"How did launch go?"

Pre, during and post TDC course launch, I’ve had tons of messages:

‘Hope the launch goes well!’ ‘Congrats on the launch!’ ‘All the best for launch weekend!’

It’s lovely to receive and I thank everyone of you who did send those messages.

Because launching a product on LinkedIn or Twitter is incredibly nerve wracking.

As the person launching your new product, you’re stressing over:

• If people will join the waitlist
• If people will buy into the hype
• If people are happy about the price
• If people are looking forward to the launch
• If people are going to even buy the product

And then it doesn’t end there - they have to LIKE the product, too.

As a spectator, you’re curiously watching how they launch the product:

• The build up marketing campaign
• The LinkedIn/Twitter content
• The landing page
• The emails

All of that.

And then there’s this one question that you’re sitting there wondering. The one question you’re asking yourself, asking others and even reaching out to ask the person who launched the product themselves.

The question:

“How did it go?”

Which, in other words, means “how much money did you make?”.

I get it, we’re curious little things, humans.

But I duno about you, but I get SUPER bad comparison issues when I see others posting their revenue made from product launches.

I have no problem with people doing it, not at all.

I applaud it, it’s fantastic. Full transparency is right up my street and something you know I bring to all my content. I’m not afraid to spill the beans on anything, it’s all just information and I have nothing to hide.

But for me personally, I really suffer from the comparison.

It brings me down and makes me feel like I’m not good enough, not DOING enough, that I’m lazy. And I hate that.

So, for this product launch and probably all product launches of mine (unless I come across a very good reason to) I won’t be posting revenue figures.

I would hate for someone to feel the same looking at my launch figures, as I do.

I don’t have anything to hide, but one of my biggest life morals is treating others how you want to be treated and not doing anything to others you wouldn’t like done to you.

Now, let's get to the launch goss:

It was really interesting, fun and messy all at the same time.

I was going to breakdown the TDC Course Launch in my own way, but instead I’m going to treat this like a Q&A.

On Wednesday I asked LinkedIn “what do you want to know?” about the launch.

So without further ado, lets crack through some of those questions as best I can 🙂

Let’s get into it:

Q: “Why did you send so many emails?”

There’s a commonly referenced concept in marketing called the “Rule of Seven”. This means that a potential customer needs to see or hear a marketing message at least SEVEN TIMES before they take action and buy a product.

Now, consider this: the launch was 3 days long.

If I sent even ONE email every day of launch, that’s way way lower than the Rule of Seven. It’s not enough reminders. And someone’s potentially going to completely miss it who I believe needed the product.

So, I decided to send 3-4 emails per day.

Not every email was a sales heavy email. In fact, only 4 out of the 12 or so emails were really ‘salesy’. The rest were stories mainly - stories of how courses have benefited me in the past, stories of racing Luke Matthews, stories of client success.

Some didn’t like the volume of emails, some didn’t mind it, some actually loved all the extra content that came through.

I had a ton of fun writing the stories and I hope it wasn’t entirely annoying.

For my next launch, I’ll be looking into an opt in/opt out feature so you can opt out of receiving any launch emails.

I’ll take that as a good enough sign that you’re not interested in buying and you’re just here for the free weekly emails which is all gravy baby.

Q: “How did you plan and what was your thought process?”

I knew I wanted to create a product that was basically a productized version of how I write my content and my client’s content. So that was simple. I simply wrote it out in a word doc, then put it into Canva slides and hit record, working through exactly how I do it.

The reason I wanted to create a course like this was:

1. I know it’s going to be valuable for others who are looking for a better way to write content that actually gets them clients (it’s proven, it works for me, my clients, it’ll work for you too)
2. I know that if someone bought this course and saw how I work, they’ll be in an even better position to work with me 1:1. They know my systems, methods and frameworks. Now they can go apply it themselves, with my help or hand it off to me entirely.

Now, how did I plan the launch marketing campaign?

Here’s how step by step:

1. Open up the waitlist

This was the first step I took.

I picked a date to launch, 6 weeks from that day. I wanted to launch before Christmas so I could afford to buy my family presents. I’m joking hahaha. No, I wanted to push myself to launch a course. I work well under pressure and I needed to take action. This was the first step and I didn’t want to wait around on it.

I hadn’t done a thing at this point.

I just created the landing page to sign up and assigned tags in Convert Kit, so if you signed up you got tagged and I could email waitlist build up content. Sent an email to my email list announcing the upcoming course, what it’s about and how you can join the waitlist.

I needed to validate my idea before putting any work in.

2. Ask what they want to see in the course

I asked everyone who joined the waitlist to complete a survey.

I asked questions like, what do you struggle with most, what do you want help with most and what’s your dream outcome. This all helped me dial in the course content so it was very specifically what people needed the most help with. It helped me put together my marketing material - waitlist landing page, content CTAs, launch landing page - with messages that are mirroring customer language.

This is very important.

3. Plan content cadence

I planned my content cadence on a pretty simple Google Doc.

I needed to make sure I was consistently talking about the upcoming course in my content. And I needed to continue to make people aware of the waitlist they can join. I started out talking about it 1 or 2 times a week. Then I ramped it up to 3 or 4 times a week. Then ramped up to every day the week of launch.

This created some buzz and tension in the community for the launch.

Remember: people need to be reminded, a lot. Otherwise they will simply forget.

4. Write content around those topics

I wanted to plant subtle seeds right up to launch.

As I got more feedback from waitlist sign ups, I created content around the questions they asked, the pain points they shared and the dream outcomes they desired. That, and around the topics within the course. That way when I CTA’d to join the waitlist, the content fits the solution in the CTA and it all feels very natural. Not like I’m shoehorning in a ‘oh btw i’m selling a copywriting course’ at the end of a post about coffee or lifting weights.

The campaign content aligned with the product content.

5. Increase volume of content

Like I said before, I ramped up the content volume the closer I got to launch.

I wanted to be everywhere as much as I could in everyone’s feeds all around the world. So I went from 1 post per day to 2, even 3 some days, on LinkedIn. I’m a fan of volume of content, anyway.

Again, people need to be reminded a lot. They need to see your face everywhere and get excited about seeing you.

6. Blitz volume for the weekend

Then, for launch weekend it was a blitz of content.

Ramped up email volume - as you know I usually send 1 per week, this turned into 3-4 times per day over 5 days (waitlist presale was 2 days). I would wake up and write all the emails for the day and schedule them in, so I wasn’t writing them over the course of each day.

I kept social media content to 2-3 times per day, but I think this was a mistake as on the final day of launch I posted around 10 times on Twitter and around 8 times on LinkedIn and the final day of sales was by far the biggest of the 5 days.

And I pivoted to posting social proof and testimonials only on the final day, too

Obviously, time sensitivity plays a part in this. But the checkout traffic I drove on final day was considerably higher:

Wednesday: 177 views Thursday: 178 views Friday: 294 views Saturday: 201 views Sunday: 536 views Monday (early hours): 464 views

The cart conversion rate went down considerably too, but made up for it in volume.

And because that traffic was all from results posts, people were already curious about the results the product could deliver. So it wasn’t a bunch of random traffic.

Q: “How much sleep did you get?”

A perfectly normal amount of sleep for me, nothing abnormal here.

Q: “How much coffee did you drink?”

I have 1 per day, maybe 2 on a normal day. It didn’t change for launch. Sorry folks, no crazy caffeine consumed here.

Q: “How did you tackle audience engagement during launch?”

I wasn’t engaging on any social media content really.

A few comments here and there. IMO, it was low down on the list for this weekend as my main goal was communicating that my course was live and how it can help people. Not the nice answer, but it’s the truth.

There was quite a bit of customer care - emails about checkout issues, course access, no confirmation emails etc, standard stuff like that, which took priority over any social media engagement.

I’ve spent 2 years building a large audience to be able to afford posts where I don’t engage on it. So it wasn’t the most important task of the launch weekend, which, as a solopreneur, is incredibly important you prioritise well.

If I prioritised social media engagement over customer care or content or email writing, I may have missed out on a lot of revenue and had a lot of unhappy customers.

Alright, this got long so I’m going to call it here.

But I hope this was useful!

The overarching takeaways:

• Volume is important
• Plan well
• Take action
• Prioritise tasks

Launching is not for the faint of heart.

You need to be able to plan your marketing, create a course, create a page to sell it and choose a platform to host it.

But it certainly isn’t the sweaty, life consuming, painstaking job a lot of creators make it out to be.

I think there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors there with some creators.

They say they pour 1,000s of hours into making a course just to make you feel like it’s really valuable. But to me that is just a crappy marketing tactic, because they don't actually know how to market their product.

Not sure if you agree with that but it sounds really dumb to me :)

That’s a wrap.

Before you go...

I’d like to thank you for your endless support in 2023.

This year has been incredible for me personally and in business and I have you to thank for a lot of that. So thank you for being interested in what I have to say and for being great.

I hope you had a great year.

I wish you a happy holiday season and all the best for 2024!

Cheers,

Matt