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THE SECRETS OF PRODUCT LAUNCH COPY

The quote starting off this chapter is one of my favorite examples of a product launch.

It’s from the late Steve Jobs of Apple.

On launch day every year at the big Apple announcement, Steve Jobs made his keynote presentation about the company, then he announced the exciting new product(s) last.

At the end of his annual public presentation, when he had apparently finished and was preparing to end his talk, he always said, “Oh, and one more thing...”

It may have been OS X, or it might be the iPod, iPod video, or the iPhone, but Steve became known for uttering those words every year, just before he unveiled the one thing everybody really came to hear about.

WHAT IS A PRODUCT LAUNCH?

When you have a sale, or a promotion for your product, you make a special effort to sell it, and you do so by telling stories about it. Those three particular activities—launches, promotions, and story selling—are inextricably intertwined in my mind. I don’t think you can separate the three.

Any time you do a promotion, you’re doing a miniature launch.

The first thing you need to do is decide what kind of launch or product roll-out you’re going to do. Will it be a full launch, one that’s going to last over a period of several weeks from beginning to end? Are you going to do a compressed launch, which might be a process of launching your product over a week to ten days, or are you going to do a mini-launch, which could be more like a promotion that takes place over one to three days?

When we talk about the time frame these launches need, it’s important to keep in mind that a product launch consists of a sequence of marketing events that form a story. There’s something very powerful at work here, and that is the need for the human mind to close open loops.

The incomplete loop in your mind draws and magnetizes your attention, so when you have a sequence of marketing events—for instance, a sequence of e-mails, pieces of sales copy, blog posts, PDF reports, videos, and audios—there is a need in the human psyche to complete the sequence, to finish the story.

Your next step is to “map out” your launch. Plan it on a calendar, even if you’re doing just a promotion, not a “full” launch. Think of it like a launch, and at the very least, map out the beginning, middle, and end on the calendar. That will give you a framework to plan your promotion and make it more effective.

If you’re marketing on the internet, you’re always doing a product launch. The only question is, are you doing it well or doing it poorly? Consciously or unconsciously? Your copy, your website, your videos, each of these elements is telling a story. Whether you’re consciously directing that story and deciding how you want it to affect your readers or viewers, is up to you.

If you let it happen unconsciously, you may not be happy with the results. If you consciously direct the story and think about the strategy behind it... if you make the tactics fit the strategy... then you can improve your results in almost every case.

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO PRODUCT LAUNCHES

For a full treatment of product launches, I recommend the book Launch! by Jeff Walker. The book is a fun and comprehensive read about the subject. Jeff pioneered the concept of the online product launch, and teaches the full process in an online learning program called Product Launch Formula.

Meanwhile, here’s a beginner’s guide to product launches.

PRODUCT LAUNCH USES PSYCHOLOGICAL “TRIGGERS”

Product launches work because they employ all the psychological triggers of influence. This subject was examined in detail by Dr. Robert Cialdini in his book, Influence.

Influence is the result of university peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the factors that influence people’s behavior. Employing these psychological triggers is what makes the launch process so powerful. The triggers Dr. Cialdini identified are:

Product launches do not, as has been suggested, make the sales letter irrelevant. In fact, more copy is required for a launch than for normal sales processes. A launch distributes the sales letter over several forms of media, and over a longer period of time. But the fact is, the entire launch is copy. There’s a lot of copy required when doing a product launch, which leads us to...

LAUNCH COPY BEGINS LONG BEFORE THE SALES LETTER

In fact, the sales letter, even though it might be sizable (some recent launches have used fifty-page sales letters!), may only represent 10–20 percent of the actual copy used in the product launch. This includes:

Launch copy is not irrelevant. To the contrary, launch copy is crucial, and is part of a sequence. All the psychological factors implemented in the various discreet copy elements put the potential buyers into a more receptive frame of mind. When they finally see the sales letter, they’re more likely to be influenced to buy. In fact, they may have already made their decision to buy, and are just looking for a “Buy Now” button to push.

PRODUCT LAUNCHES ARE FIRST A STORY

The most effective way to set the launch up for success is to do so by making it into a story. The story might be as simple as, “I had a problem, and I figured out a way to solve it. Now, I would like to share with you how I solved that problem.”

If you do nothing but write a bunch of blatant hard-hammering sales messages, you’re not going to have much of a launch, because people need a story to engage them emotionally.

KNOW THE ARC OF YOUR STORY

We will spend more time on how you develop your story later.

For the purposes of this discussion, just remember that your product launch is a story, and there must be an arc to your story at its simplest level.

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Your launch needs to have the same thing: a feeling of resolution at the end. In that moment of resolution at the end of your launch, you also want to leave people wanting more. That is why they buy.

STORYBOARD YOUR LAUNCH ON A CALENDAR

Keep yourself on track during your launch by having a plan that’s disciplined by dates. Some of you might be thinking: “Ray, I’m not real sure what the elements of my story need to be, so how will I know how to put that on a calendar?”

Let me walk you through a thumbnail sketch scenario of what your launch might be like. Let’s say you’re launching a product that’s about how to house-train your dog. You’ve figured out a miracle method for house-training a dog that only takes two or three days.

This is something a lot of pet owners would love to know about. They want to hear your story. They want to hear how you discovered this method. They want to hear how you bought your new pet and how that pet had house-training problems and how you were desperately searching for a solution.

Your launch process could start with something as simple as putting up a blog or perhaps going to forums where pet owners hang out and putting up a post that says, “I’m working on putting together a report on how to house-train your dog; do you guys have any suggestions about that?”

Take some of those answers and begin to form the basis of your launch. Maybe you blog about some of the struggles that you had with training your dog. Then a few days later, you begin posting about how you’ve discovered a method that seems to be working.

Just make sure it’s all true. Your stories should always be true. I hope that goes without saying. Do not tell lies. You’re better than that, and don’t need to do it. You can always find a real story.

If you didn’t have the experience of discovering the method that allowed you to teach your dog to not soil the carpet in three days, but instead you acquired the rights to a product that teaches people how to do that, what’s the story there? How about this: “I have a dog that kept having accidents in the house, so I found this product that taught me how to fix the problem and it did, so I bought the rights to the product.”

That’s a darn good story. In fact, you’ve heard that story in a famous marketing campaign. It wasn’t about dog training; it was about electric shavers. Remember Victor Kiam and the Remington company? “I liked this razor so much, I bought the company.”

Map out on a calendar when you’re going to release these pieces of the story. Then set a date and tell the people on your mailing list, who follow you on social media, who read your blog or who read in those forums you frequented, that on May 23^rd you’re going to open the doors and have fifty copies to sell of this book you’ve had printed, along with the DVD. If they want one, they need to get on the waiting list and be ready to go.

Then you update your list on your progress, perhaps by sending them an e-mail to let them know, “Now we have one hundred people on the waiting list, so it’s important when we open the doors on the 23^rd that you move quickly and buy your copy.” Once it’s sold out, you send them another message, make another blog post, and make up your sales letter describing the product.

You can begin to see how these represent points on a calendar. Laying these points out on the calendar is what I mean by “storyboarding” your launch.

CAST YOUR STORY

Who are the players? I want you to think about this carefully, because you need to think through who the viewers of your story might be, who the potential customers or prospects are, and who the players in your story are.

For instance, if you want your joint venture partners to send an e-mail to their list telling their subscribers about your product or service, you’re going to need to write copy that persuades them to do that.

You’ll need a story for your present subscribers, your list members, and a story for new customers, prospects, partners, and the marketing community in general. Remember, they’re observing the process of your launch to see how well it goes—to observe your skill as a marketer.

11 LAUNCH COPY COMPONENTS

Here are the minimum required pieces of copy for a proper product launch.

1) List-building copy.

This is where you’re writing copy that starts building a list, perhaps using a blog or commenting in a forum.

One way to do this is, setting up a landing page, then making posts to your blog that talk about the fact that you’re conducting a survey for a book you’re thinking about writing or for some articles you want to create.

If it’s in a community where a lot of activity and communication takes place naturally, then it could just be as simple as saying, “I’m taking a survey of iguana owners. What are the biggest problems you face as an iguana owner? What are the best things about owning an iguana? What are your funniest iguana stories?” I know I’m picking a ridiculous market as an illustration, but this idea will work in any market.

Then you need copy for your squeeze page. You need copy for your confirmation e-mail. You need copy for your follow-up e-mail, and you’re going to need to think about how that continues to tell your story.

2) Survey copy.

As your list and traffic grow, you want to start asking your market what bugs them. Find out what their pain is.

There are two ways to go about this when you’re thinking about how you’re going to create and market your product. You can focus on relieving a certain pain in the life of the prospect or you can focus on moving the prospect towards some type of pleasurable outcome.

People will respond more readily and will do more to get out of pain than to get into pleasure. I tend to want to focus on the pain-relieving aspects of the product or service.

You could just as easily focus on the pleasure-inducing aspect. That would be good in hobby markets, for instance, such as the model train market. People do model train activities because those activities make them feel good, not because they relieve some great deep psychological pain. That’s a choice you are going to want to make. I recommend focusing on finding their pain and ways to relieve it.

3) Product.

This is especially important if you’re creating an information product. You want to think of your product itself as copy because it’s making a continual sale to your buyer. The sale it’s making is, “I was worth investing in. I am giving you value.”

You need to think in terms of how you structure the product, how it is written in language that reaffirms the decision the prospect made when he or she decided to invest in it. Make sure it addresses the questions and points that were in the copy that sold it to begin with. How many times have you purchased an information product and after you bought it, read it, listened to it, or watched the videos wondered, “What happened to those bullet points that made me buy this? I don’t even see where those are answered.”

You want to make sure you address those in the product itself. Think of the product as an extension of your copy.

4) JV recruitment copy.

This is joint venture recruitment copy. When you’re performing a launch, you don’t want to rely on just your own list. What if you don’t have a list; you’re starting from scratch, and you need to create a list from nothing?

The way you do that is with joint venture partners. Let’s say, for instance, you are a veterinary doctor and you created a product on treating your pet for common ailments at home: “How to do preventative health care with your pet at home and how to use holistic remedies for your pet to save money and have a healthier pet.”

Let’s say you created this product, and you have good information, but you have no list. This very situation was faced by my coaching and copywriting client Dr. Andrew Jones. He created the product I just spoke of and did over $44,000 in his first week, creating an on-going income stream based on this product with no e-mail list.

How did he do this? He got joint venture partners. He called other vendors who offered products to the market he wanted to speak to: pet owners who care about their pets. He said to them, “I’m going to have this product. If you will send an e-mail to the folks on your e-mail list, and they buy from your e-mail, then I will give you half of the proceeds from that sale.”

If you’re familiar with the world of online marketing, this doesn’t seem like such a novel idea. However, the people Dr. Andrew spoke with had never heard of this kind of deal before. Outside of the internet marketing world, this is news – and usually, you will find people who are thrilled to partner with you.

5) Pre-launch copy.

The next few components are all part of this. Here is where you begin building anticipation, scarcity, and social proof. Get your market as excited about your launch as you are.

6) The “Big PDF.”

This is where you’re going to write a white paper, a position paper or special report that spells out your platform or USP (unique selling proposition). It needs to really grab people’s attention.

It might be a collection of advice from well-known experts in your industry, with you as the publisher and editor. It might be an e-book or procedure manual that you authored yourself.

Whatever you choose to publish, it’s important that it is appealing to your audience; that they will want it enough to pay for it, if necessary.

7) Unpredictable plot complication copy.

We’re borrowing language from television and movie script writers now. “Unpredictable plot complications” means things will occur you didn’t plan for. Some people identify them as problems; I like to identify them as storytelling opportunities.

Let’s say your server goes down. That’s the one that people know most commonly. “Wow! We had so much traffic from people who wanted to get a copy of our big PDF that our server went down.”

That’s a story, but it’s a story that’s been told so, it might have lost some of its effectiveness. Even if the proverbial “server crash” really does happen to you, it might be better to look for a different story.

Maybe you got a nasty e-mail from someone who doesn’t like the way you’re promoting your product or offer. Share that with the people on your pre-launch list and let them see the story unfold. I promise you, if you do that, you’ll win the hearts of the people on your list. Your prospects will leap to your defense. (I know because it happened to me during my own launch.)

Again, make certain your stories are true—be open to them, and I promise you they will occur. A product launch is such a complex endeavor, things will happen. Things will go wrong; unexpected things will occur. It’s not always a problem; sometimes it’s a great opportunity.

You might get an unexpected phone call from Tony Robbins’ office and he says to you, “I need you to come speak at the Learning Annex; we’re having a big event, and I’ve heard about your products. I would love to have you on the stage at the same time as me, so you can speak about whatever it is you teach.”

Wouldn’t that be a story worth telling? Yes, it’s exaggerated. Yes, it’s dramatic. But it actually did happen to one of my clients! Those kinds of stories make for great storytelling opportunities during your product launch.

8) Countdown copy.

This is where we start playing on the anticipation and scarcity. Again, this is taking a leaf from the book by Robert Cialdini. We’re letting people know, “On this date, you will be able to buy tickets to this workshop. You’ll be able to buy one of the kits for our product that teaches you how to have a better relationship, but we’ve only had 100 printed! You will need to be ready when the countdown reaches zero on date (x) at time (x).”

Countdown copy is very effective. Yes, you’ve seen it done in the marketing world. I know it still works in internet marketing, and it works even better in markets outside the marketing world, so make sure you include countdown copy as one of your copy components in your launch.

9) The sales letter.

You knew we had to get to this sooner or later! A carefully crafted sales letter is key to the success of your launch. There have been a couple stupendously successful online product launches over the last year. Controversy arose over the sales letter.

On one side of the controversy, people said, “Wow, Copywriter X must be great. He wrote a letter for that product launch and brought in a million dollars in a single day!” (In one case, a million dollars in less than an hour.)

On the other side of the controversy, people said, “The sales letter was irrelevant. You could have just put a ‘Buy Now’ button on that page and people would have bought. You didn’t need a sales letter; it had nothing to do with it.” What’s the truth?

Are sales letters irrelevant in the face of product launches? I don’t believe so.

Even if a buyer never sees your actual sales letter — they are still sold by it.

Every form of communication used during your launch is sales copy, and is part of the “sales letter.” In fact, you can think of a product launch as one giant sales letter, just broken into smaller pieces and distributed over time in different media (text, audio, email, video, info-graphics, etc.)

What about launches that use only a video and no written sales copy at all? The script of the video is the sales letter. And just for the record, failing to also supply a written version of the sales letter for people whose preferred form of learning is through the written word is a huge mistake.

Finally, the messaging you create in a well-crafted sales letter informs and shapes all of your communications with your prospects. Even if a buyer never sees your actual sales letter – they are still sold by it.

10) Post-launch-week copy.

As much as 30 percent of your sales may come in the week after your big launch day. Think about that. If you don’t do any post-launch e-mails, blog posts, or marketing activities, if you don’t have any post-launch e-mails for your joint venture partners or affiliates to send out, then you’re leaving loads of money on the table. You need to make sure those e-mails are carefully crafted, planned, and ready to go.

11) The missing piece.

I see this component left out all the time: following up with your buyers and prospects to make your launch become a profitable business.

Often during the process of a launch, a marketer builds a list of potential buyers, then stops marketing after the big launch day, or at least after launch week.

If you’re in the small percentage of marketers who are savvy enough to continue marketing the week after the launch, the “missing piece” is to continue to follow up with the people on that list, because they were interested in what you had to offer. They were interested in what you had to say.

Continue talking with them, dialoguing with them, and making offers to them. Just because they didn’t buy your initial launch offer, it doesn’t mean they may not be interested in other things.

PROMOTIONS ARE MINI-LAUNCHES.

If you take the entire process and all the copy components I just outlined and compressed those into a couple of days, you have a promotion, or a mini-launch.

The best promotions are a story. Even a sale, like a back-to-school sale, is a story.

The story is, “Summer’s over; the kids need some new clothes for school; they need some school supplies. We’re going to put those things on sale to help you out because we know you need the help, so come to our Back-to-School Sale. It’s good for a few days only.”

There’s your scarcity, urgency, and timeline on the calendar. It’s a mini-launch.

THE MAGIC POWER OF “STORY SELLING.”

Stories are the process by which we learn, live, and believe anything.

I’d like you to think about that carefully and test that statement. Don’t just nod your head and say, “Yes, that’s good information, Ray.” Think it through.

Stories are the process by which we learn, live, and believe anything.

Try to think of something you’ve learned and lived through, something that you believe, that is not expressed as a story.

I don’t think you can. In the next chapter, in fact, we will take a look at how Hollywood tells and sells its stories, and how we can borrow some of their ideas for marketing campaigns.

PRODUCT LAUNCHES ARE A TEAM SPORT

Product launches are a team sport. There is a false perception that you can sit in your basement at home, dream up a product, type it out, create it on your computer, get online and find your JV partners, launch it, and do it all by yourself.

First of all, if you have JV partners or affiliates, you’re not doing it by yourself.

Secondly, the most successful product launches involve a number of minds working actively together, sculpting and crafting the launch as it progresses. If you keep this in mind and involve other people in what you’re doing, you’ll find your launch to be much more successful.