S5E8 | warming up a group

“I’ve been in groups where we’re talking about one particular topic, let’s say we’re talking about online business. I am not just Sandra, online business woman, right? I have hobbies, I have things I like to do.I have trips I’ve taken or want to take, I have a family, I love rescue animals. And so to have to be in this group and only talk about online business when we all have so many multiple levels to us is a disservice for your community.” 

In August I put a poll in my group asking what topic they wanted me to teach most, and the topic that won was how to warm up your group for a launch. I did a Facebook Live on the topic in my group, and I highly recommend you check it out. I’ll also be sharing my knowledge on warming up your audience in this episode! 

Before you start warming up your group for your launch, I recommend that you pull out your calendar and make sure you have a month or two before your launch to give yourself enough time. Next, designate the day that you’re going to launch. If you’ll be doing a challenge launch, for example, you’ll want to pick the date for your first day of the challenge, second day of the challenge, so on and so forth. Make sure you add when you’re opening and closing your cart too! 

Two or three weeks out from day one of your launch, you want to start promoting. You’ll want to decide on the date that you’ll be announcing your launch and starting to pump up your audience. This can even be as far as one or two months in advance. 

Once you announce your launch, you’ll have people posting to ask details, like how they can sign up for your event, or what other details are available. In this stage, you don’t even have to have your signup page ready yet. This is like the ‘save the date’ card, and you want to be the event that’s first on their calendar!

Then start to post other announcements sharing how excited you are. Post the link where people can sign up, share a countdown until the event starts, and let them know why they want to be there! 

If you’re doing a challenge launch for example, let them know what the promise of the challenge is. What goal are you going to get them to? Are you saving them time, money, or energy? Are they going to learn something new? What do they need to know about this challenge without you giving away too much?

From this point on until your launch, you’ll want to use some engaging posts to keep up the energy. Remember that your audiences have many identities outside of just your group’s topic. You can ask them questions seemingly unrelated to the group’s purpose, and this can foster connections between people in your group. 

You can ask people what it is they’re working on this week, what they’re hoping to accomplish soon, or what they’re doing today. Asking people to post pictures of their pets will always get a lot of engagement and a lot of adorable animal photos! A win-win! 

Next, you want to give people a way to contribute to what’s going on. It will help them feel more a part of your community. I love to ask my group for feedback, like what topics they’d like to see me cover, how I can make my workshops even better, or what’s something that they struggle with that I can make easy. While you don’t have to take every suggestion, their feedback is super helpful. With their feedback in mind, you can tweak your challenge or other launch event before you start. 

You can also include sneak peeks of behind-the-scenes as you prepare for your launch. Maybe you’re preparing boxes to send or you’re working on something on your computer. Give them just a snippet and it will get people’s curiosity going. 

You can also do a poll and live, where you post a poll asking what topics people want to see covered. You can then do a Facebook Live training on the top three winning topics. This strategy helps to grow, engage, and monetize your group all at the same time! When people see you on video they can connect with you more strongly than they can through text. This is something I love to do in my group, and there may be some new Facebook Lives in my group in the upcoming year!

I hope you find these warming up strategies useful for your next launch! If you want to learn more about warming up and engaging your group, check out my Wake Up Your Dead Facebook Group Workshop!