Launches that Convert Part 1: How to Set Up a Launch

TUNE IN:
APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | GOOGLE

Join us as Katrina kicks off a new series in the podcast and shares the behind-the-scenes of how to create a launch for your business that not only converts into clients -- but also sets it up to feel easy and effective the whole way through. In part one of this four-part series, Katrina breaks down what she launched, how she decided to format it, transforming her audience to a new buying culture, and the four stages of her launch plan.

The episode:

Katrina Widener: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Badass Business Squad podcast. As always, I'm your host Katrina Widener. I'm actually really excited for this podcast episode and the couple of podcast episodes that will be following this one, because we're going to be doing something just a little bit different today and over these subsequent episodes. If you follow me on Instagram, you will have seen that recently I actually asked all of you to weigh in on what you were interested in seeing on the podcast, what information you wanted to learn about, or really what kind of education you were looking for.

One of the things that really got an overwhelming amount of votes and that most people were very, very interested in learning about is this idea of launching. So today and over the next two to three episodes following today's episode, I am going to be giving you guys the entire behind the scenes of how I formatted my most recent launch. So that you can take this information and really adjust it and utilize it according to your business, so that you can also create a launch that feels really good and fulfills your goals and all that kind of stuff.

So I'm going to be separating this podcast episode series into four different episodes. Today we will be talking about what I was launching, how I format a launch or how I really get started, how I set up the buying culture for my launch, and what the four different stages of my launch actually is. I have all of my launching notes set up in front of me, including everything that I free wrote/ everything that I was really excited to dive into when I first set up my launch. So, if you hear any pages rustling, it is just me actually going through all of my notes right here in front of me so that I can give you as much information as possible. So I'm really planning to jam pack these four episodes with exactly how I went about creating this launch.

Really quickly before I dive too much more into it, I also wanted to let you guys know why I'm so excited that this was one that you all were also excited by. And that's because in my experience, even for someone like me who is a business coach, who has done tons of training, who has worked with outside strategists on launches, who in my 9-5 world before I ever launched my business did launches for my actual career. I was a marketing specialist and social media manager, and before that I was a journalist. And so I'm able to actually give you guys all of this information that even I, when I sit down to do these launches for my own business can get a little overwhelmed by.

So often you can go online and you can download a PDF of someone else's launch program, or you can hire someone to give you a plan to execute for launch, but then we're always curious like, "Well, why didn't this work? I did everything that was on this PDF. Why didn't it work out the same way for me?" Or "This person gave me a launch plan and I executed it to a T, and yet I didn't get the results that I want." Launching is something that I think is... it's so much fun when you let it be, and it can be so personalized to who you are and what you are launching. But when you sit down to actually get started it can feel so, so overwhelming.

So this is what I did, how I approached launching, and I'm very happy to share all of that with you. Then if you are interested in the other episodes, our next one is going to be all about the actual content I produced, why I chose that content, why I decided on particular platforms, how I got inspired, how I executed it. The third episode is going to be 100% all execution. So when I did what, how I did it, how I created things. And I'm going to be really, really brutally honest with you guys about the things that I thought worked well, the things that I thought did not work well for me, things I would change, and that's also a lot of what we're going to be talking about in that fourth episode.

So I will be giving you guys the actual analytics, the actual results, what I would do the exact same, what I would change, what my overall thoughts are, etcetera, et cetera. I'm very excited to go through this new series of episodes. All of September is going to be really going deep into different parts of a launch, what they look like, how you can take this information and utilize it for yourself, and then we will be back to the interview format in October.

So now that kind of gave you an idea of what to expect, let's dive in. So what I was launching in this most recent launch, was my Badass Business Squad mastermind. If you are unfamiliar with the mastermind, if you haven't been following along as much, what I do is I really help my clients make more money by doing less work. And so when I sat down to create this mastermind, and when I sat down to launch this mastermind, I knew that I wanted to be embodying what I'm talking about as much as I am teaching this to my clients.

So the mastermind is a six month program, there's only six spots available. We meet once a week, it's very high touch. There's additional education that's catered to the people who happen to be in the mastermind. So none of this like "Here's the education I'll give you, hopefully it matches what you're doing." No it's very like, "What do you need? What are the projects we're working on for you, and how do I cater it to you?" I knew that when I wanted to launch, that the launch needed to be just as specific as the mastermind is. And that this launch needed to take into account who I am, who my ideal clients are, what it is that I'm selling, where they're hanging out, all of that and magical goodness.

If I'm being blatantly honest with all of you, I was very intimidated to sit down and get this started because the mastermind is something that was a little bit newer for me. If you've been following along with me for a while, you know that the Badass Business Squad used to be a group coaching program. And I'm sure there are people out there who are like, "Well what's the difference between group coaching and a mastermind?" And that's a question that I can answer at a later date in much more detail, but I was taking the group coaching program and completely redoing it, really. I was sitting down and evaluating and repositioning, changing the ideal client, changing how it looks, how it operates. From the bottom up, going through and auditing every single step of the group coaching program to make it for a different ideal audience. To make it be a different length. To have it have specific goals that we're achieving. I was launching from scratch. Oftentimes if we have something very particular that we've worked on in the past in our businesses, we can kind of use how we sold it in the past to be a really good indicator of how we can sell it now. And because this was something that I was doing from scratch with having never actually marketed and sold a mastermind format beforehand, I knew that I needed to also create my launch plan from scratch.

The way that I got started doing this was to actually sit down and ask myself, "What are the things that I know that I need in my launch to make it feel good to me, and how do I want this to operate in the future?" So I'm going to call up that second point first, "How do I want this to operate in the future?" Because it is very, very important to think about the future of your business and how you want it to operate later down the line, before you think about how you want to act right now.

What I mean by that is if you've listened to my solo episodes beforehand and specifically the one where I've talked about having a proactive business instead of a reactive business, what we're actually doing is looking at how we ideally would like our business to operate and look. And instead of saying "One day in the future, when I make enough money or when I get to a point where this can happen for me, that's when I'll do it." Actually creating that culture right here and right now. That's your business culture, but that is also your buying culture.

So I know that in the future the way that the Badass Business Squad mastermind will operate, is that it will first open doors to current members, it will second open doors to the waitlist, and it will third open doors to the public. This mastermind is only going to launch two times a year. It is a six month long commitment. I want to be able to give first dibs to the people who are currently in the mastermind to continue this moving forward, to continue to get the help that they need, to continue to get the support and that community.

And I decided that before I ever started this launch. So I know from the get go that I was going to have to launch this first round differently than I will be launching in the future. Because as a brand new service, there is no wait list. There are no current members. So I was going to have to say, "How will this launch operate so that I can teach my audience the buying culture of how I want the launches in the future to operate?"

So really that is the first thing that I sat down and figured out, was how do I want this to look in the future? I'll give you some of the reasons why I set it up the way that I did. The first one is I don't want to be constantly selling. I love providing value. I love having conversations. I love building community, and those are the things I would rather be focusing on in my non-selling months than constantly selling, selling, selling, selling, selling. So if I was switching to a business model where I have two selling seasons in a year, those times when I'm going to be selling the mastermind, then I wanted to figure out thinking backwards of how I could get to a place where that would be set up.

When I'm talking about buying culture, I'm really talking about the culture that you have created for your clients and how you have trained them to interact with you when it comes to being sold to. So I also knew that my current buying culture was a lot of, "Here's a free session. Let's convert that into an intensive. Let's convert that into signing up for something ongoing." Or just people finding me from referrals, et cetera, et cetera.

I have had amazing success with free sessions converting into ongoing coaching, when my ongoing coaching was set up for a different audience. Doing a free session, and having that convert into either the group coaching program I used to do, or one-on-one coaching, really only made sense when I was working with people who were new entrepreneurs. People who were just getting started out, who were really needing that hands-on support at the beginning, and who therefore also had a lower price point that they were able / willing to invest in. Moving from a free session into that ongoing support made sense because these were people who were like, "Yes, I need a free session. I need to work with this."

When I switched my audience I knew that that was no longer going to convert at the same rate. That's for a multitude of reasons, and I can talk about that at a later episode if you guys are curious. Just like holler at me on Instagram or send me an email or something. But there's some psychology to it. There is just some trend setting and market research that goes into that. But very often people who are interested in a free session are not the more established entrepreneurs.

So I knew that I needed to educate my audience around a different buying culture. And that's why I went into this mastermind launch not anticipating or expecting to sell out of it because I was creating a new buying culture for my audience, and I was not going to be getting 100% conversion rate because they were not used to buying for me in this way. It was completely different from anything that they had done beforehand. So I really wanted to focus on training my audience to buy from me through this new format and through this new launch type, instead of focusing on conversion in this first launch. This will not be the case in subsequent launches, but I'm mentioning this so that anyone who's listening who maybe hasn't done a solid launch plan in the past beforehand, can really understand why maybe they might want to consider this before getting started. Or even those who haven't haven't gotten the results that they've wanted can maybe have an "Aha" moment around why they didn't get those results.

Knowing that I one, had a launch plan that I wanted to implement in the future, and two, that this launch was going to have to be slightly different in order to achieve that future launch plan -- this is when I actually sat down to figure out how I wanted this to go, what I wanted it to look like. When I say that, I'm taking three different things into account. The first one is obviously that buying culture I mentioned, but also the buying culture of my competitors. How people maybe have purchased from other people. How people that I admire and look up to in the industry have done their launches in the past. Two, how my ideal client might convert or how they have converted in the past. What they're looking for, what their goals are, what their pain points and objections are. And then three, who I am, what I bring to the table, what feels natural to me and what would make this launch feel fun to me.

And I want to make it very, very clear that from the very, very beginning I literally have a note on the very first page of my planning for this. "Make it as fun / silly as possible." And I want to make this a bigger conversation because I knew from the get go that launches can feel hard and can feel intimidating and can feel stressful. Especially if we're creating content and doing things in the moment, it's going to feel even more so. And so I was asking myself, "How can I make this feel easy? How can I make this feel like exciting and fun and I want to show up, and I know that this is going to work really well?" As opposed to, "Oh my gosh I'm so stressed out. Oh my gosh I've been up every single day past midnight, trying to make sure that things are set up for the next day." And I'm going to talk about this more throughout each of these episodes going out this month, but that was 100% my goal. And so I really sat down to try to figure out how I wanted this to look.

Up to this point in this episode, we've talked some about buying culture. We've talked some about making it aligned with me. But I also am going to talk right now about a little bit of hard strategy. So when I sat down to figure out how I could make this feel easy and fun, how I could train my audience to this new buying culture, I also went into it having the knowledge from my previous experience of how a traditional launch plan looks. I'm not saying this in terms of like, "You have to post this many times, or you need to send out this many emails, et cetera, et cetera." But how the cycles of a launch plan looks, or the stages is maybe what I'm going to call them instead. So I normally with my clients and in my launches in the past, separate everything into what I call four different stages. So I'm going to go into depth about each of those stages so that you can also figure out how this can be applied to what you're launching and how you're operating.

And I do want to put the caveat out there as well, that everyone's launch plan is going to look different because you're not launching the product that I'm launching. You're not launching to the exact audience that I'm launching. You are not the same person that I am, who is doing the launching. But you can generally apply all four of these different stages to launching whatever it is.

The first stage in what I was launching is what I call the "soft pre-launch". Even before I dive into that too much, I want to make this like little note here that normally I would tell you to have at least like six to eight weeks for a launch. It's not that one or two weeks that we see from like an outsider's perspective, it really should be around six to eight weeks. You can really prep your audience for this buying culture, for this thing that's coming out. And you can really sit down and feel out how that is going to work best for you, but I would recommend six to eight weeks.

So with that first stage being the "soft pre-launch", this is something that in an eight week launch period, depending on how you want to work, you could have this be a week long period. You could have this be two weeks. But really this pre-launch period is to prep your audience to be launched to. You're not out there necessarily saying "This thing is coming, get ready to purchase!" But you're out there addressing objections and really prepping them for the content that will be coming.

The second stage is a "hard pre-launch period". The soft prelaunch is maybe a little bit more subtle, a little bit more subliminal even. It's a little bit less hardcore. While the second stage is a little bit more like, "Hey, I am here addressing your objections in the moment. I am here talking about this thing more actively."

So then when you get to the third stage, which is where I would say you have some sort of event, this is for me when the wait list doors would open, then people are already primed to be in that mindset of being like, "Yeah I do want these things." Even if they don't know exactly what your solution to them is yet.

And then obviously the fourth stage is what I call the "doors open" stage. So when you are going through this, what you really want to be doing is actually looking at it in terms of working backward. What I mean by this is that instead of thinking through like, "Okay I need to do this. I need to do this, cetera, et cetera," you're going to work backwards. And this is going to help you with your timeline, and this is also going to help you with your content creation, your execution, etcetera, etcetera.

So for me, this launch was really set up to be around four weeks total in the launch period process. Yes, I did just tell you that you wanted to be six to eight weeks, and then I told you that I had it set up to be four weeks. Trust me, that's not what I would normally do. This was a little bit of a like, "It's summer and I'm doing this last minute." It was also a little bit of "I am setting up the buying culture to set up the buying culture." So it was somewhat a Katrina ran out of time, and it was also somewhat about, "This isn't my full launch process because I don't have current members on the mastermind and I don't have a wait list."

So when we take the stages and we move backward I was able to first ask myself, "When do I want doors to close?" And in order to figure out what I wanted doors to close, I also had to figure out when did I want the mastermind to start? So this is something that is going to be a little bit more specific to any service providers versus product based businesses who are listening to this episode. But for anyone who has something that's going to start a specific day or have a program that starts on a specific day, coaching that starts on a specific day. You're launching templates for your website shop. When do you want that shop available and up and running? I decided that I wanted the mastermind to start in July immediately after the 4th of July holiday.

That was for a bunch of reasons, including just availability for people, the best Mondays since that's the day that we meet. So I had to sit down and figure out before I even started planning out these four stages, I needed to figure out when each stage was going to operate. So I looked at the date that I wanted to start the mastermind. And I went back three weeks and I said, "That's the day that the doors are going to close." I knew that I was going to be doing an introduction event for people to get excited and learn more about the mastermind and who else was going to be in it, so I decided to have the doors close two weeks before that event was going to happen. So really I sat down and I figured that out first, so then I could work backward.

So this was a four week launch, and so I had about one week set aside for each of these four different stages. So if I was going to start the mastermind in July and I went back three weeks, that meant the doors were initially going to close on the 17th of June. So I had that full week to have doors open to the public. I had a full week before that to have doors open to the "warm list", which was my stand in for a wait list. And then I had a week before that for "hard pre-launch" in a week before that for "soft pre-launch"

In the future what I will probably do is have a full week to a week and a half of "soft pre-launch". A full week and a half to two weeks of "hard pre-launch". A full week and a half of the wait list slash launching event. And then a two full weeks for doors open.

I ended up extending the period of time for that fourth stage because a bunch of personal things came up. I had some medication that I was coming off of and had some side effects. I got incredibly sick for two full weeks and was just down for the count in the middle of my launch. I was on a family vacation to visit my grandparents during the launch, and thankfully I am the type of business owner where I said, "Hey, who made these rules? I did. I can change them." So it didn't matter, and it ended up being the best for everyone involved for me to extend that "doors open" fourth stage.

But for the sake of what we're talking about today, decide in advance how long you want to give people to sign up for. Keep in mind that for each of these launch periods, you're going to be creating content for each of these. So the longer that you have the launch, kind of the longer you're going to be creating content. I mean, you don't have to have something every single day, but you want to be staying top of mind. I really set it up so that the "doors open" was the first thing I planned, that stage four. Stage three was the second thing I planned, stage two was the third thing I planned and stage one was actually the fourth thing I planned.

And by that I meant planning the timing, planning the dates that they're going to go through and really planning, "How do I want this to look?" So that then I could come in later on and actually sit down and say, "What content do I want to be creating? What behind the scenes outreach do I want to be doing? How do I want to be doing any launching events or email newsletters or reaching out to friends and family to recommend people?"

Also when we're talking about this timing and we're talking about these four different stages, what I'm also talking about is thinking about this so far in advance that you have time to prepare for this and time to create this content before you get to these days. There are so many ways that you can launch. But in my experience the way to do this in a way that feels the least stressful, the most creative in the moment, is to have 70-80% of your content created before you ever hit day one of launch. And then create that last 20-30% in the moment with what feels exciting and creative and natural to you. So you have a little bit of flex time and a little bit of ability to operate in the moment, but beforehand you actually have prepared so much that it almost runs on autopilot without you having to even think about it.

The last thing that I'm going to talk about in this first episode, is that the other thing that we really want to talk about when it comes to getting started and how to figure out where to even begin to look when it comes to launching is each of those four stages is going to also be really determined, like I said, by who your clients are.

So before you even sit down and start creating content, you're really going to be wanting to look at... and when I say look at, I mean like a really freaking deep dive guys. "Who is this person? How do you uniquely solve their problem? Where are they purchasing? If they don't buy from you? What are the statements that they're using to describe where they are right now?" Because to get into the mindset of your client is going to be the number one most effective, most life-changing aspect to creating your launch. Because then it is really, really, really created for them. It's really catered to who you're selling to, and filling in the content for each of these four stages is going to be that much more easy.

So to recap a little bit, I want you guys to be thinking about the four different stages. I want you guys to be thinking about who you are, who your clients are, what the buying culture that they're already operating is. What the buying culture that they might operate within for other people is. And what the buying culture that you want them to operate is. And then how who you are and how you launch goes into the launch that you're creating. This getting started period is always so hard and intimidating to just sit down and be like, "I'm going to create an entire six to eight week launch plan in one sitting." And so this really gives you a place to start. It gives you the ability to actually say, "Okay so these are tangible things that I can map up now, even months and months in advance so that when it comes time to launch every single stage just feels that much easier."

So thank you guys for listening to this episode. This is probably the most overarching and the least implementable or super, super hands on episode of all of these launch episodes that are going to be coming out this month. But it really is the one that is setting the foundation for how all of the rest of these episodes are going to go. So this is part one, keep your eyes peeled over the next three weeks for parts two, three, and four. If you have any questions, please let me know. And as these come out I'll also happily answer them on my Instagram page so you can get an even better look at what's going on. But anyway, I hope that it was helpful as always and I will talk to you soon.