The Client
Brigitte Lyons is the founder of Podcast Ally, a PR firm that specializes in getting clients booked on podcasts.
The Problem
Brigitte was transitioning her business from a more standard PR firm (B Think Forward) to a podcast-focused PR firm, and had been “beta testing” her new podcast PR offer behind the scenes with a few initial clients. She was ready to tell her audience and the world that Podcast Ally was open for business — but during her transition, she had pretty much stopped communicating with her existing audience.
No blog posts, very little social media, and ZERO emails to her list for more than 9 months.
We needed to re-engage her cold audience, introduce them to the idea of podcast PR, and sell them on the value of pre-paying for a year of PR services.
In addition, and not insignificantly, Brigitte knew from past experiences that launching was a stressful and anxiety-inducing project for her.
“I have found in the past that launching something completely wipes me out,” Brigitte said. “I have this habit of doing everything, myself: writing all the content, going through each step piece by piece from the content writing to scheduling everything, to trying to get web copy done… And everything just takes so much more time than you ever anticipate. I kind of stopped launching because it was so miserable for me.”
The Plan
Brigitte signed up for our full launch support package. “I decided to go with Lacy right away. It was one price. I didn’t have to worry about it.”
We started with a re-engagement sequence to warm up her email list, letting them know what was happening and that she was switching up the focus of her business.
In fact, she received more than eight inquiries just from our re-engagement emails alone.
Then, we wrote the copy for the sales emails, the webinar sign-up page and thank you page, and the sales page. We audited her webinar to ensure she was making the best possible pitch. And we also introduced Brigitte to a designer who could help her create the web pages she needed and a tech team to help create the email automation sequences.
“We had this incredibly tight timeframe, and she was a f*cking champ for keeping on top of it. It was really impressive. The idea that we were able to write all this copy, get somebody to put a webpage together — it was kind of mind boggling to me how quickly it was able to come together. It honestly reset my expectations on how long it needed to take to prepare a launch, that experience.”
The Result
Even though she was launching over the holidays, even though she hadn’t emailed her list in nearly 9 months, and even though it was a launch only to her list (not a more public launch), she got 15 well-qualified applications for the annual plan and signed several perfect clients — giving her the up-front capital she needed to hire the help she knew she would need to grow and scale.
Brigitte also immediately saw the value of having a library of sales and marketing language she could pull from and re-use in other capacities.
“Once Lacy and I decided to do this launch together, I actually started using her language and the things we were talking about in meetings selling the package before we did the launch. I didn’t even have to wait for the launch because Lacy was reflecting back to me what she saw as the value of what I was communicating.
“She was writing this copy for the emails and the positioning, the points, and it was really useful to have her reflect that back to me. There are parts of it that were almost like a pep talk, just kind of validating, this does have value. And that feedback helps me think, well, if she’s responding to that way, let’s talk about that with clients.
“And so she would write something and I would try it out in a meeting. Some of this stuff has made it into the way that I talk about our packages and our work.”
The Analysis
Brigitte’s launch was unique for a few reasons:
- We were launching a high-ticket, pay-in-full service instead of a course or program.
- We were launching to a list that had gone somewhat cold after 9 months of inactivity.
- And we were launching over the holidays — with a distinctly non-holiday offer.
Therefore, we designed her copy and content to be extremely personal, conversational, and inviting.
We wanted to capture Brigitte’s authentic voice so that the emails would feel more like we were catching up with readers than “re-engaging” them.
And we needed to focus heavily on the value of pre-paying for an annual PR plan. Brigitte was nervous because it’s impossible to guarantee results in PR, so I focused our efforts on educating them about the possibilities and demonstrating the value of having a PR team long term instead of for a short run.
Overall, we wrote more than 10,000 words of copy for Brigitte as well as auditing her webinar and helping build her launch team…
And it worked! Brigitte was able to sign 4 ideal clients from the campaign, giving her the momentum she needed to hire and scale in 2020.
“The fact that I got all this copy, got the design of the page, got somebody to set up the automations on the backend, and got the feedback on the messaging and the reflection back of the messaging — that itself is worth the money. And then when you look okay, but I also made like $40 grand off of the back of this? I would love to hire Lacy and the whole team to do it again.”
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