#238 - If launching feels hard right now : listen to this

Hey, hey guys, it is Kate here from hello Funnels. And given that it's the holiday season, my team and I are taking a very short but well deserved break. So there are no new episodes these next couple of weeks. But what we have decided to do is we've gone back through the archives and we've pulled out your most loved, most listened to and our most requested episodes from this year and we're going to be sharing them with you over the next couple of weeks. So maybe you missed them first time or maybe they just need a revisit. But, but these are the three most popular, most value packed episodes and I hope you love them. So dove right on it. Hey, hey guys, it is Kate here from hellofunnels and welcome back to the Doing it online podcast. So today we are talking launching and I am going to be sharing with you a new strategy that we've been using that's been working super well with our clients who are just sick and tired of launching. So this is what I'm calling our, basically our launch rehab plan. And it's how we take our clients who are kind of stuck launching forever. They can't get off that launch cycle because they rely on it. And we're going to show you step by step how you can step off that roller coaster. How you can still make the same revenue, if not more, but how you can now start to do it step by step in a reliable, sustainable and stress free way. You ready? Let's dive right on in.

Okay guys, let's be real. Launching in 2024, it sucks. It sucks a lot. And it just seems to be getting harder. And I don't see any sort of magical thing in the near future that's going to really change that. And this is having a really big impact on business. So let me know if this kind of sounds familiar. Like where you're currently at. Basically you're launching but they're just not performing as well. But you don't really know what else to do. So you know your current strategy is just to try and get those damn launches to work. So what you normally do is you add more to your launches, more complexity, they start making them go longer with longer warmup periods, with more challenges and webinars and whatever new strategies thrown into your launch. And because you're adding more, that means it's more time, more energy, more resources, more money to make this launch even happen, happen in the first place. And then you do all of that and the results are still not great. And you start to think like, is this even worth the investment? Like, is this even worth the time I'm putting into it? But then you realize, if I don't do this, what else do I do? You're getting tired, you're getting burnt out and it all just sucks. Now I know if you are at that point, then you've probably also started to think about, well, maybe I need a funnel, maybe I need to automate. Maybe that is the solution. And my quick answer for you is it's actually not. 1. Funnel is not the solution. One new strategy is not the solution. Even if it was, you currently don't have the capacity to do it because all of your revenue, all of everything comes from these launches which now take up so much of your time. If you were to just stop, you would put such a big hole into your revenue while you were setting these pieces up and cause yourself even more stress and then you'd go backwards. So we don't want that. This would be like, you know, taking an addict and making them go cold turkey. This is not going to be fun for anybody. We need something that is more manageable, more doable to get you off this launch addict cycle. And that is not going to eat into your revenue. It's not going to set you backwards. So step by step, plan from how you can finally step off the launch roller coaster, piece by piece. We're not diving off it, we're taking small steps off it. And we're rebuilding your business as you do using this process. So what you need to do, what you need to start setting up and building and installing into your business, it's not a funnel, it's not one strategy. Like I said, it is actually an ecosystem. There is three specific pieces you need to build out into your business. Number one, you need a social sales system. Something that you know is a lever you can pull whenever you need to that's going to let you make sales every day in a few minutes, if you want to for free. Very important. Number two is you need an email engine. We call it our M3 funnel. This is going to be your best ever salesperson, running 24,7 in the background, designed to be making you multiple sales of your programs every single week. And then the third piece of the puzzle is you need Evergreen launches. So rather than going cold turkey on launches, you are still going to make offers. You're going to make offers to your existing list because the social sales system that's making offers to your social followers, the email engine that's making offers to new people subscribing to your list. That third bucket of audience that you have is, is that people who are already on your list and a lot of them are some of your warmest, most loyal customers or potential customers. So why would you ignore them? Why would you not make offers to them? So we need to still make offers to them, but we need to do it in a way that doesn't take up 80% of your time. So you can do the other things in your business, but that is going to actually be more reliable. That's going to bring in more consistent income. It's not going to look like this. It's probably going to look more like this. But you know, if you do it right, it should mean similar, if not more sales, but just done in bite sized chunks rather than in, you know, huge time sucking ebbs and flows. Okay, so that is the plan. So how do you implement this plan? How do you get these three pieces into place if you're not just going to like skydive off the top of the roller coaster and go all in and setting this up? I have a system for you. I have a step by step plan. First things first, before you do anything, you, you need to spend a bit of time making sure your offer is a health yes offer. Okay. And you need to have two health yes offers for this system to work. One is whatever your current like signature program is whatever you look at your offer suite and it can be community, it can be, you know, a thousand dollar course it could be a $5,000 group premium program, whatever it is. But just think about which is the one that is traditionally been the easiest to sell that you know, which usually means it's the one that you've nailed. The messaging, the best you've now the delivery you've spent the most time on, that's the one you're going to want to automate. But we want to make sure it's as Hells yes as possible. So you're going to want to do a bit of work there. We've got some episodes on creating Hell yes offers. If you don't feel like your offer is a Hells Yes. So go back and listen to those. The second thing you're going to need in your offer suite is a low ticket offer, a really irresistible Hells yes offer, under $30. Okay. You don't need those two things. So let's assume we have both of these. We're good to go. If you don't have a low tick offer yet, go listen to the last couple of episodes. We'll get you sorted once you have those two pieces of the puzzle. Now we move into step one of the ecosystem, which is your social selling system. We call it the Insta ATM. So this is utilizing the wonderful tool called ManyChat and a couple of specific little automations. But basically you're going to set up a really simple funnel that is going to help you to make sales of your low ticket offer and also of your other offers just off the back of doing some simple reels. Now, there are three types of reels that convert really well. We call these profitable post framework. You need to start adding those into your regular content schedule. So whatever your content schedule is for social media, maybe you post three times a week, maybe you post every day, maybe you post twice a day. Whatever your schedule is, look at it and try and make sure that, you know, one in three is a profitable post. That means it's going to be driving people into your social sales funnel. So that's step one and that is a really quick step. Like if you've got that low ticket offer already, then usually setting up the actual funnel side of things is something particularly if you've got templates which if you're in our programs, you will, you know, you can set these up in a couple of hours. And then the reels, like those profitable post framework reels that we show you how to do, those are reels that take 10 minutes each to set up and you can start making sales from that. So this is why I love this first piece of the puzzle. Get in there, get some quick wins and then all of a sudden you now have this lever to pull. You're like, I know the types of posts I need to be doing and I know that if I'm having a low sales week or a low sales month or, you know, whatever it is, or I just want to have an additional revenue stream. I just pull this level when I want and I'm going to make sales. So that's step number one, step number two, slightly chunkier step, but this is your email engine and this doesn't look the same for everybody. Everyone's just going to look slightly different for this. You are going to be setting up an email based automation or an email based funnel that any new subscribers go through. And again, do this in a way that is going to help you to be taking those baby steps off the launch roller coaster. What you can do is figure out what is that best conversion mechanism for my offer in an automated world. And there's lots of different ones, you know, you could do a wait list, you could do a webinar, you could do a mini vsl, you could do an application, you could do a flash sale. There's a bunch of different ones, some work better for different types of offers and different types of audiences. So you're going to need to figure out which is that best one. If you don't know, you like some guidance. That's what we do inside Ecos Empire. So come check that out. We will help you. Like what you can do is you can figure out what is that best conversion piece and then for whatever your next promotional launch is, if you don't have one in the calendar in the next 30 to 45 days, add one in and basically you're going to run and create this. So if it was a webinar, you would create the webinar and you test all the emails and the webinar and everything. You make sure that everything works to your existing audience and then you would take it, make those funnel friendly updates that you need to make. Because you can't just take something live and turn it Evergreen. Doesn't quite work that way. Few simple tweaks. Put it on Evergreen and then you have the first piece of your email engine. Now that first piece is gonna be about 14 days long. In ideal world that will end up being 60 days long. But we don't need to do that all at once. I said baby steps. We're gonna start with the first one. I'm gonna tell you how to make it longer. Next. Okay, next step. So now you got your social sales engine, you got your email engine, they are both chugging along. This one's making sales over here, this one's making sales over there. That's great. The third piece of the puzzle is. Well, actually there's two pieces of the puzzle, but one like with those two things, obviously we're going to want to start getting more people through them and do that as quickly as we can. So our optional but gold star recommendation here is that you take the revenue from your social sales engine, your social selling system, you take the revenue you've made there and that becomes an ads budget for paid media. So whether you want to run ads on TikTok or YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or wherever your audience is currently hanging out, Pinterest, whatever it is, running paid traffic, but without having to dig into your profit, it just kind of means you've created this little self sustaining bucket. Because obviously as you do that, your audience is going to grow, you're going to get more Sales through that's going to mean you have a bigger budget and it creates this nice little snowball effect. So that's optional, but very powerful when you do add it in and do it right. And then now this moves on to the third piece and this is your evergreen launches and how you're going to use your first three evergreen launches to actually test, create and extend your email engine out to 60 days. So you're gonna do that by basically sitting down, looking at the next three months in your calendar, planning out one of our mini promotion campaigns that is the best suited for your type of offer for each of those 30 days, running them to your list. And these are, these are small things. This is not like a big huge launch that needs four to six weeks of, you know, warming people up first and then, you know, a webinar and then a challenge and then a this and then a that. No, this is, these are very simple, simple sequences. You know, you're going to run them to your list, you're going to test them, the ones that work best. You're then going to take them, funnel friendly them, and then automate them, and then they are going to stack on top of each other and they're going to give you this amazing email engine which is a 3 to 4 mini funnel stack that is going to convert so much better than any funnel out there. And that is going to be where the scales start to tip in your favor. And that is what going to be where you're now starting to realize, hey, I'm making a really good number of sales every day, every week and I can actually really start to rely on this. And I actually know now if I put X number of people through this funnel, what my results are going to be out the back of that. That's going to all inform how you then go forward and scale. But the great piece is about following these steps, about following this like launch rehab program is that after like the three to four months of doing the three little mini funnels and getting your initial one set up, not only will you have this awesome engine, but you will now be in the flow of doing evergreen launches. You will now have seen which types of launches work best for your audience. You will now actually have basically a back catalog of things that you can rinse, repeat, reuse, recycle, update. And now when it comes to doing your evergreen launches, which are many promotions done roughly every 30 days, they are sort of, for most of them, 50 to 80% done. So it means that now your month is no longer spent 80% on setting up for the next launch. It's maybe spent a couple of afternoons, if that, getting your next mini promo up and running and the rest of the time is yours. And when that happens, when you step into that space of oh wow, things are just working and sales are just coming in and I'm no longer spending all my time launching, that is when scale can happen and when growth can happen. Because you now have not only like revenue that you can rely on, so you feel happier to invest if you need to or bring in help if you need to, but you just have more time, more brain space to get to creative, to come up with new ideas, to come up with new offers, to, you know, deliver even better service to your clients. They go out and tell everyone how amazing you are and that is where growth happens. But it can't happen when you are stuck on the super crazy launch roller coaster. So if that is where you are right now, if that is where you are stuck, then no, I feel for you because it sucks. I know how, I know how sucky it is and that there is a better option. It's not an overnight option because I think we all know that none of those work, not forever anyway. We all want to build businesses that in three, four, five years time are still going to be running for us and not yet again figuring out how to change everything all over again. And that is what putting these processes in place does. That is our system. Guys, if you would like to find more about this and see actually how it can work, we've actually got this really cool free calculator that you can just go pop your numbers in. It will actually project out what that looks like. So you tell them, this is how many people on my list, this is how many people are on my following. This is roughly how many subscribers I get per month. This is the cost of my programs, blah, blah. And it will give you the full projection for the next 12 months of what it looks like to install this system and see it piece by piece being added and the impact it can have on your monthly reliable revenue. And I think it's going to blow your mind. So if you want to check that out, just go to hellofunnels Co Quit as in I quit launching. The link will be below. Check it out. Pop your numbers in. Let me know if you were surprised. A lot of people are when they see just how powerful it is to, to have these bits added in. And yeah, if you'd like some more help with that, that's what we do. Helping people to install this system into their business to get off the launch roller coaster. We're here, ready to help, ready to hand you the parachute and guide you on the way down. So if this has been useful, guys, if you've had any ahas, please let us know. If you like this episode. You know, give us a thumbs up, give us a like, give us a follow. Make sure you share it. Make sure you tell your friends. It means so, so much to me and my team when we see our crazy nerdery getting shared out in the world. And yeah, thank you so much for hanging out with me today. And I'll see you next week for more nerdy goodness. Bye.