360. Your Offer Is Dead Without This One Thing

Speaker A: Now your funnel is costing you way more than just ad spend. It's costing you sleep, too. Every maybe next month in your head is a direct result of an offer and a funnel that aren't sharp enough to convert consistently. On today's episode, I'll show you exactly what to fix so you can stop guessing and start knowing what to do next to create predictable, profitable results every time you run a promotion or a launch. Welcome to the Launch Lounge Podcast. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the show. I am, um, so delighted to be here with you. Thank you for listening. I wonder if you have been following along like me. Like, I'm sitting there with, like, my popcorn bucket watching this yap challenge unfold on Instagram. If you have no idea what I'm talking about. Uh, there's this woman, her name is jc. JC somebody. Uh, and she has started a brand new Instagram account, uh, maybe February this year, and has grown it really quickly and has coined the term yap videos. Actually, she probably didn't coin the term, but she has made it very popular right now. And she has done a Fantastic, amazing, incredible 1.2 million launch about a month ago. And I think she's just doubled it with her second launch of this yap challenge. I made a whole video about it. It's eight minutes long, so it's quite long for an Instagram reel. But if you want to go check it out, go find my Instagram account. It's, uh, on Instagram at the Underscore launch, Underscore Lounge. You'll see it there. The video is called a Yap about yaps or a Yap video about Yap video. Something like this. I would love to know. What do you think about it? Are you making yap videos? Have you made yap videos? Are you curious about yap videos? Do you want to learn how to make yap videos? I want to hear all of it. Email me podcasthelaunchlounge.com and tell me, have you been loving yap videos? Are you sick of them coming up on your news feed, or are you jumping on the bandwagon? There's definitely a trend going on right now. And what I find so funny is, like, a couple of months ago, I heard the word yap videos, and I heard it in the context of people saying, uh, yap videos are really taking off on TikTok, but they haven't really taken off on Instagram yet. And now all of a sudden, it is all the rage on Instagram. Which isn't that just how it is? One of the other platforms lead with something new and Instagram is not far away following in their footsteps. I mean, I guess that's why Met Eyes still the mega meta that it is. Right? All right, so, uh, email me at podcast at the launch lounge.com. i want to know what your feelings are and thoughts are and strategies are and experience is. And if you want to learn how to make yap videos this year, then email me. I have one more spot inside the agency. We are taking on two new clients in July. I have one more spot available, so. So if you are looking for the best team to help you scale your business from six to seven figures in 2026, uh, then you'll have to go to thelaunchlounge.com agency. Read that page carefully because I've had some applications, actually a lot of applications from people who are telling me they're not quite profitable yet. And if you're not quite profitable yet, then the agency is not right for mentoring is probably a better step for you. But put that down in the form. I have reworked the application so that it'll take you to the right place for whatever is right for you right now. So based on your answers, it'll then take you down the correct route for whatever is best for your situation. So that's, uh, the launch lounge.com agency. If you want to learn more about our agency offer and about how we work with clients in the agency, uh, or just fill out the form and see where it takes you. And that way you'll know exactly what is right for you. Next. Now, if you've been posting content and maybe you've been running ads, uh, possibly you've even been tweaking your sales page and following all the latest strategies and still sales just doesn't seem to get out of this startup mode for you, then today's episode is for you. Maybe some months really feel amazing, but others have you wondering if you can keep doing this. Deep down you know it's not because of a lack of effort. Gosh darn it, you're working your tail off. But maybe secretly you've started wondering if this is ever going to work for you too. And I want to tell you that if that is you, I have been there. And today we're going to talk about why your offer is broken and how to fix it. You're just going to discover the reason. You've been doing all the tactics and implementing all the best advice. But when you make an offer, you still feel like you're trying to squeeze blood from a Stone. Is that an expression that, you know, that's, you know, I think I've told you guys, I learn expressions in all the different countries I've lived in. And then I would say something and someone would be like, what? You understand when I say squeeze blood from a stone, right? It's pretty, pretty visual. You know what that feels like if you've tried making a lot of offers and it's just. It feels like squeezing blood from a stone. You know exactly what I mean? So recently I was clearing out some old client files. That was a fun trip down memory lane. And I also cleared out some of our old launch files. I found a messaging strategy document for the Launch Lounge membership launch from 2023. And I have to paint the picture for you a little bit of where I was at this point in time. I had just finished the rebrand from Shine and Succeed, which was the original name for my company. It's still actually the company name, but, uh, the website is no longer Shine and Succeed to the Launch Lounge. I felt like Shine and Succeed was something from my life coaching days and I needed to, like, grow out of it. And so I rebranded everything to the launch lounge. I was trying also at this time to move away from just being known for ads and more towards being known for the marketing that I was teaching my ad students at the time. So people would come to me for ads. I would sell them a course on ads, but then they get results because I teach them how to use ads, but I also teach them how to apply, uh, profitable funnels and how to create attractive messaging and how to do the marketing side of it that makes ads work. Right? Because ads in themselves is just traffic. You've heard me say this a million times. Ads will never make you money. It's ads is just more loudness. It's your funnels that make you money and your offers. And the students that I was teaching, they loved learning these marketing things like the light bulbs just go on for them. And I see it over and over and over. People come to me for ads and then I give them marketing, and then the light bulbs just go on. So I love teaching marketing because it's creative and it is, uh, psychology and communication, and it's just all, all the things I love rolled into one. And ads is just one expression of that creativity. But, but I was ready to kind of spread my wings and be known for something beyond just ads. Um, but, you know, marketing was the thing that I really enjoyed doing with these students. So, so then I created a new offer for the launch lounge membership. Now, originally, the launch lounge membership was a backend membership. So that means you bought a lister. And then once you bought a lister and you wanted to, you went through the live support program, you wanted to stay on, then you would join the launch lounge membership, backend membership. And it worked really, really well as a backend membership until, uh, this. So what I did was I decided I'm going to make it a front end membership and I'm going to throw everything I know and everything that my students love into it. And so I took something that I knew my students needed. That was my first mistake, and I'll tell you why. I took something that was lighting me up when I teach it. That was the second mistake and something that my already paying students raved about. That was mistake number three. And I turned that into an offer that I then presented to people who had never bought anything from me, mostly people who were on my email list. Also, I ran some cold ad, cold ads to the launch. But I made an offer to basically a cold audience. And to make this offer more enticing and to make it appeal to a broader market, I threw in the ads training, I threw in marketing training, I threw in coaching, I threw in live events, I threw in every bonus I had ever come up with in my life. My sales page, uh, I remember writing that sales page, and it's probably my most rewarding copywriting experience because it was so long, but it was so, I felt it was so good because I really dug deep. But the page was so long that when we hit publish on it, it nearly crashed my site. And all of this for $197 a month membership. Now, I know you already know where I'm going with this. That launch, it made some sales, but it didn't make the sales that I was hoping for. It did not allow me to enroll the number of students that I had been used to enrolling as my backend membership. And something about that launch, it just left me feeling so heavy and like I was forcing something. And at the time, I blamed the market for changing and I blamed, uh, online courses, and I blamed ads and the iOS update, and I blamed everybody going back to work after Covid and found every excuse, uh, for making it something external that I can't control. Rather than looking at the mistakes that I made, looking at what were the things that I could control that I didn't control very well. Right. Uh, and so as I was going through all these files, I realized that this was a really, really poor Offer made in a very confusing way. I was totally overthinking it. And I ended up presenting to my audience an offer that nobody really wanted because it was noisy and cluttered and unclear. Um, and a few months after that, I chose to close down that membership because I just couldn't rid myself of this really heavy, heavy feeling around it. What I know today is that, number one, it is always a bad idea to start a new offer from the question, what can I give them or what can I teach them? And as experts in our fields, as you know, um, knowledge based creators, as, uh, experts, we are teachers by nature, we are coaches, we are, uh, people imparting our wisdom by nature. We want to start with, what can I teach them? And that's a big mistake. And I'll tell you why. Coming up. Why? The other thing that I know today is another really incorrect place to start is with the question, what does my existing students love that I can also give to people who don't really know me that well? That was my big mistake. I took the thing that my students were raving about and I thought, well, I'll just turn that into the front door. I'll turn that into the offer. And it doesn't work that way. They raved about it because they'd already worked with me for a few weeks. But complete strangers, they weren't raving about it. I couldn't even articulate what it was right. And the third thing is, uh, that is the wrong place to start when we're creating offer is that question what lights me up that I want to teach. Uh, and I think it is absolutely critical that what you teach lights you up. It is absolutely 100% has to be in your content for at least 60%. Right? You got to be able to do this job because what's the saying, if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. And isn't that why we start these things in the first place? Right. Um, it has to light you up to a degree. But your offer cannot start from what lights me up and what do I want to teach? So I want to give you three shifts in perspective that all relate to this one thing that's in the title of this episode. So this episode is titled your offer is dead without this one thing. Before I give you the one thing, I want to give you three shifts in perspective that all relate to the one thing that your offer need in order to succeed. Number one is your offer is never ever about what you can teach people. It is always about solving a significant pain or problem that they have and, uh, that they have awareness about. They have to have a problem and they have to have awareness about their problem. Number two, just because you're paying clients or students love something that they've purchased something that they've paid for and have spent time with you doesn't mean you can sell the same thing to people who barely know you at all. And number three, offering all the things becomes noise that they just tune out. So be careful to just keep adding more things. If you're a successful course creator, coach, or online expert who's ready to stop being the bottleneck in your own growth, Listen up. We're currently accepting applications for two spots in our Meta Ads agency. What makes us different? We're not just your ads team, we're your growth partners who help you navigate the whole picture. Your funnel strategy, your customer journey, and your scaling roadmap. We dive deep into your data to make sure every marketing dollar works harder for you. If you're doing at least 10k per month in revenue, have a proven offer that converts and you're ready to Invest at least 3k monthly in ads to scale strategically, we'd love to talk. We only have two spots available and they will go fast. This is for you. If you want expert guidance and proven strategies that deliver predictable results, go to thelaunchlounge.com agency to apply now. Now, I've been talking about this one thing your offer needs to become consistently, uh, profitable and reliable. But I haven't yet named the one thing I've just told you. The three shifts in your starting point when you create an offer, and how getting one of these three wrong will basically burn your offer to the ground even before you made it. Just like it did for me in 2023. M. So what is this one thing? This one thing is a P word. And it's a P word that I almost don't even want to say out loud because I can already feel you all like cringing a little bit. But bear with me. Hang in there. Bear with me, because I'm going to help you see that this P word is not a dirty word. It's just something you need to learn to present in a certain way. The P word is pine. People do more to get out of pine than they do to have pleasure. A hot offer not only reveals the pain that they have, it builds on that pain and it points to the implication of staying in that pain. Now, I know when I heard this years ago, I resisted this idea a bit I didn't want to keep harping on about things that are negative or things that are actively harming my audience or things that they actively dislike. I'm a naturally positive person. I can be a little Pollyanna sometimes. So talking about pain and then dialing up the pain to me sounded absolutely terrible. And if it sounds terrible to you too, I want to offer you this. When you talk about their pain from the standpoint of compassion and caring, and you repeat it back to them using the words that they use to describe what they're frustrated with, what makes them lie awake at night, and what causes them emotional, financial or physical discomfort, then you become a safe space for them. A, uh, space where they're heard and understood and where someone feels finally gets what the problem is. So I want you to sit with these three things today. What is the functional pain your ideal customer has? Functional pain is specific, practical problem they can point to in their day. The thing that isn't working the way it's supposed to work. Like running launches, posting content and buying ads, but still not having predictable monthly revenue. Sounds familiar. Yeah. Uh, you know why? Or your income has increased but your cash still disappears. That's a functional problem. Maybe you're undercharging and over delivering on every project. That's a functional problem. Or this one. The household descends into chaos at homework or bedtime every night. What about my team? Keeps missing targets or after reading all the self help books, I still feel exhausted by 3pm M and I cannot organize my life. Those are functional panes and they are the first layer. And we're going to peel these layers like onions. If you can identify the functional pains your ideal customer has, then they come and sit at your fire. But you need a little bit more before they're going to buy from you. So the second thing I want you to sit with is what are the emotional pains you that your ideal customer is in and are you addressing that in your offer? I've got a really juicy list of finance, uh, not financial, emotional pains for you that I'm going to walk you through and you can just sit down and write these down. Not if you're driving, please, not if you're driving. But if you're sitting down, uh, just get a grab a pen and a piece of paper and just write down these feelings. Because I'm willing to bet that inside your offer your ideal customer experiences most of these feelings. And if you can nail this feeling for them, if you can identify the words they use to describe when they're feeling this Feeling. Then you go even deeper than the functional pain. Then you get to a layer of emotional pain that they're experiencing. All right, so number one is anxiety. For example, constant worry about money or launches or what if this doesn't work? Maybe it often shows up as dashboard refreshing or overthinking or inability to sleep. Second, feeling shame. Feeling like they're behind not good enough, or a fraud because results don't match the effort they're putting in. Number three, overwhelm. Sense that there's just too much to do and no clear path. Every single client I've ever worked with, we work overwhelm into their offer so that we can help their students beat overwhelm. Number four, loneliness or isolation. Feeling like they're doing a business alone, or they have no one that really gets their specific challenges. Maybe they've had a new baby and they're not sleeping or they're trying to lose weight. In what way do your ideal customer experience loneliness or isolation? Number I think five, helplessness. The belief that they've tried everything and nothing works, leading to hopelessness and resignation. I remember when I was about two years into trying to get a business off the ground, I was just always crying. I felt very hopeless. Next one, fear of failure. Dread of public failure or letting their family down, or, you know, having that partner or family member who kind of said, uh, why are you doing this? Then go see, I told you so. Right? That's horrible. The next one is guilt. Feeling guilty for working too much. I had that so badly when my kids were toddlers. Feeling guilty for not being present with a family or for spending money on something that isn't showing money yet, or programs that haven't paid off yet. Next one is anger and frustration. Irritation at platforms or algorithms or gurus, or even irritation at themselves because the gap between effort and results feel really unf. The next one is hopelessness and despair. And that's that quiet feeling that maybe it's never going to click. Often hidden under, like just grinding or finding something to. To. To keep you busy with. Sometimes I find people in this hopelessness and despair phase wanting to run lots and lots and lots of ads because, uh. Because that's something they feel they can control. Right. So that's your list of emotions. Let me recap them. Anxiety, shame, overwhelm, Loneliness or isolation. Helplessness, fear of failure. Guilt, anger or frustration. Helplessness and despair. Right. There's a few feelings. If you can uncover the feelings your ideal customer describes, when they describe their pain state, your offer will already be Made in a better way that will connect with them. Now, anyone can find at least three of these painful emotions hidden inside the pain that your ideal customer describes when they tell you what they want to fix. But the more you can take that functional pain and then layer it with one or two emotional pains, the stronger your offer gets. Which brings us to the highest form of pain. And this is the one that people will do the most to either create consistency and congruency about, or to make change so that they feel they are moving towards what they want around this pain. And the pain is identity pain. Identity pain is the hurt, uh, that comes from the gap between who they believe they are or should be and what their current results or realities say about them. Now, for creators, coaches, consultants, this is some of the most powerful buying energy you can tap into. And this is the pain point that taps into our need for love and belonging. And there is no more powerful driver of human behavior than our need for love and belonging. And when it is slightly dysfunctional, it becomes about our need to maintain certain status levels. Right. I remember this story that, uh, a mentor of mine used to tell. They used to talk about an advertising campaign they ran for a lawn mowing service. And they asked us all, what does the lawn mowing service sell? And we were like, well, you know, mowing the lawn. And we ended up looking at it and looking at it until we realized it's actually status and time. Right? It's time. So the guy gets his Saturday morning back. That's what he gets. So, uh, there's time there, right? That's functional. It's emotional. Because what does he get when it's emotional? He gets to, you know, look at his lawn and feel good. It's a beautiful, beautiful grass. He feels proud. He does. No, he no longer feels guilt because he's mowing the lawn when he should be at his kids soccer practice. But even higher than that, and this is where we landed with this campaign is even higher than that. He's selling my garden looks better than my neighbor's garden. He's selling status. So when we're selling lawnmower service, what are we really selling? Get your Saturday back and your garden looks better than your neighbors. Can you see that? All right, so here's some examples of emotional, uh, pain. Like maybe somebody says, I don't feel like a real business owner. I feel like I'm just throwing spaghetti on the wall, hoping something would stick, or I look successful on the outside, but my bank account says otherwise. I feel like such a fraud Or I wanted to be the calm, present parent, but every evening makes me feel like the angry, disorganized one. I worry my team sees me as scattered and unclear, not as someone worth following. I consume all the mindset and productivity content, but my life doesn't look like someone who has it together. Can you see how we started with functional pains? We built them. We built them a little bit with what their implications were, what their feelings were, what the emotions were, but the identity piece of it. That piece that someone is sort of almost not even willing to say out loud. If you can say that out loud and then follow it up by reminding them that it's not their fault and that they, you know, they just do not have the solution yet. Because otherwise you can't just leave people in that pain. You've got to also take them to the pleasure and the destination. But I wonder if you can see that these examples I just gave you tap into the things that they're often too afraid to admit to themselves. And this is when they start feeling really hurt, when you can say these things out loud or put it on your sales page. And this is when they start feeling really seen and they know that they can trust you as their guide away from this pain towards the future that they really want. Lucky for us, we don't have to come up with these pain points by ourselves. You can find a lot of that language right there in your ideal customer language, the words they use to describe their pain points, almost everywhere. Now, I say it's almost everywhere, but you might need to go and look for it. If you have any customer surveys that you've done where you've asked people what they want or what their biggest problem is right now, you will have some of this data, you'll have some of this language. But if you don't just jump into Facebook groups and pay attention to how people describe their problems, or find the books on Amazon that are written about the same topic you cover and look at the comments there, look at the reviews for those books, because in those reviews people are going to say, I used to feel xyz and then I read this book and Now I feel ABC. They'll give you that language or YouTube comments, find the person in your niche with the biggest audience and go and crawl through their YouTube channel to find some ideal customer language. And then I want you to start creating a library of these pain points. And you will never, ever, ever again feel cringy when you make offers. If you start with their pain points instead, what you'll see is how it creates deeper connections between you and your audience and how it helps you move that person who finds you on Instagram over to your email list and then move them over to your launch and then move them towards being a paying client or student. So here's the good news. All of this is completely within your reach. You can implement everything that we talked about today. You don't need to be a genius copywriter or reinvent your whole business. You just need to listen well and speak with care. And that's a skill that you can start building today. Your m people are already telling you what they need. The words are out there waiting for you. All you have to do is pick them up and reflect them back to them with compassion. And you already have that in spades. Do that and your offers will stop feeling like a struggle and they'll start feeling like a conversation with someone who finally gets it. You've got this. Go and make them feel seen and build your freedom empire. Tune in next week when I will be gently challenging the idea that it is live launches that's burning you out and revealing what it actually is that makes live launches feel like they're the thing that is burning you out. Join me again next week. See you then. Bye. Before you go, remember, if you're a coach, course creator, or online expert who's ready to scale with a team that actually gets what you do, we'd love to hear from you. We're not just running ads. We're helping you build your freedom empire with data driven strategies built for online businesses like yours. If that sounds like what you've been looking for, head to thelaunchlounge.com agency to apply. We work with a small number of clients at a time, so if we're a fit, let's talk. That's TheLaunchLounge.com Agency SA.