Wisdom for your next launch: how to plan and track success
Launching is crazy hard work. There are emails flying around, content and presentations you are building last minute, not to mention remembering to actually switch to live when the time comes.
Your marketing strategy for your launch probably feels more chaotic than a swarm of bees in spring.
Here are some nuggets of wisdom on how to make things a bit more bearable:
Use a printable calendar to map everything out. If you are a visual person (like me) having real paper and ink to write things out can bring down the initially craziness you are feeling. You can do an initial brain dump of ideas and once you have a set launch date, you can work backwards, planning out all your marketing channels.
Decide to pay special attention to only a couple marketing efforts. It is impossible to be everywhere at once. It is better to focus on 2 - 3 mediums (choosing from email, blog/site content, social networks, affiliate, etc.) you feel will really get your message out, instead of trying to be on all platforms intensively. Which leads to be my next point...
Don’t get overwhelmed by social. It happens to all of us at times. Choose two social platforms you really enjoy working in and leave it at that. And pre-schedule your posts to take off the initial heavy load.
Using a prebuilt webinar marketing tool like Webinar Jam might save your sanity. These tools have a step-by-step process that takes everything into consideration. If you have launched before and want to take out some of the organizational work (and are willing to spend a bit extra on this service), this is the way to go.
If disaster strikes, just breath. We all make mistakes at times, especially in moments of added stress. I’ve seen launch problems taken advantage of (like a technical error turned into an additional bonus to all participants) so if something does go haywire, take a step back and see if you can turn the situation around in some way. Don’t be scared to get creative!
When it comes to your marketing efforts, it is important to pin point which are leading to real sales and signs up. For example, identifying that your email newsletter was bringing in more sales than your blog content or that your weekly tweets were working better than your Facebook posts. This would be great, right? Well, there is a way!
Using Google Analytics, you can actually track back and see which marketing campaign are leading to completed sales and sign ups.
Using this information, you not only identify which marketing efforts are most successfully but you can also:
Shift your launch based around where you are getting most conversions from. Your focus is on what is really working for this particular launch.
Modify your post-launch communications, specifically choosing which medium to reach out to most of your audience with.
Apply this information to your next launch, spending your time, energy, and money where it is most valuable.
So, you’re probably wondering how to get this set up in Google Analytics. That is the best part; there is no configuration that needs to be done inside of GA. Instead, you will be modifying the links you use to share your offer. You don’t have to be technical to set this up; all it requires is a bit of organization.
If you are interested in tracking your next webinar with Google Analytics, contact me.
You can use this information for all your future launches and instead of guessing how to market your launch, you can KNOW what marketing to use.