A six-month campaign paused because the market would not move, a positioning problem it uncovered on the way, and the deal that closed anyway. Read the case study.
See if You QualifySpike had been burned before he got to us. He had thrown money at Google Ads and been through four different agencies, with little to show for it.
“I had my reservations with marketing. I’d thrown money at Google Ads and gone through about four different agencies.”
Podshop is a podcast production and marketing agency based in East London. Very small team, six years old. He was our first client.
The work generated leads, and calls booked off it did convert. But the campaign targeted businesses that already had a podcast, which meant asking them to leave an editor they were attached to. That is a harder ask than it looks, and it is where the market pushed back.
“It’s fairly easy to find podcasts, but the people are very attached to their previous editors. Either we were slightly too expensive, people didn’t want to move, or a few other reasons as well. So that’s why we decided to put a pause on that.”
So we stopped, six months in, with the read clear enough to act on: the right targeting, the wrong ask, and the wrong price for that particular audience. Continuing would have been easier to sell and worse for him.
Two things surfaced along the way that outlasted the campaign. The first was a positioning problem nobody had spotted. Every one of Spike’s clients was a business, and none of the copy on his website was written for businesses.
“All of my clients were businesses, but none of the copy on my website was targeted at businesses. That spurred me on to make some changes, not just to the website, but how we were having the conversations and how we were portraying our business.”
The second was operational. Integrating the two systems forced Podshop’s own pipeline into something trackable, with a dashboard, automated follow-up and booking links where there had been nothing.
Then a deal closed from it, roughly four months after the campaign was paused and ten to eleven months after it launched. A business wanting all of its audio and video under one roof, at £1,600 to £2,000 a month.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing history | Google Ads and four agencies, little result | A clear read on the market |
| Website positioning | Written for individuals, sold to businesses | Rewritten for businesses |
| Pipeline tracking | Untracked | Dashboard, automated follow-up, booking links |
| Campaign outcome | — | Paused at six months: the market would not switch editors |
| Deal closed from the work | — | £1,600–2,000 a month, ten to eleven months after launch |
“It’s fine to try things and it not work, as long as the reason why it’s not worked is not because of the competency of the person you’re working with, but purely because at that time it isn’t right for the business.”
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