In this episode, I’m going to help you skyrocket your reach in your next launch!
(I love that this is episode number 3-2-1. It sounds like we are counting down to an epic launch… which we are!)
3, 2, 1… Let’s dive in!
The truth of the matter is that when you’re launching something, you want to get it in front of as many people as possible.
That’s why in this episode, I want to walk you through some steps on how you can skyrocket your reach during a launch.
I do want to just quickly reassure you that actually, the act of launching in and of itself can often naturally increase your reach – especially on social media.
This is because:
- You’re showing up more consistently
- You’re more active on your social media channels
- People are engaged with your content and the things that you’re promoting and talking about
- You’re sharing a lot of free content, free lead magnets and opportunities for people to learn from you and move forward for free
What naturally happens as your launch progresses is you end up getting greater and greater reach on social media.
However, we can also be really strategic about the way that we maximise your launch reach.
Let’s dive into how to skyrocket your reach in a bit more detail…
1. Niche and message
It can be very easy when you’re in the midst of a launch to get distracted by questions that are on related topics, but a bit off track.
You can also get distracted by shiny objects or people asking questions that aren’t related to the thing that you’re launching.
Where possible, stay on niche and on message.
Something that can happen when you’re launching something is you’ll have a bunch of people come out of the woodwork due to that extra reach, and they’ll ask about things that don’t fit what you’re launching.
For example, whenever I’m launching the Take Off program, I’ll get a bunch of people asking me about courses, memberships and launching.
That’s not what I cover inside the Take Off program.
But the reason why people are reaching out is that they’re seeing great content from me, and they start to wonder if I can help them with other things.
During that launch, It’s important for me to not take that as a sign that everyone needs to hear about this other topic right now.
Instead, I engage with those individuals one-to-one.
I keep my launch going on niche and on message.
When I’m in launch of the Take Off program, I’m focused on people in the early stages of online startup.
All of these advanced marketers that have been in business for ages will come out of the woodwork because they’re seeing more of me.
Similarly, when I’m launching the Leverage and Launch program (which is about courses, memberships and launching), I’ll have a bunch of people come out of the woodwork and ask me about what to do if they’re not ready to leverage, but want to sell one-to-one services.
Of course, I’m going to let them know about the Take Off program privately. But that doesn’t mean my entire audience is preferring to hear from me about startup and getting those business foundations in place or working with people one-to-one.
It’s just that you’ll get more communication from people overall, so it’s important to not see that as a sign that you need to pivot or get distracted when it’s just one or two people who are saying that’s not what they need right now.
We want to make sure that we’re staying on niche and on message.
There’s an exception to this rule…
When you’re going through a launch and people are wanting the outcome that your course or membership offers, but they think the way to go there is doing y instead of the x that you teach, this can be a sign that you’re not meeting your audience where they’re at.
That brings me to my second tip on how to skyrocket your reach…
2. Meet your audience where they’re at
You need to be clear on your niche (who is this for?), and key message (why should people be investing in this?). But if people are coming to you and saying that they don’t need x, they need y, then to me that says you’re not meeting your audience where they’re at.
An example of this would be if I’m launching the Take Off program and I’m talking about foundations, sales strategies and getting more conversions, and people are coming to me and saying that they understand that, but first they want to know how to get more followers.
They see followers on Facebook as the pathway to getting those sales coming through and getting their business off the ground.
That’s not a case of it being off niche, that’s a case of my audience thinking they need something else first before they can focus on the thing that I’m teaching.
What you need to do is make sure that the content that goes around your launch helps people to have that lightbulb moment so they understand exactly where they need to be focusing their energy and attention to achieve the outcome.
People who come to me and ask how to get more followers, actually have the exact same goal as people that ask how to make more sales.
They have the same goal.
The goal is to get more paying clients and make more sales.
But some people think that the thing that they need to make more sales is better reach on social media.
Others think they need to get better at sales.
Both of them are actually correct.
You do need to reach people on social media, and you do need to be good at sales. You need to have some skills, processes and systems for making those sales.
BUT there’s a big difference between me saying, “Don’t worry about Facebook followers, just make sales!” versus, “Here’s how you get Facebook followers, and here’s how to turn them into sales”.
Instead of being ships passing in the night with your messaging, we are meeting your audience where they’re at.
If your audience misunderstands what they need to achieve their goal, your job is not to just run around and tell them that they’re wrong.
Your job is to meet them where they’re at.
Facilitate that lightbulb moment so they can see that they still need x if they want to make those sales or if they want to get that result.
Let’s say you’re in the health and wellbeing space, and your ideal client wants to have a really strong exercise routine to build lean muscle and trim down.
That’s their focus. They think exercise is the key to building lean muscle and trimming down.
You might know that it’s not just about exercise and that, ultimately, trimming down or weight loss is not the focal point required in order to achieve that goal of building lean muscle and trimming down.
The focal point needs to be really embracing their body where it’s at, and working to their body’s strengths. Or you might think that the focal point needs to be more on nutrition or a good balance of nutrition and exercise.
But if you just run around the internet yelling at people to stop saying they want to lose weight, people will secretly keep looking for ways to lose weight.
Rather than constantly butting heads with your audience, you want to meet them where they’re at.
In your launch, you might have some content that actually addresses the exact thing that your audience is looking for.
You might have something that says “The five best exercise routines to build lean muscle and trim down”.
But the lightbulb that you facilitate in that content is helping people to see the bigger picture.
They go and get the exercise routines for building lean muscle and trimming down.
In it, you say, “Unfortunately, if we only focus on exercise, the chances of you achieving your health goals are going to be very slim. What we need to do is combine some mindset work, this amazing exercise routine and a strong focus on nutrition if you want to achieve your long term health goals. If you’d like to achieve those long term health health goals and bring all of it together, we do that in my program.”
You can see how I’ve just built a little bridge there.
Instead of telling your audience that they’re wrong all the time, meet them where they’re at and bring them on the journey.
That doesn’t get done just once. All of your content ecosystem and messaging ecosystem needs to help move people forward in their journey.
When it comes to maximising your launch reach, we want to ensure that you’re getting lots of engagement.
To get that engagement (because engagement creates reach), we want to make sure we’re dishing up content people actually want.
That’s why we need to meet them where they’re at.
That’s my second tip on how to skyrocket your reach – meet them where they’re at with lots and lots of different pieces of content.
3. Engagement is key
When you’re thinking about launch content for social media, I want you to think of it through this lens: What would encourage as many people in my niche as possible to engage with this content?
A surprising answer to this might be not telling them what to do on every single post!
I talked about this in a recent workshop that I ran called Reach Rocket…
Often on social media, I’ll be scrolling and I’ll come across this really great tip that someone has posted. I’ll want to comment saying that it’s an amazing tip, but at the end of their post, they tell me to let them know in the comments what three things I’m going to change as a result of reading that tip.
This puts me in a position where I can’t just say that it’s an amazing tip because I know they’ll respond saying that I didn’t answer their question.
So often, this puts me in a position where I just don’t comment at all because I know I don’t feel like giving them the ‘correct’ response.
I’m seeing this more and more on social media.
Woman on phone looking to skyrocket her reach for courses and launching
When you’re so directive and every post has a very specific call to action (you’re giving people strict and explicit instructions), you can sometimes actually damage your engagement.
Think about it: When your friend posts that they just went and saw an amazing movie, they don’t say in that post that everyone has to go watch it and then comment what their favourite plot twist was.
They don’t post like that!
That’s not how humans engage socially.
And remember: Social media is social.
Your job is to look at what encourages people to engage the most:
1. Valuable content
2. Seeing things behind the scenes that get people excited to comment.
3. Asking for people’s opinions and asking people questions
4. Creating content that is really relatable for them
In none of those is it content where you’ve given explicit instructions on exactly how people are to comment.
Furthermore to this, if you really want to skyrocket your reach during your launch, remember that the Facebook and Instagram algorithms are looking for posts that tell people to comment.
Those posts instantly tell the algorithm that this is a business – this is someone trying to get in front of more and more people in their audience.
They can tell that this type of content is not going to be organic and engaging, so they show it to fewer people.
That’s the tough truth of the matter.
Think about how to get people to engage. Not through the lens of telling people to engage, but through the lens of: What makes you want to engage on content? What is going to feel compelling for them to engage?
We’ve got small attention spans. Very often, we want:
- Easy to absorb content
- Content that’s really helpful
- Content that asks opinions or easy-to-answer questions
If it’s a hyper-complex three-part question, then lazy brain goes NO. We’re here for instant gratification and a little endorphin rush.
We don’t want homework.
I want you to have a look at your launch content and give it an extra little sweep to make sure it’s highly engaging, without resorting to telling people explicitly what to do.
That’s my third tip on how to skyrocket your reach – engagement is key.
4. Leverage your existing warm audience
Especially your mailing list!
Think about your social media channels and your mailing list as two parts of a beautiful cycle that feed each other.
If you encourage your mailing list to come and engage with specific content on social media, then that engaged social media grows your reach and recruits more people to your mailing list. Then you’ve got more people to encourage to come and engage on your social media.
Maybe for the few weeks leading up to your launch, you will tell people about great Facebook Lives you’ve done or share the most hilarious reel that you did on Instagram last week.
What you’re doing is directing your mailing list over to your social media.
They engage over on your socials, which grows the reach on the socials. You get more reach on socials, so there are more people coming over and joining your mailing list.
They create this amazing virtuous cycle that supports each other.
So leverage your warmest audiences. Focus on nurturing and engaging with your warmest audiences, because they are the key to organic reach, and will skyrocket your reach on social media.
I always recommend we start by creating an amazing platform with strong organic reach, that also is proven to create sales and results before we scale it up with paid advertising. This brings me to my fifth tip on how to skyrocket your reach…
5. Pay for it
Eventually, we want to move away from putting a bunch of time into social media to get money out.
Instead, replace time with money. Money in, money out.
You didn’t start this business to be on social media 65 hours a week.
We want to have a plan of how you are going to scale up your launches to get to the point where you can confidently invest in reach, knowing that that reach will convert into paying clients in your launch.
We want to make sure that:
1. You can see how you can progress to paying for your reach eventually
2. You are progressing towards less time in getting reach in your launches, and more money being invested in getting reach in your launches
Bonus tip: Do not wait until launch!
The most likely people to buy from you when you start your launch are the people who are already on your list.
Yes, launches are an amazing time to recruit new people to your list. But new list members are three times less likely to buy from me when I launch my online courses and programs.
I see that reflected in my clients and my biz buddies as well.
If someone’s on my list, they are far more likely to buy from me when I go into launch.
If they join my list during that launch, they have a shorter window to:
- Get to know me
- Make a decision
- Overcome any objections
- Get the money together to invest in the program
This means they are far less likely to buy.
On the other hand, I know that people who join my mailing list in one launch, even though they’re less likely to buy then, they’re the ones who are more likely to buy next launch.
See list growth, audience growth and reach as a snowball, rather than a flash and crash.
The more that you see that every launch is creating momentum for the next one, the more that you will be able to create that snowball, reach more people every time, and make that virtuous cycle of list growth (creating social reach and social reach creating list growth).
Don’t wait until launch to grow your audience and skyrocket your reach.
The best time to start is now because the more that you grow that reach and the more that you focus on these things as you lead up to the launch, the more you’ve got a warmed-up audience when the launch actually starts.
If you’re reading this and thinking that you need to focus on growing your audience, I have a great free resource for you.
It’s called Grow Your Audience.
Remember: You want to start focusing on growing your audience now. That is what will skyrocket your reach.
You want to be on niche and on message, meet people where they’re at, grow your engagement on socials, leverage that warm audience and eventually start paying for your reach.
Make sure to grab that free training here: CLICK ME
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Heart-Centred Business Podcast.
As always, make sure to come on over to the Heart-Centred Soul-Driven Entrepreneurs Facebook group and share any questions or aha moments that you’ve had as a result of reading this episode. Just use #podcastaha and the episode number (321), and let’s keep the convo going!
Until next time, I cannot WAIT to see you SHINE.
