3 Red Flags to Spot When Hiring a PR Agency

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. My guest today is Loretta Markov, the founder and chief strategist for Seed Communications. She has a storied career in PR strategy and management, and we talked a lot about what's the difference between using a PR firm or building your own in-house PR team.

Sean Weisbrot: What kinds of things should you be thinking about when it comes to pr? How is it a part of marketing and how can it help to be responsible for establishing the brand strategy and story and telling it? And so much more. She's a very wonderful guest, very giving and warm, and it was a fantastic conversation for me.

Sean Weisbrot: Her favorite quote is from Robert Frost and he said, I. Freedom lies in being bold. Loretta is a very bold personality and I hope you enjoy her spirit in this episode.

Sean Weisbrot: Why did you want to get involved in PR and how you switched over to startups from large companies?

Loretta: Sure. So I am an innovator at heart. I guess that's why I have a lot of passion for startups since I was a little kid.

Loretta: I'm just a dreamer and love. To invent things and make things. So that's likely why I focus on startups today and why I started in the creative industries to begin with. I started my career about a little over 20 years ago, working in big advertising agencies and worked on huge global brands. Like HP and Gillette and Diageo Brands, Charlie Spirits Brands, and Proctor and Gamble, like all the biggie, McDonald's, Verizon, you name it.

Loretta: You know, working in big ad agencies is amazing because you're surrounded by just the cream of the crop creative people. And as the industry changed and social media became a thing. Uh, the big agencies weren't really jumping through hoops to win that business because it felt very tactical at the time.

Loretta: I saw something bigger and decided to move over to PR because PR agencies saw it too, and they started to go after social media business and start to build. They are because they felt like, well, we're public relations. We understand how to build communities, word of mouth, and that's what social media was pretty much built on.

Loretta: So I saw that happening and decided to take the leap to pr Super happy that I did. PR is a really interesting place to be. Very different from the advertising world, although both are about brand building. One is really, advertising is focused, at least when I was in the business on making the ad, like making the, the thing that is communicating about the brand.

Loretta: And PR is broader than that. It's transcends the marketing department, although it includes it and it's about how the company is doing corporate reputation, managing a brand through its ups and downs, telling its narrative and story over time. So it's definitely a very different part of the business, albeit with the same goal, which is to make the brand household name and, uh, really make it an exciting place for consumers to come and, you know, coalesce around an ethos.

Loretta: And so startups for me, really, I started my agency seed. So I'm the founder of Seed and Chief Strategist because I focused on strategy and creative for my whole career. And you know, I started seed really thinking about startups. And the only reason I hadn't started an agency sooner is because I really didn't know what audience I wanted to go after and what types of businesses I wanted to support during c.

Loretta: I just was trying to counsel really establish established brands on how to manage through COVID and how to innovate and pivot. A lot of those large brands just, they were scared and they didn't want to, and I saw startups just coming in and. Save in the day, you know, look at Instacart delivering my groceries.

Loretta: It was a really beautiful thing. And you know, all the telehealth and all of the things that were coming out to make consumers' lives easier, and these startups were just willing to jump in and do it. And it was imperfect and not always beautiful, but they were willing to take the leap. That's exactly what I wanted to do, was to support startups.

Sean Weisbrot: All right, great. Thank you for the introduction. I appreciate your backstory on that. And I also love to focus on working with startups because of similar reasons where they often have no idea really where they're going. They just know they want to go there, and they're willing to figure out how to get there along the way.

Sean Weisbrot: And, uh, I believe it was Reid Hoffman that said, building a startup is like putting together an airplane as you're flying down the cliff and hoping that you, you turn it into a real thing before it hits the water.

Loretta: Yes. And that's just a paper airplane.

Sean Weisbrot: So what are the differences between good and bad PR methods?

Sean Weisbrot: Like how, how do you look at a company and. Just kind of with your eye very quickly, see, uh, they've got a proper PR strategy or they've got a bad PR strategy.

Loretta: PR strategy is about stepping back, taking a look at the PR mix, taking a look at the competitive set, the landscape, the context, right, the cultural context of what's happening, and determine what's your best way to attack.

Loretta: To, uh, ensure that you're getting the most visibility, establishing a reputation for yourself and telling your story. The default of startups around PR is, oh, we just need to get mentioned and then the world will open up for us. Right? We need, all we need is someone to mention, mention us in Fast Company or in Fortune or Forbes.

Loretta: That's one part of PR is media relations, but there's so much more to PR than that. There is, you know, corporate communications, there's influencer marketing. Of course, social is a part of that. What I've noticed is that there isn't a real strategy there. It's what we call spray and pray, right? It's like, can we pitch as many outlets as possible?

Loretta: Please get us some coverage. First of all, it's not easy to get coverage. People think that it's a walk in the park and, and as a matter of fact, I just saw an ad come across my feed where a startup is saying, Hey, do you want. You know your brand placed in the big magazines and online publications, well, we can place it for you there no problem.

Loretta: You know, and I'm just like, sure. You can probably get a mention about a brand, but if you're not telling a story and you haven't strategically thought about how to utilize media relations within your broader marketing mix, and also how to unfold a story. For the press over time, then that's not really strategic, it's just a mention and you're crossing your fingers and hoping, and I, I feel like there is the default of defining PR as media relations only, and then there is this, well, if we get a mention, our business will take off and that is not necessarily true.

Loretta: It's not always easy to get placements saying what you want them to say. That's the point. Someone may mention you because you pitched an outlet, but that doesn't mean that they're saying what you actually want them to say. That's quality coverage. Right. And a lot of the startups just want quantity coverage.

Loretta: And they're like, well, we got mentioned. And that's great. So I think that's probably one of the biggest. Things that I've observed that hurts my heart. As somebody who was born from strategy, you know that there isn't a ton of strategic intent. Probably a lot of heart, a lot of desire to story tell, but it doesn't feel intentional.

Loretta: It feels like a box check.

Sean Weisbrot: Who should be responsible for establishing the PR strategy? Who should be responsible for executing the PR strategy? At what time should you be starting to think about PR strategy and what do startups routinely end up with at the beginning?

Loretta: Okay, so who should do the PR strategy?

Loretta: If you have a PR agency or a PR consultant, you should be collaborating with them to create it. It's a co-creation method. The reason being is that if we look at PR as, let's say, just media relations for a second. The people that are day-to-day speaking to the media understand what the media is looking for at those moments in time and are gonna, what they're gonna wanna write about, what their readers care about, et cetera.

Loretta: So if you're not working with a PR professional and you're trying to do media relations, you should probably think about. Contacting someone and getting them to collaborate with you. The other pieces of the PR mix, you know, like taking influencer for example, the same rule applies. You can reach out to rando influencers and say, oh, they have a good following, and they're kind of talking about what I want them to talk about.

Loretta: Let me go and reach out to them. Like, you can do that. Again, it doesn't have that intent. Right. It's not part of a bigger story. There's not really a role carved out. It's just, Hey, can you talk about our brand? So I think that it is a collaborative process with those who are professionals at doing it and are living and breathing it every day.

Loretta: And someone on your team, be it the marketing director or you know, communications director, everyone has different levels of marketing, communications professionals on the startup side, but it should be a process, uh, between the two. I do believe that. You know, executing the PR strategy, once you establish it, is, you know that responsibility belongs to someone who's on the front lines of doing it every day.

Loretta: If you want it done well, editors are not gonna answer you or wanna talk to you If a, you don't have a really good story to tell, right. Which hopefully your professionals that you're collaborating with will help you to formulate of what's your unique brand story that you wanna tell. But they also, there's kind of, there's just like a way that you do it, right?

Loretta: Just like any profession, there's a craft to it. It's not just calling, smiling and saying, Hey, you wanna write about us, right? Like, there is a craft to framing a pitch and. Telling a story and connecting the dots to what's happening in culture contextually, what their reader would care about, and what your brand has in common With those two things, that is a craft and I, I never assume that I can do better than someone who's on the front lines of doing that every day.

Loretta: Despite my deep experience, like I'm not pitching media every day. My team is.

Sean Weisbrot: At what time should a company start thinking about developing a PR strategy, and at what point should they start thinking about executing that strategy?

Loretta: They should think about it as early as possible because we do branding as well. We do advertising, like we're not just a PR agency. So our eyes are always on the broader mix and when things are going to start and end, and how we, how PR can fit into that. You know, if we're just doing PR for our company, we would love to be part of the brand development process because. Understanding the birth of that story and also affecting it.

Loretta: Because there are many times that startups are thinking of their brand name or their branding, and they actually don't do a huge competitive dive. And I just had a client that we didn't end up working with for the long term, but they had the same name as a huge tech startup. They're probably not gonna win the SEO war there.

Loretta: Um, because this is like a. Super highly funded startups. So you know, when you're coming up with branding and naming, really doing that due diligence of who else shares that name or, you know, avoiding sharing the name of another brand is super important. So in the brand development process, understanding the origins of your brand story, probably like.

Loretta: Six months before launch is a good time to engage pr and many times that's about the time when maybe a year out, people are starting to develop their brand before they launch and then they kind of get their act together and then they're ready to launch about a year later, depending on the funding, depending on, it's such a, each business and sector is different.

Loretta: If you engage about six months before launch, then you're hitting some like long lead media. That write more in depth stories. Um, you're also going to get everything in line and in order before your, uh, launch so that you're not scrambling, which is super important. You also can get access to more talent.

Loretta: You know, if you're engaging celebrities or you're engaging influencers, you know, hitting them up the month before you're gonna launch, they're likely gonna be booked potentially, or that's just not enough lead time, especially with everything you have going on as well outside of pr. If you're doing an advertising campaign or any other kind of CRM or marketing efforts, you can coordinate all of that before.

Loretta: PR should not be an afterthought of, oh, well we have all this stuff. Go amplify it. You know? Or we came up with this creative campaign. Can you go tell everyone about it? It's like, well, no one's gonna care about your creative campaign. A and B, PR can B. Actually set the stage for you and kind of set the table so that when everyone comes to eat, it's a gorgeous, beautiful story being told in that tablescape, right?

Loretta: Like that's what we can do really well is set the stage and then also amplify as we go. So it definitely shouldn't be an afterthought.

Sean Weisbrot: I definitely made a mistake on the name side and I paid for it.

Loretta: Really? Tell me about that.

Sean Weisbrot: The original name was Sidekick and it was suggested by my advisor. He's not with me anymore.

Sean Weisbrot: What I failed to do was look at how many other companies use that name. I did some research and I found T-Mobile owns, uh, a company owns a product, but. We weren't, we weren't infringing on their trademark because it was a software application, not a phone.

Sean Weisbrot: However, we knew it would be a problem possibly in the future if they wanted to get annoying and they own sidekick.com. So we would never get it because despite the fact that they haven't launched a product in. Uh, nine or 10 years under that name, they're basically trolling the world and keeping the website online. They recently did some stupid ads that were for a fake product with the name. They're just messing around to make sure that nobody can really use the trademark for anything.

Sean Weisbrot: But beyond that, there was like another 20 or 30 companies in different industries with the name and so. Yeah, you know, not having an SEO or marketing background, I wasn't aware that the decision was wrong. And when we finally hired a marketing director a few months ago, he, the first thing he did was analyze the name and he is like, guys, there's no way we've gotta change this because we're never gonna rank on the first page of Google and we're gonna pay a dollar per ad for Google if we want to get people to look at it.

Sean Weisbrot: It's just, it's not feasible. So we did some research and came up with the name Nerve, NERV, without an E at the end. There was one startup that had nerve plus.com, but they were also taking Get nerve.com, but they died a few years ago, so there's no competition on the first page for anything in this regard, and there's no competition on social media handles or anything.

Sean Weisbrot: So we felt like it was really easy.

Loretta: I feel like you know, the due diligence you can, you know, you can do everything that you can to avoid duplication of a name. It's really hard.

Loretta: Because there are so many startups out there. Every day there's new brands launching, and the saturation point is like, we're here.

Loretta: You know, every category is just flooded with new, uh, companies every day. I do believe though, that if you. Have a name and someone else happens to have the same name as you. Just at least make it not be in your sector. You know? Like if a dog food has the same name as you, you know, you'll figure it out. Um, but you know, definitely not in the same sector.

Loretta: I think naming is so important, but a lot of companies get. Stuck at the naming stage and actually spend so much of their budget on branding and they, they stay there and churn for really, really, really long time. I think it should be simpler where you land on a brand name, you all hold hands and say, okay, this is gonna be it.

Loretta: And save your money to amplify that brand. Branding matters. Of course it matters. It's critical, but don't get hung up there. I guess is my advice because then you could spend, you know, a half a million dollars on branding and then suddenly you're like, shoot, what do I do? I have no money left for advertising or for search or for pr, you know, and I think it eats some of the budget, the churn on it.

Loretta: You can access professionals in branding, who it's their job to make sure that you have a brand that's differentiated, but a brand that has roots in a story and a brand that can, uh, capture a consumer attention. So not a bad idea to also pull in a professional, even if it's not to come up with it, but to be evaluative and to say, here's areas to improve.

Loretta: This is an eight outta 10 or a five outta 10. And just show you the the way to ensure that you do have a differentiated brand.

Sean Weisbrot: So what are the pros and cons of working with a firm rather than building PR in-house?

Loretta: I mean, there's nothing wrong with building PR in-house. I think startups have other key staff that they need to hire first.

Loretta: That's probably, you know, more of a priority at that point. PR is also, when you're starting out, you don't know how the industry's going to react to you and how well PR is going to work for you. PR is not a silver bullet. It works sometimes great for some brands in the right context, among the right competition at the right time.

Loretta: And sometimes it doesn't. You know, if you were trying to launch a brand, you know, in certain sectors during COVID, let's say that you had a collaboration or video conferencing brand during COVID, that's great. What if you were launching it after COVID, you know. PR would work for you maybe really well during a certain contextual moment, and then maybe it wouldn't, no matter what you do, if you're banging your head against the wall trying to get coverage for things that post pandemic, people aren't necessarily thinking about top of mind, but still need.

Loretta: Sometimes PR will work really well and it's great to test it out. For your brand and for your sector before you commit to hiring a full team to do that. Uh, see how it works for you and delivers on ROI for you. The, you know, difference between an in-house team and an out-of-house team is just an i, I believe in how you pay them because the out-of-house team and agency is so in it with you.

Loretta: You know, we consider ourselves an extension of our clients for sure. We're in it and just as passionate. If not more sometimes than they are. So I think from a commitment perspective and a passion perspective, certainly they're on the same plane. I think from a professionalism and aptitude perspective, most people that go in-house are from agencies.

Loretta: I. So you're gonna find very few lifers that started on NPR on the client side and never worked at an agency before. It's, I, I don't think I've really met anybody who's done that. You're going to get somebody who's been trained in the same way. So aptitude wise.

Loretta: They're probably pretty congruent. I don't know that there is an advantage to having in-house versus, versus an agency.

Loretta: I even in speed, you know, you just pick up the phone like you would a colleague, you know, and you call your agency and ask them to help you out. You know, it's the same thing of. Calling somebody who's in your office or writing an email. And if you are not feeling that way, if you're not feeling the seamlessness and this extension of a team feeling, then you probably have the wrong agency.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay. I love that you said that, and I want to go deeper into that. You mentioned several quick and easy kind of providers that they're like, Hey, we can get, you mentioned. Beyond that, what kind of red flags should someone be looking for when they're trying to pick a PR firm, if they choose to go that route?

Loretta: There are many red flags, I think the most. Prominent for me is that they don't consider strategy. If they're just willing to come in and say, yeah, we'll, we'll start making those calls, you know, and not thinking about the intent that I spoke about before, and having a real strategy for how they're going to do that.

Loretta: As far as the due diligence to go in and look at the context. Right. First and level set with competition and what's happening in culture and in the world, and who your target audience is and what they care about right now. All of that. If they're not doing that and saying that they can go off and do it without that, that's a huge red flag.

Loretta: And then, you know, putting together an. Approach that is not just PR in a vacuum. It looks at your broader marketing mix and seeing how you fit in. You know, what else are you doing? How can we leverage and connect the rest of your efforts to what we're doing in pr? Can PR amplify things you're doing in other areas?

Loretta: Can you amplify PR results in other areas? So, um, the cross collaboration piece, if they're not suggesting that or inquiring about what else you're doing, how else they can connect, how can they maximize your investment? That's certainly another flag as well. I think the transparency about expectations is a big deal.

Loretta: The promising of we're gonna get you on the morning shows, you know, all of that is. Anybody that promises that is just asking for trouble as an agency. But I think many times consultants or agencies will say what clients wanna hear sometimes and that. Is a huge red flag. Now, I would rather be hired by being honest than by promising things that you can't deliver.

Loretta: Remember PR and media relations, not an influencer which is paid, or you know, in other parts of pr, which sometimes are pay for play, media relations is earned. Media earned meaning that you're telling a great story and that by virtue of the story you're telling and it's. Interest to folks, readers, uh, or viewers, they want to feature you or talk about you, and so you can't promise results.

Loretta: It's nearly impossible because you're reliant upon the good faith and the interest of people that are making decisions without you. So I've always been incredibly transparent with clients that we'll do everything we can, and maybe they don't wanna hear that. But at least we try to manage expectations with our clients, you know, at the onset of the engagement so that they're not expecting to be on the cover of Fast Company.

Loretta: I would love to put clients on the cover of Fast Company, but that's not our decision. I. So, you know when it happens, it's amazing in, in my career, we've had, you know, technologies on the cover of Time Magazine. It's awesome when it happens, but so few and far between, and especially today, there's so many startups out there.

Loretta: That's actually the context that's changed for me the most is the saturation point of startups and that there are so many new brands. Everyone thinks that their brand is the most beautiful baby in the world, right? Look at my baby. Don't you think it's the cutest baby? It may be so cute, but there are a lot of cute babies out there, and everybody thinks their baby's cute.

Loretta: They're gonna get selected to be written about by certain writers and selected by certain editors or producers to be featured. And there's no, no matter how cute your baby is. Right. You may think it is, other people may not. I think understanding that they're managing expectations on the front end of an engagement, if you're hearing promises that sound too good to be true, they probably are.

Sean Weisbrot: That brings me back to the time when I had a fundraiser who sold me the sky and gave me nothing.

Loretta: Yeah, it's dis It's so disappointing and you actually are setting yourself up for failure as an agency because. If you manage expectations and you know they're super high and you manage them out of the realm of what you're capable of, you know, it's, it's really difficult to have that conversation, I guess, when the stories don't come or there's not as many stories as you thought.

Loretta: And I think post COVID, especially in the media relations space. It's been tough to get back into the swing of how it used to be and remembering that editors are at home, you know, they're not at their desks, they're getting all sorts of packages from PR firms and publicists, you know, at their house. Like, try our product.

Loretta: You know? Um, it's really turned the media relations world a little bit on its head for a while. It's become. Harder to reach folks in general, but also the competition is super fierce because there's so many new companies and so many brands out there in every single sector. That's really the biggest point to me.

Loretta: You know, I just wrote a blog post rather recently and was interviewed as a follow up to that around kind of the top five things that startups need to succeed from a marketing standpoint. And differentiation is always at the top of my list because. That is what's going to get you noticed, right? What is the unique story that you're telling?

Loretta: How are you connecting to culture in a meaningful way? Do you have a CEO who has an amazing backstory or who has a mission that he's super passionate about that connects with people and what they're feeling or thinking right now? So elevating your story to be differentiated is going to help you to break through when you're trying to tell a story to other people.

Loretta: I mean, at the end of the day, think about yourself being pitched a story. You're being pitched this newfangled bottled water company called Splash, and you're talking to me about the packaging. And you're like, Ooh, this water is sourced from this great place. And you know, California, where they're turning water into gold and all of this stuff, you got a great story, but it's about water at the end of the day.

Loretta: It's not exciting. It's not interesting. So how can you elevate that story? Well, you connect to something values based. In culture that's happening that people wanna hear about. So if that water brand is doing something amazing for the universe at large, for humans, um, and it doesn't have to be like a buy one, give one like a Tom shoes or anything, but what if they're just super focused on the quality of.

Loretta: Water access for underprivileged kids in their community. Let's just say they go that far or in schools or something that's a little bit meatier than just pitching their product. That's the type of stories that you wanna tell.

Sean Weisbrot: So what if that bottle company had a completely black packaging with like BLM on it?

Sean Weisbrot: Or if they had like a rainbow colored bottle to support LGBT, is that virtue signaling or is that valuable, like truly valuable? Is that meaningful in any way?

Loretta: It's only meaningful when it's authentic to their brand. If their brand has a story that maybe the founder is a person of color that founded the brand and has deep roots with the Black Lives Matter community and, and they decided to do that, then I could see that that's authentic and genuine.

Loretta: There's a connection there. But if it's just taking advantage of a situation or. You know, just trying to leverage that. I, those are the things I hate. I um, I did a talk probably like five years ago around this concept called brand ambiguity that my team and I kind of coined at my last agency, and it was about brands trying to keep up with the social media content race, which still is happening today.

Loretta: And they just glom on to anything that's happening. Oh, I changed my profile picture of, you know, in honor of something that's happening in Ghana. You know, like I, how does that have anything to do with your brand? And the worst examples and offenders were, when celebrities died, I. And at one point, Cheerios, sorry, Cheerios, um, put up a, a post that when Prince died that said he was like RIP or something, and the Cheerio dotted the I, and I was just, I'm just like, Cheerios, why are you celebrate?

Loretta: Like, why are you not celebrating Prince's death? But why are you even in this conversation? Like, what does Cheerios have to do with this at all? And the answer is nothing. And so when you try to insert yourself as a brand into conversations that you don't belong in, it's the same as wrapping your bottle with something that is not authentic to your brand and who you are, at least from your ethos.

Loretta: I'm all for supporting causes as long as you make it clear that we're supporting that cause. Right, and you're not using it as a way to attract attention to you. It's more we are in support of this cause, insert cause here and we're putting money toward that, or we're gonna give exposure to an organization that maybe needs it, but we're not looking for you to give us anything in return.

Loretta: Right. It should feel altruistic. It shouldn't feel self-serving.

Sean Weisbrot: I haven't been in America for many years, so was my use of the word virtue signaling Correct in that regard?

Loretta: Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm trying to be hip with Gen Z terminology. I, I don't understand it very well. I try,

Loretta: you're doing well, and don't even get me started, by the way, on Gen Z, calling that out, right?

Loretta: Like they can smell that a million miles away when you're being inauthentic, and you just don't even want to go there with that audience. Because they will call you out and then that cancel culture may come to find you. So if you're supporting something and you really believe in it, have a breadcrumb trail back to why and have it be an authentic reason why.

Loretta: Otherwise, someone will pull back the kimono on you. And if there's nothing there, there's no there there. Then it feels just self-serving and kind of icky, I guess is a great word.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, that's one of the reasons why I have the podcast. 'cause inevitably, I feel like at some point in my career, someone's going to try to destroy me.

Sean Weisbrot: And I've had people try before when I was doing non-profit, so you better believe they're, they'll be coming after me when I do for-profit. And I just feel like people are gonna try and if they actually go through every episode of the podcast, they'll be like, damn, there's nothing here. This guy is squeaky clean because he either keeps his opinions to himself, or what he talks about is wholesome and family oriented.

Loretta: Right. Yeah. It's hard to live in today's culture where everything is hyper examined, but at the same time, companies are being held accountable, which is wonderful, and they're being pushed in directions to do things that aren't as self-serving. And that's part of also the role of PR is right, corporate communications and.

Loretta: Putting the word out about your company, not just your brand and what your company is doing, that's better for culture. You know, how are you contributing in a way outside of just ringing your cash register? And that's become such a prerequisite for brands today and companies. In fact, gen Z follows, um, probably more than any other generation ever has before, like 15 year olds are following CEOs of companies.

Loretta: To hold them accountable and following them also from brands. They love to make sure that they're putting their dollars in their heart behind companies that are doing the right thing. And I don't know about you, but when you were 15, if you ever, you know, followed CEOs on. Twitter. You know, I don't think if Twitter was around when I was 15,

Sean Weisbrot: like smartphones didn't exist until I was 22 or 23, let's put it that way.

Sean Weisbrot: Twitter wasn't around until I was like 25 I think.

Loretta: Yeah, it's kind of crazy how long it's been around, but how new it really is ultimately. But it, it definitely affects, you know, some PR agencies run all social accounts, right, for brands, and what's great is that you get tons of realtime insight. Which as a strategy person, I really appreciate because I'm always hungry to hear what people are saying about brands that I work on or what's happening with different cohorts and age groups.

Loretta: And you hear the good, the bad, and the ugly, but at least you hear the ugly quickly, you know? And you can do something about it and react to it before it becomes something bigger.

Sean Weisbrot: What kind of pricing models do PR firms use, and what amount should early stage startups expect to set aside for a PR budget?

Loretta: Every PR firm is different, right? I, I guess I could only speak to what the ideal would be is being paid fairly for what you do. That's kind of a guiding principle, and fair is a relative term. When you engage PR agencies, they have to pay for people's time to do a job. Right, that's, agency models are really built on staffing time, percentages of bodies doing different jobs.

Loretta: At seed, we have a model that actually flexes. So it can be as small as you want or as big as you want, but it's not a constant team, and that's to save startups money. So big agencies, first of all, in the PR world, they won't take anything less than like 20 KA month. On a retainer, there is an opportunity there for agencies like mine to say, well, we will, but we're going to structure differently where we're gonna have a core team for you and bring in specialists as you need them, but we're not gonna charge you to have specialists on your team for the duration, if that makes sense.

Loretta: In a traditional agency model, you're hiring a salary and you have to make sure that their percentage of their time is full. So they're put onto businesses and they're put on it for the duration. We try to just bring in different SWAT team members as needed with specializations so that they swoop in and then they swoop out.

Loretta: So that saves the client money, and so that structure is super helpful for them. As far as fees go, it's impossible to tell you how much a budget should be because every single situation is different. I think I. If you wanted to do media relations and have a decent amount of support against media relations, somewhere between, and this varies like 15 to 20 KA month, could do it.

Loretta: But again, you don't need to be on all the time, right? You may just flex in certain months where you've got news to tell, you wanna be out there. You never wanna be dark. You wanna have somebody that's there for you to field any kind of inquiries. And you also want to be able to tell stories as cultural opportunities arise.

Loretta: Um, or you have, have an opportunity that comes up that you were quoted or something like that where you're able to react to that. So you should never be dark, but you don't have to be on full blast all the time. You know? Our clients engage us. On a monthly basis where we have longer relationships, but we also have project based, you know, which is great for startups who wanna test out pr.

Loretta: Again, I think I'd mentioned like you never know how PR is going to work for your particular brand, telling your particular story at your particular time. And so understanding and testing out PR is a great thing to do. But you know, that's only the one piece of pr, which is media relations. You know, you've got influencer, you've got social, you have any kind of crisis communications, and that's why it's kind of impossible to give you a number because how that mix comes to life for your brand.

Loretta: You need to do the strategy to find out, right, like what you actually need in order to be able to achieve the results that you're looking for. So I always will say, test out pr, do a strategy. Your strategic team should be able to tell you, this is the best use of PR for you. Here's the mix that we think you should employ to get your brand out there and to be able to tell your story.

Loretta: And hopefully, even though PR is known as a top of funnel or whatever the funnel is today, it looks like it's kind of like a pipe system. But, um, you know, the top of the funnel discipline, does it drive conversion? It can. Right? It absolutely can. But there are other disciplines that probably do that better.

Loretta: So that mix is super important of understanding which pieces of the PR puzzle, you know, or the PR mix you wanna flex, um, at different times and, uh, doing different jobs ultimately. So I think the strategy and testing piece of it is a great way for startups to, to begin with PR and. Then take it from there.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there anything I haven't asked you so far that you'd like to add?

Loretta: What's the good things that I'm seeing among the startup community that I think they should keep doing? What's great about startups and what is so endemic to just the people that are starting them and running them is their fearlessness and their openness.

Loretta: And that's awesome for PR folks to work with individuals that have the balls basically to go out there and tell a story that hasn't been told before. Or to say something that may ruffle feathers, because then they will get noticed and they'll be one of those brands that people do wanna talk about. Um, the hustle and the speed, they move so fast, you know, they'll make decisions super quick.

Loretta: So if an opportunity comes up as a PR professional, you have moments. To capitalize on that, whether you're in social tweeting something back at someone, or if you're gonna go pitch media, uh, as a response to a story that you've seen out that speed and hustle is not happening with established brands. So that is certainly an advantage.

Loretta: And I do think that startups are, are quick to trust, which is lovely because as an agency, you know, you're not as. Snake oil salesman. You know, I think when I started in advertising, I read that ad agency people are like one above used car salesman. And I'm like, that's ridiculous. I totally, fundamentally disagree with that.

Loretta: Any agency person I've ever met in my life, which are many, we just wanna do great work and we want the brand to be successful. And that is like what drives our story. Souls. People in advertising and PR work so hard. Our hours are ridiculous, and yet we stay in this business and it's because we absolutely adore what we do and we love making brands shine.

Loretta: So startups are really quick to trust professionals who are willing to help them, and it makes the relationship piece of what we do so amazing. I love my clients. To death. Um, my current startup clients, not to say I haven't historically, but the trust that they have in our team, it's just great. It feels great.

Loretta: It feels like we're all in it together.