Positioning Our Copywriting Agency To Attract High-Ticket Clients [Update]

Derryck Strachan

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Published: July 18th, 2023

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Derryck Strachan

Founder, Big Star Copywriting

$30K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Big Star Copywriting

bigstarcopywriting.com

from Totnes

started October 2006

$30,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Derryck recommends to grow your business!

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join ... Timothy Ferriss

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Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind Al Ries

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Want more updates on Big Star Copywriting? Check out these stories:

1. I Left My Job As A Journalist In The City To Start A $360K/Month Copywriting Agency (2022) ➜

This is a follow up story for Big Star Copywriting. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 2 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I’m Derryck. I’m the CEO of Big Star Copywriting - you can read my original starter story here.

As our name suggests, we’re a copywriting agency based in the UK but that doesn’t do justice to the service we provide. We bridge the gap between SEO and content, working with our clients almost as their in-house copywriting and search marketing team - and in many cases, our relationships go beyond that to cover all written comms, both for B2B and B2C businesses.

When we started back in 2006, our business was very much focused on large-scale SEO content writing projects - big volumes of product descriptions, articles, and landing pages. That’s changed significantly in recent years to smaller volumes of researched and targeted content, often involving interviews with multiple stakeholders and frequently daily input into the project management of content production within medium to large enterprises.

It’s been a move from quantity to quality that I’ve greatly enjoyed as it’s given more value to our clients and brought with it closer relationships, which on a human level is satisfying and rewarding. We’ve been pleased to note that revenue has grown along with the changes - we’ve increased our turnover by around 15% and profitability to around 25%.

Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?

We talked to Starter Story last in March 2022 and since then our business has grown steadily and the shape of the business has also changed. I had a plan 5 - 6 years ago to move from a model where we were chasing large-volume content writing projects at low rates and with tight margins.

This worked well for us in the past but we were getting to the stage where we couldn’t compete with the cheapest players in the market and I was uncertain how to offer more value to these bulk buyers, who were not interested in some of our more strategic services - content strategy, SEO - or the more high value, in-depth content we were writing for a select few of our clients.

I was juggling two propositions - one based on price, the other based on quality and service. There was no cross-sell and it was difficult to represent both cost-effectively through our marketing.

We’ve always been adjacent to SEO, so the natural step was to offer a service that offered not just the SEO content but the full package so we could help clients shape their content to get better results. This would be on a retainer basis - this gives us a more predictable income but it also means we’re more involved with the client and can show the results that come from our work.

This makes such a difference to how rewarding the work is - previously we’d very rarely hear praise from clients: content was just a commodity, a necessity that was usually handled by a content manager or agency, rather than a decision maker in the business. Now we regularly get positive feedback from decision-makers because we’ve got more skin in the game. And that feels good for everyone - for me and everyone on my team.

New businesses need to think about positioning carefully - and many people get this bit wrong, usually by not being defined enough in what their brand is about.

I wanted to get to a stage where we had around 10 - 12 retained clients, each spending around 2k per month and I think we’re approaching that now. This is alongside our “pure” content work - but even that has moved to a higher quality approach with more input on project management and strategy.

To get to this stage we’ve had to make some changes to the business - some have been thrust upon us, others more proactive. In early 2022, our editor resigned - it was a challenging time but it’s worked out extremely well as she is now one of our leading freelance writers.

That gave me pause and I decided to handle all the editing - often up to 100,000 words per month - myself.

Although the workload was significant, it gave me a chance to review the quality of the work personally and make some changes in our personnel so we had the right writers on board.

Saving money on the salary of an editor gave me the confidence to look at our pricing and make some increases that reflected the focus on quality rather than quantity. This has undoubtedly had a positive effect on our bottom line.

However, I’ve had to take a step back now from the editing as it’s just too much to handle that element of the service delivery myself. We’ve now got a part-time editor who is handling much of the briefing and project management, and also a team of freelance proofreaders.

It’s freed me up - but now I need to focus on defining my new role! I feel a bit bereft without that relentless editing but I’m now turning my attention to more social media activity, some personal branding, and a bit more outreach work.

What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?

I constantly struggle with my mental and physical health - anxiety and depression for the former, and serious back problems for the latter. I can be really fired up to get on with something new, only to get floored the next day by depression - or I can hurt my back and not be able to sit too long in my chair.

It’s frustrating but I’m really lucky to have so many good people working with me now who are confident and capable enough to handle most aspects of the business.

Aside from that, we’ve certainly seen inquiries dip in the last couple of months. There are some fixable aspects to that, such as improving our site speed which has already led to improved rankings - and, we hope, will lead to more inquiries.

Anecdotally, it seems like a lot of people have noticed a slowdown - unsurprisingly after a year or more of high inflation and businesses now watching their spending.

I think the biggest challenge to us now is AI - although I’m still not sure how worried I should be. On the one hand, AI can write some pretty decent articles but on the other hand, we’ve seen that it produces a very stiff copy with a weird tone of voice, often with duplication from other sources, not optimized for search, and sometimes with glaring inaccuracies.

We also don’t think it represents a significant time/cost saving yet - we think our human writing service is still cheaper for things like product pages and web pages, which require a lot of inputting and tweaking to get a decent result.

We’re also increasingly creating copy that is both original and creative - articles that have original interviews with stakeholders, travel blogs based on firsthand experience, opinions, quotes, and stats based on our clients’ (and their end users) real-world experiences, etc. Undoubtedly it will eventually affect how we work but for now, we don’t think it can replace the kind of content we’re creating.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

There are lots of big trends out there that are challenging to navigate - AI, inflation, economic stagnation, market saturation, etc. but I think we have an offer that will endure because ultimately it’s based on good service and a human approach to content marketing.

I’m not looking for huge growth - I’d prefer to work more with our existing clients and wait for new inquiries that are a good fit for us i.e. businesses that want a competent and reliable team who can help them create consistency in their written comms and search marketing.

The biggest lesson for me though, which I cover more below, is how important and rewarding it is to have authentic relationships with our clients. Above and beyond the brands on our books, we work with some great people and it gives a lot more color to my days.

Perhaps on an equal footing with that is how grateful I am to have such a good team beside me - I’m 50 and a lot of the people involved in Big Star now are (much!) younger, which gives it a new energy which I greatly enjoy.

Until recently it’s been “my thing” but now it feels like it’s evolving into something different where everyone can have a stake in defining what this company is - I’m excited to see how that’s going to change things over the next few years.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

I’m trying to formulate a bit of copy that gets across how great we are at work as a kind of ready-made, in-house comms team for medium to large organizations. I want that to be a central part of what we’re communicating in our marketing. We add so much value that you can’t get from an individual freelancer or from agencies that are more transactional.

I love working with CSAM, Polygiene, OneFineStay, and others because I feel like we’re part of the team and can share in the successes of the company. I feel more invested. In the past, I kind of kept clients at arm's length and tried to keep the relationship strictly transactional, so they’d be buying a certain amount of content and that was kind of it.

That was kind of essential when we were selling a no-frills content writing service because there was no margin for project management or strategic advice. Now though I find it much more rewarding to have actual human relationships with people I’m working with!

Other than that, we’ve got a long-term plan to develop our newsletter to be a really useful tool for anyone working as a content professional - if this goes well we want to offer courses and even useful products in the future.

What’s the best thing you read in the last year?

Until our new editor started I was proofreading 10s of thousands of words a week so reading outside of that felt physically painful! So I’ve got into audiobooks - I mainly listen to fiction. Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning “A Visit From The Goon Squad” is awesome, as is George Saunder’s “Liberation Day”.

As a songwriter in my spare time, I got a lot from Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” and I’m currently listening to “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman which is a great book about how little time we have and how best to use it!

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

It may be stating the obvious but I don’t think there’s a silver bullet anymore. When I first started, SEO was in its infancy and you could pretty much just write some keywords on a web page and you’d rank almost overnight.

You could enter a niche for the first time with a website and build a significant business quickly using SEO alone. Now niches become saturated rapidly and growth comes from a hard slog to outgun your competitors in terms of social media posting, content published, backlinks earned, etc

Given this, my advice is that new businesses need to think about positioning carefully - and many people get this bit wrong, usually by not being defined enough in what their brand is about.

Look at the marketplace you’re about to enter and find a point of difference from your competitors so you stand out; that will let your audience know what you’re about and why they should buy from you.

I think the way this is most obvious is how people become successful on Instagram or TikTok - they find their “thing” and then repeat that thing over and over again so they become known for it. For example, they’re the “Trombone Guy” or “Salt Bae” - what they do may be quite small but it grabs attention for a second and they become known for that thing. So Salt Bae has essentially built a billion-dollar restaurant empire on the back of sprinkling salt on food.

Once you get your positioning right, it should make it easy to then create your content and build your brand.

Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?

Not specifically but we’re always on the lookout for good, reliable freelance writers. We are also interested in ideas for lead generation - that said I get hundreds of emails from people offering us qualified leads etc from agencies that don’t come across as credible.

So I’d only really be interested in hearing from individuals who have some good ideas about our business and who have a track record in lead generation.

I’d also love to work closely with someone who has experience delivering copywriting or SEO training.