Product launches have been on my mind the last couple of weeks, not just because Lance and I run a 1-hour webinar launch just about every week, but we have recently come off of a “tear” of lots of NEW product launches (as opposed to us running webinars to promote existing ones)…
- Our Product University live event
- Updating our Webinar Crusher course to version 5
- Updating Setup a Fan Page to version 2
- Updating Newbie Crusher to Income Machine
Plus of course re-launching those old classes that we created initially as live webinar courses, then repackaged into home study courses – including a member’s dashboard, transcripts, affiliate program, evergreen webinar replay, post-sale autoresponder sequence, all the usual “product” stuff.
And when I see other internet marketers try to do the same for their business, they fail to think and act in strategic terms. They incorrectly focus on the MECHANICS they think they need, like creating a blog post with 2000 Facebook comments. Making 4 pre-launch videos. Creating a report (or whitepaper) about the product they’re about to create.
These are things that DON’T make the difference
between a successful and unsuccessful product launch!
Things No One Cares About
- How much time you spent creating your product
- How many pages, megabytes, or minutes of video you have
- A too-big 3 to 5 hour webinar
- A too-long launch sequence of videos that takes 4 weeks
- How great, smart, or rich you are
- Wordplay, hypnotic language, the confusion close
“Tricks” That Get People to Buy (Sometimes)
- Time running out
- Offer closing
- Price increasing
- Limited seats
- Disappearing bonus
- Price (high or low)
What Actually Works
- What they’ll know
- What they’ll GET and HAVE
- Cost of NOT doing it
- Repeat success or exponential success
- Speed
- Ease of use
- Power and effectiveness
- Hungry crowd
- Compelling magic super-offer that combines logic (and proof) plus emotion
The Answer You’ve Needed All Along
Here’s how to think “strategically” about your product sales and launches.
I keep scouring books, courses, and the internet for something better than WWHW, Eugene Schwartz, and Robert Cialdini but I haven’t found it yet.
Basic sales copy tells us to structure a sales argument in this way:
- Attention (promise)
- Interest (problem)
- Desire (solution)
- Action (buy it now)
High school English class told us to structure our writing like this:
- Why (why is this important)
- What (what am I going to discover)
- How-To (how do I do this thing)
- What-If (what are the possibilities once I take this action).
Eugene Schwartz tells us there are five levels of marketplace sophistication: novelty, enlargement, uniqueness, sophistication, and abandonment. But if you think about it, you can combine #3 and #4 so it’s just…
- Novelty (something is new to the marketplace)
- Enlargement (bigger claims)
- Sophistication (faster and better)
- Abandonment (too complex and back to the original)
Robert Cialdini tells us there are six social weapons of influence to get what we want. Let’s organize this as well…
- You use Authority (why people should listen to you) in the Attention phase of sales copy
- Liking (why you are similar) and Reciprocity (I’ll give you something, like free information, now you owe me in return) introducing a Problem
- Desire, which is where we explain our solution, uses Consistency (get people to agree with you every step of the way), and Social Proof (how have others used it)
- In the final phase, Action, where we want people to buy, we use Scarcity the most (buy this now or else something bad will happen).
AIDA, WWHW, Eugene Schwartz, Robert Cialdini,
all just different ways of saying the same thing.
What’s a “Strategic” Product Launch?
It’s where your email sequence, videos, sales letter, pitch webinar, everything all matches up to a consistent message and MOST people think they have to flood the marketplace with information, list 53 different components potential buyers need to have. Nope, you just need to walk them through the FOUR STEPS.
The only way I’ve found to do it, that works every time, is to list out the ALTERNATIVES people might take (but you make fun of them) so that the only logical and emotional course of action is to buy from you.
Let’s take our Webinar Crusher product for example…
Alternative #1: Don’t run webinars. Alternative #2: Run webinars from free services. Alternative #3: Run evergreen webinars.
Alternative #4: Run webinars using our Webinar Crusher system.
At each point along the way we make fun of each alternative and point out its disadvantages to the extreme. There actually is a method to this madness:
- Alternative #1: Not Doing It (“Novelty” or “Attention” or “Why Is It Important”)
- Alternative #2: The “Too-Big” Solution (“Enlargement” or “Interest” or “What Do I Do”)
- Alternative #3: The “Too-Complex” Solution (“Sophistication” or “Desire” or “How Do I Do It”)
- Alternative #4: Your Solution (“Abandonment” or “Action” or “What-If I Use Your Solution”)
Just by listing these four things, we’ve structured most of our sales letter, the webinar pitch, the email launch sequence, everything. We didn’t brain-dump a laundry list of alternatives that sent people elsewhere. We didn’t jump in with our solution right off the bat. We’ve LOGICALLY listed out the possible avenues while EMOTIONALLY exhausting people with the pain and frustration of those other guys without specifically calling them out.
Too many times, I see people in an uninteresting niche, with a boring product and offer, or the wrong positioning, just trying to make it work. For some reason they think that more traffic, more subscribers, more affiliates will help… a slick sales pitch, fancy videos, or amazing sales letter graphics will help. They won’t.
What will help? Having the right offer, in front of the right crowd, and presenting it in this (4-step) process.
Please comment below: Do you think that 4-step sequence will make it easier for you to come up with sales copy, webinar presentations, email sequences, and more?
