Welcome to the Marketing in the Wild Podcast. I’m Julia from Stratos Creative Marketing, where we are obsessed with finding real-life in the wild stories about business and marketing.
I am recording today two days after what I would call a failed launch. While I don’t love talking about failure, because I do think that we can learn from it and see and do something different next time – and we’re actually going to – this actually did not meet my expectations. And by that, I mean we had zero sales, and I was hoping we would at least get one. But we got zero. And so, we built this whole campaign. We’re launching a new product, a new membership. We built this whole campaign, we had ads, we had email funnels. We had everything that we would do for clients, we had done for ourselves. I’ll be honest, I expected to at least sell one thing. So when I woke up on Tuesday and checked my sales, then there was zero, I was incredibly disappointed. And so I’m gonna talk a little bit about that, and what we’re doing.
But I wanted to first share that because if you’ve been in business for even a month, you know that there’s disappointments. There are launches that don’t go as we expect and we have to recalibrate. There are sales that we hope that we get, there’s clients that we would love to have, and then they go for a competitor. Whatever it is, we all have disappointment. And so I sat at the dinner table on Tuesday night with my husband and I said, “I don’t wanna scrap this idea. It’s a good idea. We know that people need it, but what is missing?” And he was like, “I don’t even know why you would think about scrapping it, because all you gotta do is recalibrate.”
And so I’ve been thinking about, what does recalibrating look like specifically? I do this with clients all the time, you guys, but sometimes we are our own worst clients, let’s be honest. And so I’ve been thinking through, okay, what needs to change for the next time? We’re waiting a month, we’re gonna launch it again and see what happens. But I figured, it could be any sort of problem, but here are the things that I could reduce it down to and say these are the things that could have gone wrong. Number one, audience is too small, number two, the messaging is off, number three, the product we’re offering is off. And so here’s the thing, I worked backwards; product and offering. This is a product that we’ve created based on over 100 sales calls. So when people tell us, “Oh, I really want help with social media.” And then they say, “But I don’t know if I could pay for you guys to do it.” That’s where we were solving this problem. We created a lower level offer that is still a great approach to social media for these people. So I was pretty sure that our offering was accurate and that was not what I needed to change.
Number two, messaging. As a person who’s working on other people’s messaging all the time, sometimes we have to switch it up, we have to change it. Just this morning I changed some ads to make them much more direct with an even harder call to action in hopes that they would get better traction. It could be messaging.
Number three, audience. So what we had done for this particular launch, because it was an early access launch, we created a wait list. This wait list was where people opted in specifically for this product, and we had like 50 people on it. So it’s not a big audience by any means, and I can totally admit that. Then we also sent it to like our most loyal subscribers, so the people who are opening our emails all the time, so roughly like maybe 100 to 200 people. And that’s like a fifth of what our whole list is. We have over 1,000 people on our email list. So I was like, you know what? That is a very small audience. It is not a very big sample size. And so maybe that’s what I wanna switch first. I admit, the messaging could be totally off, or maybe the offering is right, but the pricing is off. There could be a lot of other problems, but the audience problem is the easiest one for me to fix fastest.
So what we’re doing is we are running ads to grow our email list for the next few weeks. We’re serving that email list with really, really, really good content, and then we’re gonna launch to a group of 1,000 plus people. If we don’t sell anything after that launch, then I’m gonna look at the messaging. I mean, granted, I’ll look at the messaging now, maybe tweak a few things, but I’m not gonna do an overhaul until I know that it is not an audience problem. Because if it is an audience problem, that is the easiest thing for me to solve right now. So I say that knowing that if you have had a launch that hasn’t worked or you have something that you’ve had 10 sales calls, nobody has said yes, then you might be looking at your messaging or your offering before you look at your audience, especially if you have a sales call problem. We have other podcasts about sales, so make sure you listen to those, but perhaps the messaging that you’re using to sell that offering, maybe that’s what’s off. Maybe it’s not an audience problem. You’re getting plenty of leads, but what you’re saying isn’t resonating.
Here’s the thing, guys. We put a lot of effort into it. When I talked to my business coach about the launch not going as well as I wanted it to, he said, “Hey, this is part of the deal. Sometimes it takes us 12 times to nail it and get the right thing out into the market.” He was very encouraging. So I just wanna show up here with a little bit of transparency, a little bit of honesty, that it didn’t go well for us. I wanted it to. Will it? Yes, I am putting my heart and soul into this program and this product that we’re launching. If you wanna check it out, we would love to have you. It is for people who want quality content on their social media, but might not have the budget to have an agency manage it. So I’ll just put it out there. Head over to Stratosphere on our site. It’s http://stratoscreativemarketing.com/product/stratosphere/ to learn more.
But you all should know, the first iteration of this did not go well. So hopefully by the time you’re listening to this, we will have already done our second launch and it will already be thriving. But I’ll tell you this, it’s a good product, and I’m trying to figure out whether it’s an audience problem or a messaging problem. So here is to always experimenting, here is to try new things. Business is hard, but it is always worth it. So friends, what are you experimenting with today? And if it is something that did not go how you wanted it to, I’m right there with you, we’re all in this together. Cue all of the High School musical ‘we’re all in this together’ songs. But anyway, you’re doing your best, and that’s all that matters.
Friends, thanks for tuning into this week’s podcast episode. I am so glad that you have. If you’ve enjoyed it as much as we have, I just ask you to subscribe so you know each time we have a new episode coming out. If you loved our podcast and wanna give us a rating or a review, I promise, we will read each and every one of them. A special shout out to our friend, Carson Childers, who is producing our podcast. We really appreciate him and all the hard work that he’s done for us.
Also thanks to the Stratos team. They have been behind the scenes doing all of the graphic design, brainstorming, et cetera, et cetera. Really, this wouldn’t be possible without them. I’m thankful for each and every one of you guys.
Lastly, listener, we’ll be back next week, and I hope you will be too.
Recent Comments