How to Launch a New Offer: 3 Things I’d Recommend If I Were Your Marketing Consultant
If you’ve been wondering how to launch a new offer without it falling flat, this is exactly where I’d start.
Over the past 7 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of small business owners across all kinds of industries – and one thing I can tell you with certainty is this: knowing how to launch a new offer properly is what separates the offers that exist, from the ones that actually sell.
So if you came to me and said, “I’ve got a new offer and I want to know how to launch it successfully” – here are the three things I’d tell you.
Get Crystal Clear on Who Your Offer Is Actually For
The Biggest Fail Point
The number one mistake I see business owners make is that they jump straight into execution mode.
They’re so excited by their idea that they dive straight into building the sales page, designing the graphics, planning the content. All the fun creative stuff.
But when it comes time to launch the offer, instead of attracting perfect-fit humans, all it seems to attract is the people who can’t afford it / aren’t ready / need to run it by their partner first – aka the people who are never going to buy from you.
And it’s not because your offer is bad, the price is too high or the market is fucked.
The real problem is sitting in the foundation of offers that sell well – messaging.
Your messaging hasn’t made the right person feel like your offer was made for them. So you can do and create all of the things as much as you like, but it won’t help your offer sell.
My Recommendation
Before you touch a sales page, write an email, or plan a single piece of content, I want you to get clear on three things. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know exactly what’s coming.
Desire. Demand. Differentiation.
Desire
What does your ideal client desperately want? Not need. Want. The thing they’re lying awake thinking about. The feeling they’d have if this problem was finally solved. That’s the desire your messaging needs to lead with – not your modules, not your methodology, not what’s included.
Demand
Why do they need it right now? If your messaging doesn’t give them a reason to act today, they won’t. You have to create urgency. Show them what’s getting harder, more expensive, or more frustrating the longer they sit on it.
Differentiation
And why should they choose you over every other option? Not “I really care about my clients.” I mean your actual method. Your specific process. Your point of view. The thing they can’t get anywhere else.
When you’re clear on all three FIRST, it’s much easier to position your offer as the obvious choice.
So before you do anything else – get that foundation locked in.
Build a Pre-Launch Runway – Not Just a Launch
The Biggest Fail Point
The second thing I’d tell you as your marketing consultant, is something I see happen constantly, even with people who’ve launched before…
And that’s to stop treating your launch like a single event instead of a campaign.
Again you jump straight into execution mode – from idea to launch in 5 seconds flat.
And I get it, you’re excited about your offer and you want to share it with your people as soon as possible. But you’re being swayed by excitement instead of leading with intention.
When you get caught up in the excitement – you can be sloppy and move too fast for your audience.
Your audience has gone from not knowing the offer exists to being asked to hand over money – sometimes in the space of a single Instagram post.
And that’s too big a jump.
You can’t expect your people to understand your offer like you do, or feel the same level of excitement as you do. And you definitely can’t rush them to make a decision.
They need time to understand what your offer is, who it’s for, and why they need it – which is why a launch isn’t an announcement, it’s a campaign.
And campaigns need a runway.
My Recommendation
Think of your launch in three distinct phases – pre-launch, launch, and post-launch.
In your pre-launch, your job is to seed your offer before the cart opens – you’re preparing your audience to buy.
In this stage you want to get an idea of the temperature of people in your audience. Who are your hot leads that you need to keep an eye on because they are your likely buyers. And who needs a little warming up – a bit of nurturing, a bit of building problem awareness.
You gotta remember that not everyone is at the exact same stage of their customer journey with you, so you can’t just lump everyone together and apply the same strategy to everyone.
Your pre-launch is about giving people a reason to care about what’s coming next.
Then in your launch phase, this is when you actually sell the thing.
Selling doesn’t equal dropping one post and then disappearing off the face of the Earth.
And it’s also not about repeating what’s included for the length of your launch campaign, because BORING. That’s one way to repel your dream clients.
You need ANGLES and you need to rotate through them. Show your offer through different stories and different lenses, because your audience needs to hear different things to facilitate the purchase decision. They need both feelings AND facts.
And finally your post-launch phase, where you look at the data from your launch and make decisions for what comes next.
For next time you might need:
- More eyeballs in your audience
- To nurture your audience a little more
- Adjust the messaging of your offer
- Give yourself a little more time
Because a launch is only ever a failure when you don’t apply the lessons from the past. So this is where you can do a post-launch survey and ask why people didn’t buy and what they need from you to feel confident in their decision.
Give Yourself Enough Time (and Don’t Try to Do It Alone)
The Biggest Fail Point
And the final thing I’d tell you as your marketing consultant, would be to give yourself plenty of time and don’t try to do everything yourself.
More often than not, the reason a new offer launch doesn’t go as planned is because you tried to rush.
Most people don’t give themselves a realistic timeframe to bring the vision for their offer to life. They underestimate how much time is required to create the offer (including the messaging and all the offer assets), prepare their buyer (and themselves) and then actually sell the offer well.
Even myself (a very seasoned launcher + messaging + marketing wizard) make sure I give myself enough time + space to cook with.
Do you want to spend your whole time scrambling, writing content at 11pm or on the weekend and making decisions on the fly and under pressure because you couldn’t rein it in a little bit and set yourself up for success?
Future you is bitch slapping you in the face right now!
Plus that chaotic energy translates into what you put out into the world – there’s a very obvious difference between someone selling from a place of confidence and someone selling from a place of panic. Your audience can tell which one you are.
My Recommendation
Set yourself a date when you want to launch your new offer and then map out everything you need to do before now and then to make it happen.
Create a plan.
Assign dates.
And then add another 2 week buffer onto that.
You’ll soon realise, you’ll likely need a minimum of 6 to 8 weeks BEFORE you actually sell your offer.
In that time, focus on a few things.
Building your Hot Leads List. Go through your DMs, email list and comments and pull out everyone who’s enquired before, past clients who could be ready for a next step, and warm lurkers who engage with everything but never quite pull the trigger. These are your most likely buyers – start there.
Getting everything in one place before the launch even begins – dates, offer links, messaging angles, testimonials, assets. I personally brain dump into a Google Doc first and then move everything into ClickUp so I can see exactly what’s happening and when. When you’re hunting for things mid-launch, you’re wasting time that should be going directly into selling
And get the right support around you. It doesn’t need to be a whole team, but find your people. Whether that’s a copywriter for the sales page, a VA for the tech, a coach to gut-check your messaging, or even just a business bestie who keeps you accountable and hypes you up when you want to throw the whole thing in the bin.
Because the more supported you are, the more that confidence and ease shows up in your content – and in the way you sell.
Final Thoughts on How to Launch a New Offer
If you’ve been trying to figure out how to launch a new offer and actually get results, it comes back to this:
- Get clear on your messaging first.
- Build a pre-launch runway.
- And give yourself enough time and support.
This is exactly what I’d recommend to you as your marketing consultant, if you came to me with a new offer you want to launch.
In next week’s episode I’ll be sharing what I’d recommend if you want to grow your audience filled with perfect-fit clients.
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