How do you want to start out?
Do you want 20 leads and a half-million views in your first month?
Or, would you rather get 10 highly qualified leads and a stream of 100K views consistently?
The second option is the most stable and that’s exactly what Maria got in her first three months of working with us.
In this case study, let’s take a look at how a passion-centered startup gained traction and turned our client into a thought leader.
Who is Maria Rybak?
Maria Rybak is remarkable.
She’s the founder of the brand PVLSE, which is basically an online marketplace for creative and passionate people looking to monetize their passion projects.
Think about it as a more creative Fiverr where tutors can reach new audiences and marketplaces using different types of events and online coaching.
PVLSE was unique and there was nothing quite like it.
But, here’s another thing about Maria.
She also had a passion for harmonizing humanity with technology.
Right off the bat, we could tell that this was going to be a fun, creative project.
What’s The Problem?
People didn’t know about PVLSE.
Now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it was relatively new.
But, if she wanted to have the first-mover advantage and prevent copycats from ripping off her idea – there will always be someone – she needed to get things moving fast.
She didn’t have a lot of investors on board, and her following was small compared to what she needed to get momentum going on her side.
Here’s What Needed to Be Done
Maria needed five main things to happen to PVLSE and her business.
- She needed to establish herself as an influencer and thoguht leader
- Investors to fund her business expansion and operational costs
- More people to join PVSLE
- More collaborators
- A lead generation campaign
The good news was that these were the five things that BAMF specialized in.
How Did BAMF Help Maria?
LinkedIn Influencer Profile Optimization
From a design perspective, Maria’s “above the fold” LinkedIn profile details looked aesthetically pleasing.
But, there was a major design flaw.
It didn’t tell people who she was, what PVLSE was, or even hint at why they should be interested in it.
The design was good but the potential for conversion wasn’t up to par.
We immediately jumped in and switched out the cover image. The running man looked great, but it could easily be mistaken for a fitness company. We decided to go with multiple pictures of creatives in action.
We changed out the marketing copy as well.
The old cover talked about the passion economy, but it didn’t really show what PVSLE was about. We decided to tell prospects landing on her profile exactly what PVLSE did. This clarity helps score conversions and gets people curious.
Her headline was another problem.
It wasn’t convincing enough since people didn’t know what PVLSE was about.
So, since we already explained PVLSE in the cover photo, we now took the time to tell people about her goals and drop a couple of personal facts about her.
This turned the headline into an avenue to get to know her personally.
After tweaking her profile photo a little bit, it was time to get to her about summary and push for the full completion of her profile.
Short and sweet was the goal here.
She needed a summary that could get people on PVLSE, so two sentences about that.
Then to personally connect with prospects she talked about herself and her goals.
The cherry on top was switching out her “connect” button with a “follow” button.
Content for Thought Leadership
With our in-house influencer program, we were able to start the first round of interviews with her.
We wanted to know what her personal stories were and her goals were. She had a unique voice so we wanted to extract that.
Once we had notes on all the stories that made Maria who she is, it was time for us to start the content creation process.
The subject of the posts was going to be thought leadership.
We focused on the hyper-effective LinkedIn plain text founder stories method, and then we got to work on her draft posts.
Using a combination of scheduled posts and proper strategy, we got her on an efficient content rollout campaign.
This started to build momentum for her, and soon posts started gaining traction with some even going viral.
Here’s the great thing about thought leadership content.
It also serves as a lead magnet for people to land on your profile.
Since Maria’s profile was optimized to be a landing page on LinkedIn, she was able to turn it into a passive lead generation machine.
If someone was interested in the content that she was putting out and was suddenly curious about who she was they would check out her profile, since her profile is optimized it acts as a net to catch leads and throw them into her sales funnel.
We Helped PVLSE Find Investments
PVLSE needed money.
It was just starting to gain traction, so she needed an outbound campaign to attract potential investors.
We started doing advanced prospecting for her.
We went ahead and used the account-based marketing (ABM) approach.
This meant a hyper-personalized outbound campaign to reach potential investors.
Each segment was broken down and specialized content was sent out.
A Separate Outbound Campaign for Creative Collaborators
Now that she was set up with an outbound campaign for potential investors, it was time to get some leads for her creative collaborations.
We put her on another outreach campaign that prioritized different sectors of the passion economy.
After mapping out possible responses, we included a lead nurturing campaign to make sure that we didn’t lose leads that were coming through the pipeline.
Results
Maria didn’t just get 100K LinkedIn content views in one month.
She was consistently hitting each with that range in the next three.
In fact, on her bad month, she still managed to bring in more than 60K LinkedIn views.
Her aggregate view count rose smoothly (and significantly) over the three month period.
Apart from her content campaign, her outbound outreach campaigns were also making strides.
Her connection rate of over half is higher than the average rates we’ve seen, and coupling that with a message reply rate of 41 percent, signaled that she was getting extremely good feedback with her personal outreach.
These connections translated in actual qualified sales calls for Maria.
In just three months she scored 43 meetings.
Now given that she was in a niche and we were running a medium campaign, she was bringing in at least 10 of qualified leads each month.
That was the progress she was looking for.
And, we’re not talking about small brands here.
She had educational institutions that were interested in meeting with her as well as reps from tech giant Apple.
Maria wasn’t just able to jumpstart her growth on LinkedIn, she was able to bring in actual clients that brought in actual revenue for her organization.
Maria Rybak
Takeaways
In just three months, Maria was able to jumpstart PVLSE and bring in high-profile collaborators.
And, she started with close to 0 views on LinkedIn and a phone that barely rang.
Here’s what.
Getting 1 million views in the first month wasn’t the priority.
The priority was consistent growth.
By getting the momentum going for the first couple of months, you can position your company for stellar growth in the future.
Growth that is scalable.
And, more importantly.
Sustainable.
