The landing page is the event but what comes before?
Your landing or sales page is how you introduce your product or serve to your customers. But what is the event that comes before? When you're so focused on a sales page, it's easy to forget that the sales page/landing page is just one tiny step in the whole sequence. There's a sequence that precedes the landing page.
Most of us when creating products or services ignore the pre-sell sequence.
We assume the product or service alone should have the spotlight. Which is a mistake.
Let's look at three parts of pre-sell:
Part 1: How do you create a build up for your product?
Part 2: Why you have to create a ‘moment in time' for every product?
Part 3: What is the one biggest reason our product launch fails?
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Pre-sell 1: The Build Up
“You do realize, you will never make a fortune out of writing children's books?”
These were the words Joanne Kathleen—better known as J.K. Rowling heard from her agent when she first put forward the idea of Harry Potter. By 1999, Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. But how you take a phenomenon and make it even more phenomenal? You put it in a cage—that's what you do!
At Waterstone's in Birmingham, the third in the series, “Prisoner of Azkaban” was in a cage guarded by two mannequins dressed like Men in Black. The kids—and their harried parents—could see the book, but they couldn't get at it. All over the globe, a similar rollout was in progress to create a build up for a particular moment in time. That moment was the release of the next Harry Potter book.
Let's assume our products and services don't have the cult-status of Harry Potter
In such a case, how are you supposed to create this moment where you get clients to sign up for a product or service? The wrong way to have a launch is to shout, “Surprise” and present your product or service to the client. The right way to do it would be to create a build up. A build up that may have started weeks, months, even years ago.
When you see a Psychotactics course sell out in less than an hour, there's something important you don't see
You don't see the pre-sell in action. And yet if you were to read this article, you'll spot the fact that the Article Writing Course is coming back around next year again. Bit by bit the information trickles out, with very few specifics until the date gets closer.
Build up is critical for both products and services
If you're a web designer, and you sit around waiting for something to happen, well, something might happen. But it's also likely that nothing might happen as well. That clients don't come rushing to you. If you're a copywriter, it's the same scenario. You're waiting and hoping, and hope is a pretty iffy strategy.
When you look around you, the biggest names in the business don't play the game with iffiness in mind they pre-sell way in advance.
If the big new Bond movie is coming out, you'll hear about it for weeks in advance. You'll see videos on YouTube, magazines splashed with the actors from the Bond movie. They'll be eating, drinking, be on the brink of affairs, separation—and who knows what else! But they're building up for the event.
Pre-sell 2: To make something—anything— irresistible, you have to create a moment in time
Like a lunar eclipse that causes everyone to dust off their telescopes at the precise time, you have to control the build up. Bit by bit the information needs to peter out from you to your clients. Almost without exception, clients should know of your product or service—and the day of the launch. It's this rigour that allows a product or service to become an “instant success”.
Pre-sell 3: Pre-sell involves buildup and the biggest reason for failure are that we're too trigger-happy.
We expect to launch something and then it needs to take off like a rocket. And yes, there are exceptions to every rule, but by and large you're going to struggle a lot if you don't go through the steps of pre-sell and build up. It's the patience and planning that counts.
The steps to a launch are:
1) Work on a date of the launch well into the future
2) Create steps along the way—and what you're going to drip feed to your clients.
3) Keep adding different elements until the clients get caught up in the fever of the product or service. That's when the product or service becomes irresistible.
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