A Product Launch Tool Worth Considering!

"Gordon Bryan" "The Great Gordino"At the end of January 2013, a friend of mine launched a new book, and I was intrigued by a marketing tool he used. I watched as it unfolded, and thought it well worthwhile sharing – you may want to use it too…

Peter Cook’s new book is called ‘The Music of Business’, and in the build up to the launch he used, as you’d expect, some marketing techniques to generate interest. He set a launch date of 31-1-13, which in itself had a nice palindromic nature that could be played on.

Also, he posted snippets in the run up about what would be in the book, plus testimonials, all over the social media landscape, and it’s here that we find the tool he used on launch day that I want to focus on. It wasn’t a new tool – nothing ground breaking maybe, but there was a touch of creativity involved. So what was it..?

Facebook.

You may be rolling your eyes as you read that, thinking that there is nothing new in posting about a new book on Facebook, because after all everyone does that, right?

Yes, they do, and with good reason, because it can get the word out far and wide, to people who may have Facebook as one of maybe only a couple of websites they ever visit.

What Peter did was slightly different, because when he set up a page to promote the launch, he sent out invites to a virtual launch party on that page on launch day. That meant that he wasn’t simply sending out Facebook invites to an event, the event *was* on Facebook!

That meant people could drop in and out at any time they wanted during the day, for free, at their own leisure. No in your face stuff, it was totally at the discretion of invitees, but Peter did something which gave an incentive to check in on the event not just once, but regularly.

That was to offer prizes. He offered free sessions of his consultation service to the first amount of people to reply to a request in the event, or free signed copies of the physical paperback to the best contributions to threads in the event. That meant it was worth people coming back to check on the latest threads.

As for those threads, as well as the competitions he used snippets from the book, links to videos made just for that day, and music related questions to create activity – your first concert, your first album, etc

It meant a long day for him as he needed to host/run the event in real time, but it allowed him to generate interest and engagement with people all over the world for hour after hour, and of course they could go and buy the book instantly.

That’s something else he did, ask people to buy the book! You can’t be afraid to ask people to spend money with you, and since he wanted a launch day push of sales to boost the book’s rankings, he certainly *wasn’t* afraid to ask!

Something you want to see at the end of an event like this, is results, so was there anything tangible to take from it? Well, yes, the book ended up in the Top 10 of leadership books on Amazon.

That’s a nice result.

This virtual launch was not all Peter did to promote the book of course, he’d probably started a month earlier. As the launch got closer though, he concentrated on promoting the launch event as much as the book itself.

It came across to me that this was a creative way to use a tool we all know about – it was free to set up, free to promote, free to attend, and that’s three free thoughts to consider (easy for me to say!)

You may have a launch brewing yourself, or maybe you have a service you’d like to promote. You could do worse than taking a leaf out of Peter Cook’s book (did you see what I did there!), and consider hosting a live event on Facebook too.

Ok, that’s it for this time, let me know what you think. You can also check out Peter’s site The Academy Of Rock.

Health & Happiness,
Gordon
P.S. You might also want to read the blogging secret the gurus don’t want you to know!

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