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hello and welcome to hr connections our channel is dedicated to finding success factors of professionals and business owners at the top of their game in our series global achievers we seek out and we speak to those top professionals and business owners from around the world in today's episode we have pollyanna brown she owns a pr agency in the u.s and today she will be discussing with us on how to evaluate a pr agency if you're considering on hiring one for your business how to measure your results of success and finally how to get earned organic media so stick around we'll be right back [Music] [Music] well hello this is going to be a very exciting episode for sure uh i have the lovely pollyanna brown with us um she has been in the entertainment business since she was six months old literally she had a modeling contract before she could even walk or talk so uh pollyanna how are you today i'm doing really well thank you so much for having me i'm stoked to be here okay awesome i know you're gonna add a lot of value to our audience and um you know i think this will be a great episode so let's just get started uh tell us about the early years you know the modeling contract even before you could walk or talk so let's begin with that absolutely so i grew up in the 80s and the 80s was the years of pageantry and so my mom put me into a beauty contest when i was six months old shockingly enough i won and it came with a modeling contract so i started modeling that young and continued to do beauty contests and things like that and then as i got older i started acting and singing and doing theater and all that kind of stuff so it really just kind of built from there okay awesome perfect and after that obviously you went on to complete uh several degrees from my understanding right a couple of masters as well and um what basically led you into public relations if we can get there absolutely so as a performer i really loved storytelling and it was just such an integral part of who i am and how i interact with the world and especially because i have a deep belief that storytelling can change the world it can change our hearts and our minds and our perspectives and all of that is so beautiful and amazing and so with that i went into my first master's degree which was a masters in psychology and i had wanted to be a writer but it wasn't something that i felt confident necessarily in pursuing because i'd been performing for so long so it was a bit of a fish out of water even though i had always had a strong knack for it and it was always in my wheelhouse so i was talking to my professor and she said paula your papers are really good you should write articles and i went okay and it kind of gave me this permission slip to go after writing articles for magazines and so i started pitching and within about 90 days i was published on four continents around the world getting paid to do it which was really fun and all of a sudden i had this confidence in my writing and in the publicity aspect in journalism and so i went back to my professor and i thanked her for the advice and she just kind of laughed at me she was like polly i'm an academic journals not practicing so i was like oh oops um so that was the oops that completely changed the trajectory of my life and so as that journalism career evolved eventually i was helping business owners tell their stories and connect online and use storytelling in order to do that and eventually they started asking me how to get publicity on their own and i went oh yeah this is a service isn't it it wasn't something i expected to do and so we started serving our clients utilizing the publicity skills that i had already been utilizing for years so it was really powerful okay perfect so um i guess um your journey into the pr space or you know setting up your own agency that was way back uh if i recall currently was that 2015 so yes in 2015 is when i started the business with the storytelling aspect and then my amazing business partner came into the picture in i think late 2016 early 2017 and we kind of got together and put together a full functioning um all hands on deck uh marketing and media firm which was absolutely phenomenal so i no longer had to do it on my own okay perfect and what are some of the services that you're providing absolutely so we cover everything from marketing to messaging to monetizing media and we also do ghost writing for books and things like that so we do anything from strategy and you know teaching diy stuff for people who really want to implement in-house and we also do the done with you stuff where people are learning but having us by their side as they implement and we go all the way up to done for you where clients are a little more hands off when we do all the heavy lifting okay perfect and um in terms of want to ask like your popular services right you know what are most of the popular services which are available by clients absolutely so i would say our most popular services are are done for you publicity and are done for you ghostwriting and so the done view publicity really focuses on getting a custom media mix getting people out into the world where their audiences are hungry so that way they can have their message making the biggest impact and really driving that traffic over to their platform to expand it to bring in new leads new clients all that beautiful stuff and then our done for you ghost writing really focuses on how do we build a platform with a traditionally published book and we do everything from soup to nuts and we really focus on getting the idea and the concept right and getting that outline done then we do all of the writing the book proposal we go after the agents for them we send those queries and we make sure that it's the right fits and then we stay on all the way through publishing and helping them edit and all of those things so it's really comprehensive packages okay perfect and um how would you recommend a potential client who wanted to evaluate a pr agency yes so when you're looking to get publicity it's really important to kind of know the rules and the regulations and all of those things so just like you would learn them for marketing and what's legal what's not legal what's ethical what's not ethical those are really important pieces especially because publicity is a form of marketing so there are two different forms there is paid which is advertising and then there's organic and free which is publicity and your social media and other pieces of content marketing and so you want to make sure that if you're going to an agency that you're asking the questions of do they pay for their media placements if they do it's actually buying advertorials and other pieces of advertising instead of getting that free organic publicity which is really more of what you want so you want to know that first of all the second thing that you want to ask is do they know what journalistic ethics are if they cannot tell you what journalistic ethics are run and not because they're bad but because that just is someone who's really new to the space who doesn't know the rules and it's really easy to break the rules when you don't know what they are and a lot of people don't even know to look into them to see what they are so it's not that there's this big bad wolf out to get to it's just there's some ignorance in the space so that's a really great way to make sure that you're on the right track with who you're hiring okay perfect so that actually leads me to a couple of different questions um i think the first question would be that um as you've said that there are two pieces to it one is the organic which is free another one is the paid so on top of that obviously there are agency fees which someone needs to pay right so essentially if someone is using paid advertising there are two pieces to it there is the paid part which goes to uh the different platforms i'm assuming right and then there's the agency fee whereas organic you're just paying the fee to the agency correct absolutely and just to kind of differentiate it a little bit more the feed to the agency is really covering their time and their effort and their experience all of those things that are going to help you get those results faster take it off of your plate which is different than paying for actual placement those are completely different things right right got it so um coming back to that part what would you say the market rates are or how do you actually charge your clients so market rates vary on the lower end you can get some done for your publicity for about four thousand a month and those are usually younger firms um and they don't always have the best results and especially at that price point you're probably not gonna find guaranteed results um other places can charge upwards of ten thousand twenty thousand and more a month and with a six month you know term minimum so it really depends there is a lot of fluidity in there and again that is experience and what they specialize in and all those kinds of things and then for us we do it per package so we do packages based on how many placements we're going to give our clients um and we don't specify the outlets um that's one of those really important differentiating factors um you can't really do that it's it's not really possible to organically promise specific outlets so we do placements we work until those placements are done and we do those from anywhere from uh 12.5 000 all the way up to 100 000 depending on how many placements are involved okay all right got it so um if i wanted to get published on forbes you wouldn't possibly guarantee that right no okay no especially right now no okay so um what would you say then about certain companies who are going ahead and actually advertising that if you wanted to get on bloomberg or forbes or yahoo or any of these popular ones right how are they actually guaranteeing that for a certain amount of money you will get published in those publications so i'm going to be very delicate in handling this answer okay but most often agencies that are promising specific outlets are doing one of a couple things one they are getting um those advertorials that we talked about which they're paying for placement which is above board when it's an advertorial it's marked as sponsored it's marked an ad and all of that and that's appropriate the the issue is they don't always tell their clients that that what it is that's what it is um and so there's a little gray area there the other thing is there are a lot of agencies acting illegally and in the united states we have what's called the ftc which is the federal trade commission and the federal trade commission states that we are not allowed to pay for placement without it being marked and many of these big publications have rules for their contributors that they are not allowed to accept payment for placement it's a big rule that they have they have to sign a contract and everything and what has happened is a lot of these agencies are paying contributors under the table illegally in order to get those results so if someone's offering you a specific publication with a price point i would be very leery and very careful okay perfect i think that also leads to something you said earlier about ethics and following the rules and things like that because i think you know most business owners or solopreneurs someone who's looking for some publicity out there this is one of their comparators like on one of these uh publications and they figured you know what uh we have the same set of qualifications maybe the same type of clients we're working in the same space so if that person got published why can't i right but but as you rightfully said that more experienced agencies follow a set of guidelines and rules correct and i think that is also very important because what could be some of the blowbacks to for example a small business owner or somebody who who is using one of these services in your opinion so the blowback can be really intense it's more intense for the publicity agency that's engaging in the practices um because the clients don't always know so that's one of the important pieces is the clients don't always know they really are victims in the situation um and so that's really sad however if there are two main things that could happen um with the agency where the publication could bring up charges against the agency and so could the ftc because ftc guidelines are laws they're not there we refer to them as rules because it's a little nicer word but they're they're actually laws and and fully enforceable so that is one of the important things with that as far as blowback uh the placement that you paid for is taken down a lot of the time so that thing that you just paid 10 000 for is now gone and you got nothing out of it um so that's something that can happen the other thing is your reputation being associated with that other place can be tainted and those are things that can heal with time those aren't the things that i would worry about the thing i would worry about is um being blacklisted that happens so if you're someone who's known to pay for placement you will get blacklisted across the board if an editor finds out so that's really important the second thing is you could lose your standing with the publication even if you didn't know so if you wanted to do it the right way after they may not ever accept you so those are really important on top of the placement being lost all together so any potential benefit that you would have had long term is now gone so it's really a short-sighted play to engage in anything like that okay okay perfect that's so uh well said and i think it should also serve as a reminder for a lot of people who may not actually know what the consequences are right because a lot of people are not very well educated in this uh in this space so to speak right um so i think one of the key things which has been brought about with uh just talking to you is that how do you um sort of create and maintain those relationships with these different media outlets so i'm going to give you the weird answer because when i do this for clients i actually pitch as them because what i have found is that media people cannot stand publicity people on average and it's because they operate differently there's right there's a different thought process there's a whole different system of values and so it can get a little contentious um and so i like to teach my people that we're building their relationships with the media instead of building mine which doesn't do a whole lot for them especially if i mess something up if i accidentally offended someone if i you know made someone angry at some point then that's not going to help you so we want to make sure that we're avoiding that as much as possible and so when i pitch for my clients we're building their media contacts from scratch and then i hand them over at the end of the package unless they renew in which case we just keep going and that i find is much more empowering for the client because that way they actually have their media contacts they're not you know beholden to me in order to you know have access to that and they can continue building those relationships over time which are really precious things to have so it's more about showing up understanding what the editor um or the media professional really cares about which is usually their audience and so if you put their audience first and put yourself on the back burner then you earn the right to engage with them and that's something that they look for they really want to know that you know their audience you care about their audience and can bring significant value and when you do that the relationships really easy peasy from there okay perfect uh very well said um i think the next thing that i would want to know and uh i know we have discussed this briefly is um talking about success because ultimately that's what our channel is about we look at success factors uh not only for the professionals and the business owners but also their impact on their clients so um i believe you wanted to share um a success story for one of your clients absolutely and if it's okay can we touch really quickly on the difference between getting success with it and not sure absolutely let's start off with that and then we'll lead into the story itself cool so there are definitely people that i talk to every day who have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on publicity to not get anything and that can be anything from not getting placements to their placements not yielding anything for the business and so it's really important to know what are the factors that create that success and go from there and so the first factor that really matters is making sure you're in the right place it's really easy to go local hunting as i call it which is you know going after the big names and really focusing on having these impressive logos on your website or on your sales page or your social media wherever it happens to be but it can lose sight of are you in the right place because if you are not in the place where your audience is hungry and asking questions then you're in the wrong place because that space is the place where they can actually hear you when they are actively searching on an outlet for the solutions that you provide and then you show up there it becomes a very kismet type relationship for them and they can follow that over to your platform or your offers or whatever it happens to be and so that becomes a very positive experience for them but for example if i had a client who was a marketing expert i would not put them in cosmo in order to get clients and leads right it's one thing if we have a personal story that's just really important to them right and a part of their soul that they really want to talk about that's a different thing but if you're looking to make sales get leads get clients then you want to make sure you're in the hungry spaces where you belong where your audience can hear you instead of in the places where they're playing and they're not paying attention to you so that's the first piece the second piece is you need some type of conversion content so it's not really a great idea to send people to your website they can get distracted they can click around and then click away and you really want to make sure that you're getting them on your email list and capturing that lead and from that thank you page on your email list you can send them to your social media or wherever you want them to go and that's totally fine um but you want to have that journey structured a bit and once you have those systems and processes in place then it can be leveraged for you so those are the things that you want to be thinking about that really create the success and that goes into the types of publicity that you choose because some types are more leverageable than other types um but we've had great success with our clients and one of our clients she had a massive package and on her second article that we had out she followed her leveraging plan she made the right calls with everything and she ended up making 20 000 in new business within the second article so that was a huge success and another one of our clients let us know that about 20 to 30 percent of her leads are coming from the articles that we put out so it's a really powerful way to build your platform and actually get clients in the door awesome that was uh that was very inspiring so um just so that you know everyone's clear on that um basically what you're saying is that the client we just uh talked about um twenty thousand dollars that is the new business which was generated as a result of you guys publishing a couple of different articles the leads came from there correct yes the leads came from the articles and we also did we do a leveraging plan with every client and so i let them know the different ways to leverage their publicity in order to bring new people in and so not only did it result in new leads that were completely brand new but it also got some people off of the fence who were considering working with this person in order to make that decision the article was kind of that defining factor of oh you work this way i see you more clearly this sounds like it will work for me and it helped to close those sales as well okay awesome um what kind of structure do you have in place um at your agency for executing these projects so this is where my nerd is gonna show a bit i i am a sci-fi fantasy nerd and i like to have systems that are really simple and so we have something in place called the big book of dnd and so instead of dungeons and dragons it stands for deadlines and deliverables and what we have in that is it's one document that really tracks their entire program so it tracks all of their story ideas it tracks all of their bios it tracks all the outlets that we're going after it has a timeline associated it has the drafts of the articles and them published it it is a one-stop shop so that everything is hyperlinked in one home base and what it allows us to do is it allows us to see what story ideas are working which ones aren't working where do we need to pivot how do we need to change things up and all of that is so vital so having it in that one space is really really powerful okay perfect um i think um you know we we're sort of gonna be winding down um this um exciting conversation um so one of the things i guess i wanted to know is how have you seen pr morphing over the years because you know many years ago and you know you can correct me if i'm mistaken but i thought of pr as getting your article published on a newspaper or maybe a news outlet covering you right maybe for tv or newspaper or a magazine that's what pr was at least to me years ago but with you know digital media social media and so many other forms of media these days how have you seen it morphed and what is it today it is so powerful today there's really never been a better time to get publicity there's never been more opportunity and the beautiful thing about digital media um is it lives forever it's indexed it's seo driven which is we could all use more seo power in our lives and it's such a beautiful thing because what we're finding is that the stories of rags to riches and making millions and all those things they're not really impressive anymore and it's because so many people are doing it which is a beautiful thing to have more millionaires than we've had in previous years and for those to not be astonishing stories it's really powerful and one of the biggest shifts that we've seen is a lot of media outlets are shifting their digital media from free to paid subscriptions and so what this means is now their audience has to pay for the content that they were used to getting for free so a lot of the fluff pieces and a lot of the click baity pieces are going away in order to get really serious value in because what the editors want to see is their um subscribers really getting significant transformations and coming back to the platform over and over and over again because that's where they're generating their revenue now whereas it used to be ad revenue that pushed it and that was predominantly from the paid subscriptions for physical magazines and what they could charge for the ad space now that that's shifted they need new revenue models and new revenue models have required higher value articles so this is perfect for anyone who is an expert who is a thought leader or who has any kind of expertise that they can share it's a really really great opportunity okay awesome um i think one of the final things that i would want to know from you is that who should pursue a career in pr oh that's such a good question i would say if you really love people and you are more of a behind the scenes person it is a really good fit especially if you're a writer or if you have a strategic mind that is very human based because it's a very connection forward space um and you wouldn't think it is because it can feel a little stark at times and people can be a little short but it's just because they're super busy it's not personal um but in working with clients i feel like i'm always going to champion them and i'm fighting for their message and i'm you know fighting to get them in the right places and in order to do that you have to genuinely care it's not just something to pick up a paycheck you need to understand the different storytelling angles you need to understand the strategy behind it and you really need to care about the people because you're making a long-term commitment with your clients and so in order for them to have the best experience possible and for you to get them the best results possible you have to be relationship oriented as well as creative and strategic so if you are a mix of those and you are very interested in learning media and things like that then it's probably a good fit for you awesome thank you so much um i think um i'm just gonna end with a bonus question if that's okay with you say as a small business owner right um you know maybe a coach uh or maybe a local moving business or a cleaning business they could definitely use some uh pr and organic pr as well right um what would you recommend for them because you know their budget is tight um they are not really sure which route to take so in that case i'm sure you've dealt with clients such as these so what would you recommend so for me what i recommend is i recommend getting a really really great training program that you can either do on your free time or you can hire a va to really master that for you and bring it in-house those are the ways that it's going to be more leverageable and because publicity is one of those things that really can blow you up especially in a local market which is great and um the way that we do it we focus on regular recurring publicity so getting people in the media once a week or more is really the ideal that we strive for and so there are particular strategies that you can use for that and so having someone in your business who is taking that off of your plate but that you don't have to pay the same fees you would an agency that is a really great way to go it's cost effective and especially if that person is willing to commit to you for a long time and you're interested in a lifetime relationship with them it's a much easier way to get those benefits without having the high cost that an agency can have okay perfect perfect um so if anyone wanted to find you what would be the best way to get in touch with you absolutely hit me up on social media that is the best place pretty much everywhere i am at pollyanna rights and i am also sending you that uh checklist link so if anyone wants to kind of have a checklist for their publicity and know what level of publicity they're at as well as some really cool tips and tricks then you will have my email directly from that checklist so that's another great way to get a hold of me okay perfect so um all her contact information is gonna be uh in the description box below uh definitely reach out to her if you have any uh pr needs if you wanna discuss strategy on how to grow your business or get through organic media and things like that um thank you so much for your time today i really appreciate that i know you've given a lot of value to your audience and i'm sure they appreciate it as well thank you again for your time thank you so much for having me it was an absolute pleasure thanks for watching really appreciate that if you like what you saw then hit the like button it really helps with youtube's algorithm if there's a particular type of professional you want featured on our channel then leave a comment below and we'll try our best and finally we'll be posting at least once or twice every week so if you want to see similar kind of videos then subscribe to the channel thanks again for watching and we'll see you on the next one