get all of my strategies with live launching either implemented for you or with you and supporting content to go with that. All right, my friends, I will talk to you all on Thursday.