If you don't get the launch results you want, it doesn't mean that you suck. Or that your offer sucks. Or that you need to burn your business down and give up.
But it's easy to feel that you don't know what you're doing. So before you fall into a pit of self despair, I'm here to reassure you that is all okay, and you just need to keep going.
In this post, I'm going to be spilling how you can flip around a failed launch into a successful one.
All marketing is an experiment
Even the best marketers can't guarantee they'll hit their launch goals. Yes, there are strategies that you can follow and methods that typically work better than others. But there are so many factors that can impact the results of a launch, like:
other industry events
economic factors
news cycles
industry shifts
and your audience's personal life and priorities.
Like for example, I'm currently house hunting, which is taking up all my resources. And that means I'm less likely to invest in something that would normally be a no brainer.
Your audience is made up of complex humans, each with their own individual stories and individual priorities. So you can never truly know why people don't buy. But it's not always related to something you could have done better. And even if it is, that's okay. There are ways to pinpoint any issues so you can create more success with a future launch.
This doesn't mean you should give up. It means you can learn from what works and what didn't work in every launch to improve it for the next time. It's all a learning process. And doing the thing is way more important than doing it perfectly or never putting it out there for fear.
Keep your blinkers on
Another thing to bear in mind is where you're at in your own business. Keep your blinkers on and don't compare your launch to someone else's. I know that this is easier said than done when people are sharing their results on podcasts, emails, Instagram, all over the internet, it's really easy to think “why am I not getting the results that so and so is getting?”
I would recommend only comparing your launch results to your past launch results. It's very easy to look at other business owners and assume you're doing something wrong just because they got six figures in revenue and you didn’t. But you can’t ever know what's going on behind the scenes.
Firstly, be careful what you believe on the internet. Not everyone is 100% truthful about the money they're making. Some people are but you never know. So take it all with a pinch of salt.
Secondly, revenue numbers only tell a small part of the story. They don't account for profits, which I would say is the most important figure. And you don't always know the size of someone's business, their audience, their team, or how engaged their audience is, whether they've had other support, and whether they're using the exact same strategy as you.
You might look at their launch and think it's very easy to reverse engineer it. But actually you don't know what's going on behind the scenes.
Three, never assume you know how someone's launch went. Just because it looks successful, doesn't mean it was. I always say create your own benchmarks for success and stay focused. If you set a result and you didn't hit that, that's when you can start debriefing it and looking at what worked and what didn’t. If you set a goal based on someone else's business, then of course you're setting yourself up for failure. If you do one thing differently in your next launch, I recommend it be setting your own launch goals based on your own successes in the past and your own failures that in the past.
What can you do better next time based on your last launch and not based on someone elses?
The past doesn’t determine the future
Another thing I want you to remember when your launches don't go to plan is that you can always fix it. What happened in the past does not determine your future results. Unless you copy exactly what you did before without making any changes.
I always recommend analyzing launches after the event, maybe give yourself a couple of weeks to recover, but not so long that you've forgotten all the nitty gritty details. I recommend waiting for about two to three weeks so that you can look at everything and see what did and didn't work. That includes data points, but also how you felt. What was stressful? What did you enjoy? And how much free time did you have? Because believe me that is so important when you're launching.
You also want to look at data like your email click through rates, your webinar show up rates, and conversion rates across the funnel to understand what you need to improve for the next time you launch.
If you want to hit a different result, this post breaks down how to debrief a launch.
Get back on your feet
The most important thing to remember with launching is to get back on your feet.
Doing a launch is the only way to learn what works for you, how you enjoy launching and what resonates better with your audience. So don't give up now.
There are so many examples of people who launch courses or programs with less than impressive results, who turn things around to smash up their goal.
One of my favorite stories from someone's launch journey is Amy Porterfield. You probably know Amy from her podcast Online Marketing Made Easy or her book Two Weeks’ Notice, or maybe you've even been in one of her programs like Digital Course Academy. She teaches online business owners how to market their business and build profitable digital courses.
When Amy first launched Digital Course Academy, her course building program, she made $30,000. Not bad, right?
Now, regardless of whether you think that's good or bad, what happened next is incredible. Instead of thinking, okay, that works, what's next? Amy decided to relaunch her program later that same year. Same program, different launch.
After analyzing what worked and doubling down on it and ditching the things that didn't work so well, she was able to bring in revenue of $118,000. The second time she launched that program.
The third time she launched, she made $283,000. And now she has an eight figure business and she still has that offer at the core of it. She still teaches people in Digital Course Academy how to build a digital course and launch their first program.
Without commenting on anything like how much her team grew during that time or anything else that might have changed (I don't know all the juicy details), she was able to continually grow her launches by ditching what didn't get results and making time for the things that did.
That is what I want for you. Whatever revenue you brought in in your last launch, whether it was $0 $1,000, or $50,000, I want you to know that it's possible to get bigger results if you know what to look for.
It's time to get yourself back out there.
By using these mindset reframes around launching, you can flip the script on what didn't work and turn it into something profitable.
Want the step-by-step guide to improving your launch results? Check out this post.