Pitching Powerhouse

Today, we’re sitting down with Amanda Proscia, co-founder of Lightspeed Public Relations and Marketing! Lightspeed Public Relations and Marketing is a New York City-based agency focused on promoting innovation in areas like healthcare, financial services, and consumer electronics. Before starting Lightspeed in 2013, Amanda worked in various other agencies and businesses, spanning from the very lar...

Are You Keeping Up With the Shifting Media Landscape? 🏃 As PR pros, we know the media landscape is CONSTANTLY changing — new publications pop up, priorities shift, upcoming tech and trends create new expectations… 🤯 It can be hard to adapt quickly, especially when you have SO MUCH going on 😮‍💨 But every shift presents a challenge for PR pros as much as it presents an opportunity! Keeping your...

Are You Effectively Using Data to Drive Your PR Strategy? 🤔 PR is all about striking an emotional chord with your client’s audience, but you need more than emotion to craft a killer campaign… …you need cold, hard facts to back you up! Letting data drive your decisions is a super powerful way to grab the media’s attention and land high-impact placements for your clients 📈 Data-driven PR is becomi...

Jinkies! Is a Media Contact Ghosting You? 😱 Every PR pro gets ghosted from time to time. It’s a scary situation, but don’t get spooked! Even if a journalist goes as silent as the grave, don’t start heading for the cemetery ⚰️ There are a few tricks and treats that just might bring your contact back to life 🧟 So, grab a flashlight and get ready to take the spook out of the season! Because a silen...

Are You Prepared for the Busy Holiday Season? 🏃 There’s a ton for you to balance during the holidays — especially if you work with product-based businesses! And when it feels like everyone is launching new products and initiatives at the same time, it’s essential to nail down a competitive PR strategy so YOU can deliver stellar holiday results 🤩 ‘Tis the season to unleash the power of PR! This y...

Does Pitching Ever Feel Like a Daunting Task, Taking up Wayyy Too Much of Your Time and Leaving You Too Drained To Make the Most of Your Talents?🤔 Writing good, effective pitches takes a lot of brain power (especially if you’re new to PR!) — from coming up with an innovative story angle to actually writing out the pitch 🧠 But writing killer pitches that land EVERY TIME doesn’t have to be a strug...

Are You Responding to the Right RFPs to Grow Your Agency? 🤔 As a PR pro, you’ve likely received a request for proposals, or an RFP, before. An RFP is a formal document companies send out to solicit specific info from PR agencies they want to work with 🤓 You might receive one from a contact at a company in your niche, or you could get a totally cold RFP from a brand you’ve never heard of. However...

Are Burnout, Overwhelm, and Exhaustion Getting the Better of You? 😭 Everyone is feeling SOME type of burnout 😓 You might feel it creeping up on you right now, you could’ve just gotten out of a major low…or maybe you’re super overwhelmed right now! Whatever it is, you NEED to unplug, take control, and put burnout in the backseat again 👋 A burnt-out agency owner is an ineffective agency owner. Wh...

Is Your Agency Set Up to Let You Thrive as an Introverted Entrepreneur? 👀 There’s this (wrong!) idea that to be a comms pro or digital agency owner, you HAVE to be an extrovert 🙄 But as an introverted agency owner myself, I know you can be just as successful as your more extroverted peers! All it takes is a bit of extra strategy to set up your agency in a way that’s conducive to your introverted...

Are You Providing True, Meaningful Support to Your Media Contacts Through Industry Shifts? 🤝 The past few years have felt like a cycle of nonstop layoffs across journalism 😭 Pretty much every niche has been affected by layoffs, downsizing, and newsroom shutdowns…including major companies and outlets like Hearst and Insider. Smaller newsrooms means more work for in-house media contacts and more d...

Are You Leading Your Agency with TRUE Confidence in Your Skills? 🤔 Confidence is KEY 🔑 when you’re running a business. You’ve got an entire team of people (plus your clients’ teams!) looking to you for guidance — you can’t be unsure and wary as you lead them to success! A confident agency owner is intentional with their decisions, selective with their team and clients, and purposeful in ALL comm...

Does Your Agency Support You as an Entrepreneur AND a Mother? 🤔 Motherhood totally changes the way you run your agency — honestly, it’s a stage of entrepreneurship in and of itself! Becoming a mom irreversibly changes the way you look at work (and the world!) and the way your split your time between family and the office. As a mom to two boys, it’s my mission to show other women that they can be...

Are You Leveraging the Power of Mentorship to Grow Your Agency? 📈 Finding a good, effective mentor is a key part of growing your business. I’ve worked with a mentor in the past, and our partnership helped me achieve personal AND business breakthroughs! 🥰 Mentors work closely with you to help you push past obstacles (including mental blocks), elevate your thinking, and grow your agency. A mentor...

Do You Know the Most Important PR Trends for 2024? 🧐 The media landscape is constantly shifting, so PR pros need to keep their fingers on the pulse of the industry to keep up. Staying up-to-date with trends and industry innovations is the key 🔑 to creating smart strategies and delivering consistent (and impressive!) results to clients. You can’t grow & scale a successful agency if you’re alw...

Have You Been Feeling Overwhelmed or Unsatisfied in Your Business? 😩 Getting stuck in a plateau, losing out on revenue, or feeling unsure about the future of your agency can zap anyone’s motivation 😭 And I’ve been there, too! That’s exactly how I felt when I worked in law, building a career that I was starting to really hate. Pulling yourself up out of such a low is tough…but it’s possible! 💪 Y...

Are You Using Instagram Threads to Build New Media Relationships in Your Niche? 👀 Tons of apps have tried to become the new Twitter (especially after all of Twitter’s recent issues), but Meta’s Instagram Threads seems primed to actually compete 😯 Instagram Threads reached over 100 million users in just five days — and the app seems like it’ll just get bigger and bigger! With all of Twitter’s cha...

Are You Leveraging the Power of Podcasts to Score Big Wins for Your Agency? 🧐 Sometimes, it feels like everyone you know has started a podcast (guilty as charged! 🙋‍♀️). And while podcasts are fun to listen to while you run errands or tidy up your house, they’re also a great tool for getting your client in front of new, engaged audiences! Podcast interviews let your client show off who they are...

Do You Know How to Secure Press When the Media is Focused on Breaking News? 🤔 Media moves fast, but there are some days where it feels like the news cycle is going at a breakneck speed. When this happens, it’s usually because a major news story just broke…and it’s about to derail your pitching plans for the day! 😱 But if a BIG story hits just hours before you were planning to pitch, don’t panic....

Do You Know How to Leverage AI to Improve Your Pitches and Campaigns? 🧐 Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be a little overwhelming from the outside looking in, but implementing it into your agency is MORE than worth it. A text-based program like ChatGPT can help you write pitches, brainstorm campaigns, do media research, and more! 🤯 And yes, other PR pros already use ChatGPT to streamline their p...

Do You Know How to Successfully Secure a Correction for a Published Feature? 🧐 It’s always exciting to see a BIG client feature go live… …but it’s a lot LESS exciting when there’s a major error in it 😭 Don’t panic! This happens allll the time in media, especially with how quickly editors write and publish digital pieces. Lots of PR pros think that getting the article corrected is impossible, but...

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live a life you love running a PR agency and working with your dream clients? Our PR Pro Spotlight Series interviews our students and community members who have made the leap into PR and found huge success! We’ll be covering all the juicy insider details, from their biggest challenges and favorite parts of the job to their best advice for aspiring PR pros....

Are You Setting Yourself Up for Success Every Time You Sit Down to Write Pitches? 🧐 Rituals aren’t just for yoga instructors or meditation leaders 🧘‍♀️ PR pros can use rituals to get themselves in the right headspace for pitching! Your pitch-writing ritual gets you in the zone so you can generate results for your clients every time you send out a pitch 🤓 Every PR pro is different, so every PR p...

Are You Ready for What’s Next in PR? 🤓 We all know the media landscape is constantly changing, but the past few years have brought HUGE shifts to PR! 🤯 Your old tried-and-true strategies won’t work 100% of the time anymore, and new social channels are making BIG, unexpected impacts on consumers. PR pros need to be flexible and start preparing new tactics as the future of PR continues to take sha...

Is Your Media Monitoring Actually Helping Your Clients Succeed? 👀 PR is all about getting people talking about your client and making sure your client’s message is out there. But you need to make sure your client is in the media for the RIGHT reasons 😬 That’s where media monitoring comes in 😍 Media monitoring helps you analyze all of your client’s media mentions and understand how they’re farin...

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to live a life you love running a PR agency and working with your dream clients? Our PR Pro Spotlight Series interviews our students and community members who have made the leap into PR and found huge success!  We’ll be covering all the juicy insider details, from their biggest challenges and favorite parts of the job to their best advice for aspiring PR...