How To Plan Your Next Launch - Perfecting The Prelaunch
Chances are if you have a business or side hustle, you’ll need to launch something along the way. Whether you’re just starting your business or launching a new service or product, your strategy behind how you launch is vital to overall success. If you’re announcing a launch to an empty or unengaged audience, all the hard work and hours you put into preparation could lead to an unsuccessful launch.
As a social media strategist, I’ve helped my clients successfully launch courses, digital conferences, and new businesses through an effective launch plan. I will be sharing my best tips and strategies in this blog to help you rock your next launch.
Planning
I suggest using a project management tool to plan out the following steps and content I’ll be covering in this blog. I am a broken record when it comes to recommending Airtable, but this is the platform I use for planning all launch strategies for my business and clients.
Here’s a few things to outline in your plan:
The offer details - what your new business, services, brand, podcast, or product is.
The timeline details - when you’d like to launch and when you need to prepare your pre-launch strategy.
Content strategy - what content you have, what content you still need, and how it will all be dispersed on your platforms.
Actually creating content - draft email marketing copy, write up captions, create graphics, and prepare your campaign for distribution.
Your target audience - what are you launching? And to whom? Be incredibly specific and determine where you’ll find them.
Planning out your campaign will make launching quite easy and will allow you more hours to actually show up during the launch period.
Pre-launch
It all starts with the pre-launch. While this step is often overlooked or skipped completely, pre-launching is, in fact, the most important step of a launch. Creating engagement and hype in your community is what will help your launch efforts most effective.
Set a timeline for 60-days before for the pre-launch and 30-days for the major push. This gives you time to create value, excitement, and awareness around what you plan to launch.
When it comes to pre-launching, I suggest sticking to these 5 sectors of content.
Value
Leading up to a big marketing push announcement or push, I always like to preach the importance of the 80/20 rule. This rule states that you’re offering valuable content 80% of the time (or more) and only pitching for 20% of the time. Those 60-days before your launch should be value packed. Value helps build trusts, a relationship with your audience, and makes you a expert in whatever your field is.
Free-content
No matter what you’re launching, free content is a great way to grab your audience's attention. Giveaways related to the launch, a new freebie opt-in for your newsletter, or complimentary webinar are all great ways to grow an audience.
Show Up Online
If you’re hiding under a rock, your launch will suffer. So it’s time to start showing up online. The easiest way, and one of my personal favorites, it using Instagram stories and lives. These tools will help you create that personal connection with your audience and grow your account. The more you consistently use social media leading up to a launch, the algorithm will be more likely to favor your content during your launch.
Create Related Content
Leading up to the launch, be sure to create content covering your launch. So if you’re launching a new business, be sure to preview the behind-the-scenes set up while also talking about the story behind your new business. If you’re launching a new product or service, start talking more about the problem that they will solve. A blog is a perfect place to create content with a theme to hint at what is to come.
Nurture Your Waitlist
If you’re using email marketing in your plan, starting a waitlist during the pre-launch stage is a great way to gather a list of highly engaged people. This will allow you to officially announce your launch to an audience that is ready to buy into what you’re offering. Make your waitlist feel special by offering them exclusive insights and promotions involving your launch.
All these 5 content sectors will get you an audience that is prepped and ready for the announcement for your launch.
