How to Increase Sales (And Sign Clients) Using PR – Podcast Transcript

Episode 62 – Pitchin’ and Sippin’ – How to Increase Sales (And Sign Clients) Using PR

Speakers: Lexie Smith

Lexie Smith 

 Hello everyone. Today we’re going to talk about how to use PR wins to increase sales and close clients. In my experience, more people are generally familiar with PR being beneficial in expanding reach, or what we call top of funnel. Top a funnel refers to a warm audience. Or rather, let’s say Molly, for naming a person Molly, Molly was unaware of you or your brand. You have a PR When Molly does learn about you, she decides to follow you on Instagram. She loves what you post, she signs up for your newsletter, yay, right? Molly is now in your audience or your community or your network. And depending on how you have your marketing structured, Mali could quite literally be in the first stage of your marketing funnel. So like I said, most people think of PR as expanding reach and top of the funnel, which it absolutely does. What I have discovered is that most aren’t as familiar with how to extend the shelf life and ROI of PR beyond the initial reach when and how to make PR turn to sales revenue. Money, right. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Specifically, we’re going to review tactics that you can use to help increase sales and close clients after a given press feature has gone live. In my signature, the PR bar flight and pop physical programs at the PR bar, we dive way deeper into this topic. But today’s minisode should give you a good taste of things to get started. The first way to use PR winds to increase sales and sign clients might seem obvious, but it needs to be said and that’s promoted. Right? Promote said win. Share the win across your social channels Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, send it out in your newsletter, if you have one. Posted in a community thread or any networking groups, you’re a part of some people who shy away from promoting their wins because they’re afraid of coming across as an air quote here. braggy, right. But if you want to increase sales, if you want to make more money, you just have to move past that. Okay. Next tip is to update your assets. So if you don’t have a press page, now is the time to pause this podcast and go build one from scratch. No, I’m totally kidding. But now’s the time to potentially add that to your to do list. Anytime you have a press one. Here’s a core list of assets I want you to update from your press page. Like I just mentioned, to any logo slideshows, if you go to the homepage of the PR bar inc.com You’ll see an example of what I mean by a logo slideshow. You can add it as a blog, but summarize your website. Also update your media kit if you have one. Next, your bios and profiles and this is a big one. If you were just featured as an expert in let’s use Fast Company, for example, freaking add that to your marketing impress bios. Let that win help solidify your credibility and authority. You know whether you’re a product based business, your service based business or otherwise, external third party endorsement can play a large part in helping establish buyer trust. So new press one, update all the things moving on. Tip number three, use it as an asset in your sales process to provide value and bring the sale home. So here are a few ways you can do this. Let’s say you are a coach or an agency owner and you just got off a sales call with someone who clearly needs help with let’s say message

And you recently wrote a byline, for Adweek all about, you know, five best messaging tips, probably something a lot more interesting than that. But just stick with me here, okay. So what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna send them a follow up, POST call, you’re going to extend to them the resource, and this is going to do two things. One, it’s going to provide genuine value, but it’s also going to show them Oh, wow, you know, Adweek thinks they’re credible. Maybe I should too. You can also do this same technique, or similarly to reengage a dry or deadly, you know, someone who ghosted you or just someone you’re looking to reconnect with. So shoot them an email, say, you know, this article or this and such a topic made me think of you, if you’re not a service based business, because I understand that these were hyper specific examples, you can still integrate press wins into your sales funnel as well. One example you might do is let’s say you have an abandoned cart, email marketing sequence, right? So the buyer puts that cute top and that awesome candle in their checkout cart. And for some reason, they don’t click purchase, you’ve done some great systems work on the back end, they’re now entered into an email marketing sequence that tries to lure them back. So what you could do is in that sequence, work in the fact that let’s say Cosmo magazine awarded you best candle of the year, right? So the credibility might just give buyers the extra vouch of validity that they need to press purchase. So I could keep going on but hopefully you get the overall point I’m trying to make that uses that press one as a resource in your sales process. Tip number four is to repurpose and reshare. So remember, how about, I don’t know five minutes ago, I said promote your press when guess what, that doesn’t have to be a one and done approach. And I’m going to give you a personal example here. So I co authored a byline for creating a website with the co-founder of my second company, which is called ReadySet. Coach in 2021, aka last year, that last year was 2021. Okay, anyways, it was on five numbers you should know when launching a coaching business about six months after the article had gone live, which I do want to say that just FYI, that article was great for generating exposure and top of funnel. In fact, we had multiple sales calls direct Bookly from just seeing that article. But fast forward to six months later, and we decided to take the topic of that article and repurpose it into a longer form freebie to utilize in a list building and marketing campaign. So we decided to make an ebook. We gave cream cultivate the credit for publishing and endorsing the piece and gave the public the opportunity to access the content in a longer form in a more informative way. Right. From there what we did is we created an email marketing sequence that invited people more into our world so that moved them along our marketing and sales funnel. So other ways you can repurpose down the road you know a simple one throw up a throwback Thursday post if that’s still a thing I think it is. I did a throwback Tuesday’s on my weekly round up to the podcast as you guys have been awaiting this season three have been doing throwback Tuesdays anyways, it’s now a thing. You can also create a new graphic to post on Instagram. I mean, chances are someone probably didn’t see that first post and they probably don’t remember it. You can get creative and discuss one key takeaway you had from the piece in the form of a tip or an educational share. Really the sky’s the limit here.

I have seen clients benefit from a PR when more than 10 years old. I am not joking. That is real. So even right now if you’re listening to this and thinking of that once upon a time you were featured in said publication piece, it’s time to think about how you can further extend its shelf life and give it new life to help you increase sales and sign clients. I am firmly and a huge believer that PR and press can make you money and I know from years of experience that it can be directly tied to the bottom line. You know this is something that a fair amount of publicists might not agree with me on and maybe they shy away from advertising. But I hands down believe in this I know this it all comes down to understanding how to utilize when both when it goes live and far beyond, which now you have a few hacks to test out on your own if you want help creating a custom PR strategy that converts at all about conversion, as always feel free to reach out on Instagram. My handle is the PR underscore Inc Inc is I NC can also go to my website the PR barking.com All the links are in the show notes. Until next time, cheers!