The Future of PR with Scott Baradell

– [Chris] What’s up everybody. And welcome to another episode of three minute marketing. I’m your main man Chris Mechanic here with my good buddy Scott Baradell, Scott runs an amazing B2B PR company out in the Dallas area with some awesome clients that do some fantastic work, we work with them personally. But we’re super excited to have you here, Scott, welcome to the show.

– [Scott] Thank you for having me. It’s great to see you again, and yeah, we’ve enjoyed working with you guys. You guys have done great work for some of our clients.

– [Chris] Yep. I know that you’ve been really busy lately as usual redefining the game basically we were talking earlier about basically PR and, and what it’s going to look like in the future. I know a lot of our audience here are kind of growth marketers, but I think that your take on what the future of PR looks like will be very interesting because at the end of the day, I think a lot of these things are all merging together. So let’s talk about the future of PR as you see it for three minutes and your time starts, now.

– [Scott] Okay. Well talking about the future of the profession, I mean, it is about growth. I mean, we our motto is to help. We help our clients grow through trust. And by that we mean, lead generation is great. Growth hacking is great, but without trust, nothing else matters, everything kind of hit barren ground. And so that’s our job to kind of lay the groundwork to make that ground fertile or for the efforts of legion agencies, growth marketers, and so forth. So those things are all coming together. I believe the future of PR is not going to be about media relations, where the firm, agencies are focused on media coverage. It’s got to be something broader, but it also can’t be, you know, a media relations firm that also does a bunch of marketing stuff and calls itself integrated. That’s a marketing cafeteria. That’s not a strategic focus. So what does the PR firm of the future look like? I believe PR should be thought of, something that anyone can access in terms of concept the art of securing trust at scale. So I believe the modern PR firm must be able to use all the tools of modern marketing to help clients generate market and awareness, and trust, and that’s across every marketing touchpoint. So some of the tools that I’m writing about in a new book, I’m working on called Trust Signals are trust signals. I discussed 77 of these trust signals to help build trust with your customers and other audiences, website, visitors, audiences that are important to you. I discussed them in my book, on my blog to give you a high-level overview, they fall into three basic categories. There are website trust signals, and those are elements on your website that help that are evidence points to help build trust with your customers. That’s everything from a better business bureau seal to having detailed bios and photos of the members of your team. These are all elements that build trust. Off your website, there are what I call. Inbound trust signals. This is kind of your presence online, kind of in the wild off your website. That’s your social media profiles, your activity on social media, review sites and SEO trust signals. Those are things that only Google sees, but are very important, like your back link quantity and diversity. So I think this is the framework for the modern PR firm. And I think you can see how that relates very directly to the work of growth marketers. I think the brand to building those directly into that lead generation and revenue growth.

– [Chris] A hundred percent. And that’s just about time. I do have a hundred other thoughts for you. I want you to stay on the line. I like this angle and I like the concept. And there’s so when we talk about signals, this may or may not resonate with you. We talk about, we think about the algorithmic signals that you send back to the Facebook or Google ads pixels, essentially. So basically, you know, all of our clients that are running Facebook have a Facebook pixel installed, and it’s the advertiser’s job to program that pixel to determine when to send success signals back. And there’s a whole bunch of different types of success signals that you can send back from like, view to key page, to became a lead, to purchase something, to repurchase something, to downloaded an app, whatever your KPI is, right? So, but the way that we win is that, you know, most clients, most or most advertisers will just send a trust signal back only on the, when they get a lead, like in the B2B space, they all send a trust signal back when they get a lead, we call it a like a data signal or just a success signal. They send it back on lead. But the way that we win in a lot of cases, is that we don’t send a trust signal back on lead, or we send a low value trust signal back on lead, but we’ll send a follow-up trust signal back when that lead becomes an opportunity or when that lead becomes a closed one deal. So in other words, we link CRM data and ping it back to Google ads and Facebook ads to say like, Hey, yeah, lead is okay, but really a closed one deal is what we want. So go find more people like that.

– [Scott] That’s cool.

– [Chris] So that at its, I don’t know that that’s actually a trust signal. It’s more of like, you know, data signal that you would, that you would send to algorithms.

– [Scott] To help, to help enhance your, the quality of your leads and your sales efforts. You know, what I, why we partner with a great company like you guys is what I describe, having worked with clients in transportation and logistics and having been in telecom for years before I started an agency, you’re probably familiar with the term last mile, you know, last mile delivery. We’re not a last mile delivery firm. You know, we try to build that ground and establish the relationships that can then lead to more successful lead generation. And that last mile is so obviously critically important. And that’s something you guys are incredibly good at. And so I see that what you described as being part of that to kind of maximize a revenue generation based on optimizing the quality of the audience you’re going after.

– [Chris] Yeah, yeah. We’re good at the invisible stuff, but you guys are like better at writing headlines than we are. I think.

– [Scott] Yeah. We got some formal former journalists on staff. And so we’re kind of used to that world.

– [Chris] Just let the users know or let the listeners know rather, where they can find you, how they can learn more about your book or maybe you might give away free copy to some listeners.

– [Scott] Absolutely. Well, now the book isn’t out yet, but it doesn’t come out till later this year, however, trustsignals.com is a thought leadership site I’ve been working on for over a year now. There’s a lot of practical information on how to just practical ways to build trust with your customers, prospects, other audiences, reputation management stuff, how not to get canceled, all the things that are kind of going on right now in terms of building and protecting your reputation we talk about on the site.

– [Chris] Brilliant. That’s a great URL. Trustsignals.com. All right, well, I’m going to check it out. I’m sure a lot of the listeners will too. And thank you for joining us today.