What You Can Learn From The Launch Of Book More Weddings Academy

I’ve just wrapped up the launch for Book More Weddings Academy and I was going through things trying to analyze what worked and what didn’t and it occurred to me that you could probably benefit from seeing this too. A lot of wedding professionals don’t spend much time talking about how they are working ON their business vs IN their business (unless they’re in The Wedding Business Collective where we talk about this a lot).

Both of these elements are important and they are different – one is CEO planner mode, one is worker bee doing the work mode. You can’t do both at the same time but it’s important to devote time to each. Launching a product is this dance where you’re switching between CEO mode and worker bee mode a lot and neglecting one will be your downfall.

So what went into this launch?

• Rebranding everything from Mind The Gap which was trying to be too clever to Book More Weddings Academy. That means re-recording all of the videos, creating & designing a new site, adding in new things and changing things around, etc.
• Planning (super CEO mode time). I sat down and plan out every single date from when the product will be available & when enrollment ends to what podcasts will go out and when, what emails will go out & when and deadlines for when the various tech elements needed to be in place.
• I hired a launch strategist to help me and she was able to take on a lot of the technical tasks. She also helped me with my overall plan and helped keep me accountable because if you work alone, you know it’s easy to say you’ll just do it tomorrow. She was not going to let that happen.
• Created the new opt in offer (The #1 Thing Preventing You From Booking More Weddings Video) & drove traffic to this page. I set up Facebook ads to send people to this page as well.
• Setting up what happens next for those people who have signed up. What do I want to provide them with in the pre-launch period?
• I interviewed my previous clients and then had that audio transcribed so I could look for commonalities and parts I could pull out and use to tell their story like I did with Jaclyn.
• I reached out to potential partners and set up times to do webinars for their audience.
• I created and ran my own webinar for people on my email list.
• I created a new sales page that was much more design-driven.
• We had to build the member’s area where the course lives.
• We created a social media plan to make sure we were making the best use of social to send people to that new opt in & the new webinar.
• I studied copywriting to make my writing more effective. I knew this was an area I could improve on so I spent time reading up on copywriting.
• I surveyed people to find out what their biggest problems are. Then, I analyzed the results to look for the words they used, because they are going to speak my customer’s language and that’s what I want to make sure I use. The way you describe what your customer wants may not be how they would describe it themselves and that is going to result in fewer sales.

I love launches because I learn SO much from them and I think it’s important to remember that running a business means that you are constantly learning and adapting as you go.

Here are a few things I learned this time around…

• I learned that by making the name of this program something very obvious and benefit driven, it made people more likely to be interested because it addressed a real need.

• Running an interactive webinar went over really well and I got a lot of good feedback on that.

• Going away for the weekend while you’re launching is not the best idea. I was away for a wedding and loved being there but I did feel like I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to address problems as they came up – and they always do come up.

• I learned that I did not allow enough time for the early bird offer so I’ll definitely be changing that next time.

• Using the Divi Theme from Elegant Themes really paid off because it allowed me to create gorgeous pages really easily.

• Offering a payment plan helped more people be able to join.

• I need to figure out a better communication strategy for partners next time. I didn’t feel as organized as I would like in this area.

• I learned that telling the stories past clients was very effective. If you take nothing else from this post – go talk to your previous clients. Ask them questions about how you could have improved, what they loved most, why they chose you, etc.

• Using my podcast as the medium for my pre-launch content instead of doing videos & still having to do the podcast each week made my life a lot easier. How can you make your life easier?

I wanted to share this with you because I wanted to show you that no matter who you are, we’re all learning as we go and we’re all trying to put these new things in place and experiment. You are going to make mistakes, we all do.

Source: www.brightdrops.com/albert-einstein-quotes

It’s okay to not know everything. That would be boring anyway! You have to just learn, try something new and review to see how that worked for you.

Chances are you’re not launching an online course but you can still apply this to your business. Here’s how:

1. Go talk to your previous clients. Learn about them, why the booked you, what they loved about working with you and what you could improve upon.
2. When you try something like running Facebook ads or spending time building your Pinterest account, make sure that you go back and review what happened. How did it go? Why did it go this way? What could you do different next time?
3. Decide on a place to document what you learn along the way. For me, it’s Google Drive but Evernote or a physical notebook could work just as well.