How to maximise your launch profits when your audience is tiny

While you don't need a huge audience to launch your online course, group program or membership, you do need to understand some key differences and have a strategy in place. In today's episode, I'm sharing the biggest mistakes I see business owners making when they're trying to launch to a small audience and how you can maximise your profit instead.

– How identifying and avoiding common mistakes when launching to a small audience can set you up for success.
– Why launching is a repeatable process—a strategic vehicle to sell your offers (regardless of audience size).
– The 4 key ways to maximise your launch profits with a tiny audience.
– Understanding when to use paid ads—and when not to.

 

 
Today, we're talking about launch profits when you have a tiny audience. Now, if you are thinking of launching an online course, a group program, membership, or literally any other digital product or online offer, but the thing that's holding you back or that is limiting you or challenging you is that you have a small audience. this episode is for you. 

Now I'm going to start by covering some of the biggest mistakes that I see business owners with a small audience making when it comes to launching and then I'm going to share a couple of ways that I think you can maximise your launch profits when you do have that tiny audience because we all have to start somewhere, right?

 

Mistake #1: Waiting until their audience is big enough to launch their new offer.

And this happens mostly when it's the first time somebody is launching something new and they're like, Oh, I want to launch this and I want to make sure I'm getting lots of sales at the launch. So I'm just going to wait until I have more people in my audience. But the problem is you're never going to feel like your audience is big enough. 

And going through the whole process of launching will actually grow your audience because that is what forces you to show up intentionally. It forces you to shop consistently. It forces you to show up with content that is the right fit for the right people and that's how your audience grows. 

And one of the key pieces of feedback that I hear over and over again from my launch magic students is that once they started showing up and sharing that strategic content for the launch of their course or their program or whatever it was they were launching, they also, as a side effect, started getting more inquiries from potential clients for their services because that content was growing their audience. It was resonating with the right people and those people wanted to work with them. 

 

Mistake #2: Launching once and then putting their course or their membership or wherever into a shop on their website, or it just lives there. 

There's a call to action from your homepage, join my course, join my membership. And that's the extent of the sales process. 

Now, launching is a way to sell your offer. It's not just something that happens the first time you put it out into the world. I know it's very counterintuitive. A launch is not just the one thing that happens the one time when you create that thing and put it out there for sale the very first time.

And if you don't want to live launch your offer a few times a year, if you don't want to do the whole webinar, cart open, cart close, deadline, all of that thing, that's fine, but I still recommend live launching it at least once or twice, because that's going to give you a really good insight into the messaging and the strategy that's going to work to sell it before you make it available all the time.

 

Mistake #3: Putting all of their eggs into the social media basket. 

The thing with social media is that you are very much at the whim of the algorithm and your content only reaches such a small percentage of your followers. Yes, even on threads and I will do a whole nother episode about threads another day because there's a lot to unpack there, but with all social media platforms, you're very much at that whim of their algorithm.

So trying to build your social media audience isn't necessarily going to be the best use of your time and a better use of your time would be building your email list, creating some kind of strategic lead magnet that's designed just for this particular offer that you are launching, nurturing your email list.

So once somebody's downloaded that lead magnet, the freebie, that's going to get them onto your list, then nurturing those people with the content, that's going to move them closer to buying from you. And I'll talk about that a little bit more in just a second. 

 

Mistake #4: Using their content to build hype in a launch.

Nobody else is going to be as excited about your offer as you are. Excitement isn't what sells and trying to get your audience excited in the hopes that they will buy from you. That is never going to convert as well as strategic content that's designed to nurture your audience so that they're ready to buy when doors open.

 

Mistake #5: Not giving a long enough runway before doors open. 

So this is where when I say your audience is going to grow as you launch if you give yourself that 60 to 90 days of lead-up where you are sharing strategic content before doors open, that's going to start to grow your audience with the right people as well as nurture them.

And a lot of the time there's this big misconception that if we create, if we just create the right offer, then all we need to do is find the right people who want what we're selling. And most of the time, even the right people who want what we're selling, they still have a little journey they need to go on before they'll be ready to buy and I call this little journey, the magician's gap. 

You are sharing strategic content that is shifting them to where they need to be and that is why I usually would suggest at least 60 days of that strategic content in the lead-up to doors open. It's going to be longer, it might be 90 days if you have a smaller audience or if there is a larger magician's gap, a larger gap that they need to bridge to be ready to buy.

Okay, so the key idea that I want you to think about as we are going through today's episode is I want you to think of your launch as a rinse-and-repeat process. It's not just something you do once. It's something you can do multiple times a year with the same offer each time bringing in a cash injection because launching is a sales process. It is one way to sell your offers. It is a vehicle for a sales system. A sales system, which is a strategic repeatable process for selling your offers. 

Now how can you then, if you have a tiny audience right now, how can you start to maximise those launch profits? I'm going to share four things you can do. 

 

How to maximise your launch profits

 

First thing to do

Firstly, focus on building your email list with the right people, building your audience on social media, whatever platform it is, it's like building a house on sand and at any point, the algorithm can change and your audience can just wash away. Whereas your email list, that's an audience that you own. And even I've got 37, 000 followers on Instagram and every time we do a launch, most of the sales still come from our emails to our email list.

But that's also because I've spent a lot of time growing this email list with the right people. We've got offers for specific lead magnets, which is a freebie that somebody can opt-in for by giving us their email address. But they're not a shiny freebie that everybody wants. It's a freebie that is the right fit for the right person.

 

Second thing to do

The second thing you can do to maximise your launch profits with a tiny audience is be intentional with the content you share in the lead-up to the doors open.

So I talked about the magician's gap a little bit earlier in this episode. Basically, there is a big gap between where your audience is right now and where they need to be to be ready to buy your offer and until you bridge that gap for them, it's going to be a whole lot harder to actually sell to them.

So having a longer runway, allowing that 60 to 90 days, and sharing content that bridges this gap, that's going to help you to convert your audience a whole lot better.

 

Third thing to do

The third thing you can do to maximise your launch profits with a tiny audience is being strategic with how you price and structure your offers.

Now, if you want to make 10, 000 in sales, you can sell a 100 offer to a hundred people or a 1, 000 offer to 10 people and when you have a small audience, it's going to be way easier to sell to 10 people than it is going to be to a hundred people because you just don't have that kind of reach yet. And it's actually not much harder to sell a 1, 000 offer than a 100 offer.

In my experience, I found it sometimes actually easier, provided that I've nurtured that audience really well. If you really do want to sell a 100 offer, then you do also need to think about what kind of upsells you can potentially add to it to maximise that launch profit. 

 

Fourth thing to do

Maximise your profits in your next launch with a small audience is intentionally and consistently showing up to grow your audience. Social media isn't really an audience growth tool anymore, but most people still treat it like it is and it is more of a place to nurture your existing audience.

So instead, how are you intentionally getting in front of your audience? When I say intentionally getting in front of your audience, that does not mean showing up on social media, right? Intentionally getting in front of new audiences, I should say, does not mean showing up on social media because the algorithm's not really showing your content to new people.

And if you are struggling to reach new people right now, guess what? You can't keep doing more of the same thing and hoping that by just doing the same thing, something's going to change one day. You have to try something new and it's probably going to feel scary and hard because doing something new will always be uncomfortable.

And that something new might look like doing podcast interviews on somebody else's show to get in front of your ideal clients. It might look like doing collaborations and partnerships. It might look like working with affiliates, networking, going to events. speaking at events, wherever you can get physically or virtually in front of new audiences, and then you can send them back and say, hey, follow me on Instagram or follow me or wherever, or join my email list, whatever. That's fine. 

But we need to actually get in front of those new people first. We can't rely on the algorithm to show us to those new people. 

 

I'm going to wrap this up with a question that I get asked quite a lot, which is 

“Should you invest in paid ads for the first launch of a new offer?”

 

And my answer to this is it depends.

Can you invest that money into paid ads with an expectation of zero return and be okay with that? Because in reality, you don't know how your launch is going to convert the first time. You don't know until you get your offer out there and you ask people to pay money for it and the same offer that has been launched with two completely different strategies, two completely different versions of messaging can have two completely different results.

You don't know what's going to land just yet, which is why launching is really an experiment. A lot of the time it is testing, tweaking. Let's see if this messaging works. Let's see if this messaging works. We still, even though we've launched launch magic, like six times, seven times, I've lost count every time we launch it, we tweak the messaging a little bit to see if we can optimise it and make it better.

And yes, you can do a lot of audience research. You really do need to do some audience research, but even all the audience research in the world won't guarantee that your launch will succeed until you get it out there and you test it. 

 

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