Why you need an Online Course Pre-Launch Strategy

The key to your online course success is in your pre-launch strategy.

That’s why, in this episode, we’ll look at what a pre-launch strategy is, why it’s important and what you can include in yours.

Tune in before you ever attempt a(nother) course launch 🎧

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Transcript

Episode 161

Hey, welcome to the new School of Marketing podcast. I’m so grateful to you for tuning in. Before we dive in, I would love to pay my respect and acknowledgement to the Palawa people of Lutruwita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates. And I pay my respects to the elders, past, present and emerging. Alright, let’s dive right in. I am literally doing this recording before the school up. So yeah, can’t leave too late. So I want to talk about prelaunch strategy. And really, in a nutshell, your key to your online course success is in your pre launch strategy. But before we get ahead, let’s look at what a prelaunch strategy actually is. And basically it is what it says it is. It’s a strategy that you put in place before you launch your online course. And it doesn’t mean it has to be your first launch. It can be your 2nd, 3rd, 4th, like your 10th course. But every time you launch a course, you need a pre launch strategy. And when I talk about a pre launch strategy, it actually also doesn’t mean that you have to have built your entire course. You can be in your first launch and not have your course built. You can actually pre sell your course before it’s built, but you still need a pre launch strategy for a successful course launched wherever you’re at in that process. First launch, 2nd, 10th, 50th, you need a prelaunch strategy. The purpose of a prelaunch strategy is to get people excited about your course as well as building up a customer base before you launch it. And depending on what you’re launching, your prelaunch strategy generally has the following elements. Firstly, you need to understand your target market and who you’re actually launching to because this will help you with the foundations. From your messaging to your launch platform, to your marketing tactics. Knowing who you are actually going to speak to will help you speak to the right people. Right? Doing your research before you launch will pay off massively. Like you need to just do your research. You can’t just launch and cross your fingers. It’s not only to know who you’re going to launch to or how you’re going to do it, but also to validate your offer concept. Especially if this is your first launch and you haven’t actually built the course. You need to figure out if what you are going to build is actually a valid kind of offer and people want it. So identify who would be the best course. Even if you have a person in mind for it already, you won’t know if your thoughts and your expectations were actually correct until you’re in your prelaunch stage. Next, you’ll be crafting a plan to get the word out about your course. And this plan should include a mix of marketing activities. And those marketing activities need to be tailored to your specific target audience. So you need to know where they hang out, you need to know how they speak, you need to know what kind of messaging they’re attracted to, what kind of creative they’re attracted to. Really, who are they and how do they consume content, where do they consume content and how can you best connect with those people? A successful prelaunch strategy is something that is flexible, it’s adaptable, and you really want to be monitoring the responses that you receive during the build up to your launch so that you can make tweaks and changes. It shouldn’t be set in stone, but you still need a roadmap. Otherwise you’re not going to know where you’re going to go. The prelaunch stage is a time to experiment, and it’s also a time to rework your tactics based on the data and the insights you’re getting back. And like I said at the start, the key to your online course success is in your prelaunch strategy. And as the saying goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail or something along those lines. So without a prelaunch strategy, it’s just easy to miss important details or you might be overlooking like obstacles along the way. Plus, you’ll most likely learn more about your audience and possibly where they spend time so that you can actually engage with them and market to them, the idea is to build up awareness and hype before your course is available to buy. And in essence, really the larger your potential audience before your launch, the more possibility of sales. It’s literally maths. If you want to sell lots of courses, like if you have a course that’s kind of like uncapped and you want to sell lots of places, you need lots of leads. It is like that. So a pre launch strategy is essential to get those leads. And I’m sure you can imagine what that without mentioning it lots of times to lots of people, you just won’t get the same response as if you had spent time talking about your upcoming course launch on your social platforms to your list, for example, doing videos on YouTube, talked about it on podcasts and all of those places. If you were just beavering away and creating your course, we hadn’t actually mentioned it. And then you’re like, hey, I’ve got a course. It’s here, you can buy it. Now, you would not get the same response. So all of those pieces like talking on social platforms to your list, that’s exactly what a prelaunch strategy is. It’s a plan to build awareness and get a list of people who might be interested in purchasing your course. And while every prelaunch strategy is different, I’d like to walk you through an example so that you get a better idea of what it would look like. So let’s say that you’re launching a course, teaching makers to start a business and sell on, for example, etsy or creative market. Really, it doesn’t really matter what the course is right now, but let’s roll with that. So you’ve got your course outline ready. You’ve got a good framework to create and deliver the course. There are a few steps you need to complete to be able to actually sell your course. So you need a way to take payment and most likely a document or a sales page on your website that tells your audience exactly what it is, what they’ll receive, who it’s for. And most of the time, you also need to write some copy that paints the picture, sets the scene, helps people overcome objections. And once you have all of that ready and you’re ready to open the proverbial doors, you just need an audience who turn into customers, right? But where do you get those customers? And that is exactly where your pre launch strategy comes into play. Without a plan on how you’re going to attract customers, you’ll be launching to crickets. And shouting into the void isn’t going to work either. Like you can shout louder and louder, but people will most likely either not see, because Instagram and Facebook, they’re all places where the algorithm dictates what people see. So you can shout louder and louder. People will most likely ignore you because they just don’t know you. You haven’t spent time helping them get to know you, get to like you, and get to trust you. So you need a pre launch strategy for your online course that maps out how you’re going to create hype, how you’re going to create awareness about your course launch, and whether that is your first or your fourth or your 20th. So you need to build up awareness, and you need to build up an audience for when your cart opens. Even if it is evergreen, you still need an audience. So plan out what social media posts you’re going to post and when. Plan out how you’re going to attract more subscribers to your list. What kind of freebie are you going to use? How is that all going to look? How is it going to all be delivered? Plan out which paid ads you’re going to run. If you’re going to run any paid ads, plan out which podcasts you want to be a guest on before your launch. Plan out which webinars you want to host. If you’re going to host webinars or a challenge or something like that, plan out which people do you want to connect with in terms of joint ventures or collaborations. Plan out how you are going to get more eyeballs on your offer. There’s so many pieces to a prelaunch and every single one of them will be different. Like my pre launch will be different to your pre launch because your audience is different to my audience. So you can’t simply take a template and go, I’m going to follow exactly all these steps. Because if you’re spending time for your pre launch on Instagram but your followers are not, your audience is not, then you’re still going to be launching to crickets because you’re not in the right place at the right time, speaking to the right people with the right message. So that is basically what your pre launch comes down to, talking to the right people with the right message at the right time in the right place. So plan all that out. This is why you really need to know your ideal client so well, so that you know where they hang out, how they speak and what kind of messaging resonates with them. You need to be in that right place at the right time with the right offer. The stars need to be aligned, basically. But you can plan all of this, and this is why a pre launch strategy is so important. I hear of so many courses not seeing the light of day or people say, I’ve got this course and nobody bought it. It’s because you have not spent enough time on your pre launch strategy. So you need to execute your plan. You need to track along the way, and then you need to make changes as needed. So keep an eye on the data. And this is what we do with Facebook ads. But this goes for every single piece of content you put out there. You need to look at what is the response, what kind of feedback am I getting, what are the numbers looking like? Is it getting engagement? All of that. You need to be tracking so that you can then make changes or if it is landing really well, make more of that kind of content. All right. Hopefully this explains to you why you need a prelaunch strategy and what you might want to focus on. Again, it is different for every single one of us because our audiences are different. So really nail down who your audience is and then make a plan of how you are going to create hype, how you’re going to create awareness, how you’re going to build trust. Before you actually say, hey, I’ve got a course. Do you want to buy it? That is your homework. If you are launching a course in the future or in the near future, or if you’ve got one and you’ve tried to launch it, but you felt like it didn’t really work, nobody bought it. Go back to this, create a pre launched strategy and try again. So there’s your homework. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the new School of Marketing podcast. I hope it was helpful. I can’t wait to share more marketing tips with you next week. And as always, if you are ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising and speed up that lead generation process. Because we all need leads and we all love speed. Maybe we don’t all love speed, but it really is a little bit of a hack. It makes your lead generation much quicker, much faster. So if you’re ready for that, make sure you visit newschoolofmarketing.com to download practical free resources. Sign up to my brand new free masterclass where I teach you how to sell more of your online courses with meta ads. Sign up to that and also subscribe to the podcast and never miss an episode. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Until next time, take care and market your business every day.