The Launch Planning Deck

How to Use Your New Launch Planning Deck

Most people find it helpful to have a notebook, a pen, and some sticky notes handy. 

Start by sorting your deck by colour. You should have 6 piles of cards.

1. Pink for Strategy
2. Yellow for Elements
3. Navy for Tasks
4. Orange for Team
5. Mint for Debrief
6. White/Gray for Labels

STEP 1: STRATEGY

1. Grab your Strategy cards (pink) and start going through them one by one, with each card consider: 
1. What information do I have relevant to this strategy?
2. Is this relevant to my audience?
3. If I used this strategy, what are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?
2. For example, if you're on the Strategy card that reads 'Urgency', your thought process should look like this:
1. What information do I have relevant to this strategy?
1. How have my competitors used urgency? 
2. How have I used urgency before?
3. How would I add urgency? Will it work with my timeline?
2. Is this relevant to my audience?
1. Do my audience need the extra nudge that urgency can bring?
2. Has urgency worked well for my audience in the past?
3. If I used this strategy, what are the advantages? What are the disadvantages?
1. Is my audience already primed and ready to buy? Will urgency help them come to a decision sooner?
2. Will it seem inauthentic and turn people away?
3. As you go through the Strategy deck, discard cards that don't make sense for your launch, and hang onto cards that do. If new ideas are sparked, write them on a sticky note and place them with the selected Strategy cards.

STEP 2: ELEMENTS (YELLOW)

1. Once you have your selected Strategy cards, grab your Elements cards (Yellow). 
2. For each Strategy card that you've chosen, break down the different elements your funnel will need to successfully execute that component of the strategy. 
3. For example, maybe in order to add urgency (strategy) to your funnel, you decide to use a tripwire (element). Or if you identify that you need to build audience trust (strategy), then you can add extra testimonials (element) to your messaging.
4. Similar to Strategy cards, if you don't find the element you need in your deck, just write it out on a sticky note. 
5. If you're creating a more complex funnel, you might it helpful to use the cold/warm labels (White).

STEP 3: TASKS (NAVY)

1. Now that you have your elements, it's time to break them down into Tasks (Navy).
2. Shuffle through the Task cards and start pulling out tasks that you'll need to complete in order to build your launch plan.
3. If you think of new task that you don't see in the cards, you know the drill, grab the nearest sticky note!

STEP 4: TEAM (ORANGE)

1. Use the Team cards (Orange) to assign team members to the different tasks you've laid out. 
2. You can arrange this however you like, but we recommend laying out your Team cards horizontally, and arranging Task cards underneath them.
3. Snap a picture and send it to your VA to set up in Asana or Trello for you. :) 

STEP 5: DEBRIEF (MINT)

1. Use this deck to direct your post-launch debrief.
2. Shuffle through the deck and analyze the most relevant data for your launch and use it to benchmark your next one!

The Strategic Copywriting Deck

How to Use Your New Strategy Copywriting Deck

Most people find it helpful to have a notebook, a pen, and some sticky notes handy. It's best to use this deck fairly early in the copywriting process for a project, but not before preliminary research.

Start by sorting your deck by colour. You should have 4 piles of cards.

1. Orange for Personality
2. Pink for Edge
3. Mint for Data
4. Navy for Copywriting Formulae

You can start with either the Personality, Edge or Data cards. We recommend starting with whichever one you feel most drawn to/have the most information about. Once you've completed all three, then proceed to the Copywriting formulae.

Personality

The goal of the Personality cards is to help you quantify what defines your brand's personality. Shuffle through the Personality cards, pausing to see what ideas each card prompts and noting them down. 

The Personality cards also contains mini-sets within them: Sense of Humour, and Story. These are two crucial components of your brand's personality. The ideal choice will feel true to your brand while still being something that your audience can resonate with. 

Edge

The Edge cards help you identify your offer's USP. Shuffle through the deck, pausing to see what ideas each card prompts and noting them down.

If you find that you don't know the answers to any of the questions that come up as you're going through the Edge cards, make a note of them and seek the answers out either by speaking to customers, researching competitors, or by examining your product.

Data

The Data cards make up the bulk of this deck, and for good reason. This is the most important part of writing good copy. 

Just like you did with the Personality and Edge cards, shuffle through the Data cards, pausing to see what ideas each card prompts and noting them down.

The Data cards also contains mini-sets within them: Fears, and Motivation. By understanding your audience's fears and motivations, you're better able to put yourselves in their shoes to see what they really need to hear in order to convert. The real secret to writing to good copy is empathy, and the more time you spend understanding your audience, the better your copy will be. 

Copywriting Formulae

One of the most famous quotes about copywriting:

“Copy is not written. Copy is assembled.”
– Eugene Schwartz

By the time you're at this step, you should have several pages of notes on your audience, what makes them tick, snippets of copy, stats to pull from and more. 

Now it's just a question of assembling all that copy into an email sequence, website copy, sales page or whatever else you're working on. 

To make the process easier, shuffle through our copywriting formulae (including some Team Scribesmith originals!) to make sure you aren't writing from scratch.