Why Companies Should Add More Focus To Their PR Efforts With Christine Wetzler

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is why companies should add more focus to their PR efforts. Today's guest is the president of Petrila PR Marketing, a Forbes entrepreneur contributor and managing editor of boostfrontline.com. A big welcome to Christine Petrila-Wetzler.

00:25 Christine Wetzler Hi, Christine. Hi, thanks for having me.

00:28 Andy Splichal Thanks for coming on. Now, when we're talking PR, I guess let's start with your firm. It offers numerous services. I see there's media relations, content creation, social media, web development, digital marketing and paid placements. Do most companies need all these services?

00:44 Christine Wetzler Collective, yes. So all companies should be doing something marketing and PR related, but does each company need every single one? No. There are some that probably don't make sense for certain companies and some that would be very beneficial. But I think that's why you hire a good marketing person so they can tell you what to spend your money on and what not to.

01:16 Andy Splichal So with all these services now in 2023, what do you think typically is gonna be the best way for a company to connect with their target customers?

01:26 Christine Wetzler So it's funny, I say this a lot to new clients and even existing clients I've had for a number of years, but I believe that the closer you can get to a personalized opportunity with each one of your customers, whether they're a new lead, top of the funnel or you're closing them, they wanna speak to people. They wanna speak to people that know what they're talking about and they don't wanna feel shuffled around. And so I think the goal this day and age is to try and leverage technology, be able to do that to scale, but still offer that hands-on white glove, if you will, experience for your customers. So they feel like they're connecting you and your brand.

Andy Splichal So PR, how do you define that at your agency?

Christine Wetzler So for us, it's media relations and anything that will help us generate third-party credibility. So it could be an event, it could be a speaking engagement. Most of the time, I'd say 95% of the time, it's speaking engagements, media relations, writing contributed content or contributing to an article somebody else is writing. I'm sure everyone's heard of that called thought leadership. It's a nice, positive word. But yeah, so that's how we define PR. And I think it's hard though, because a lot of people will also include other things than that. But I would say if you're trying to get credibility with the effort that you're making, then that's very closely aligned with PR.

03:15 Andy Splichal Now, how important is the PR and the media relations and how exactly do you even go about measuring an ROI on that effort?

03:27 Christine Wetzler Yeah, it's hugely important, hugely, because if you think about it, you could have a very good product, a very good service, but if nobody knows who you are, it's gonna be tough. And second to that, if people know who you are, but nobody's ever said anything or given a third party, you know, tap that you're the one to work with, it's also not gonna work. You know, people want to feel safe making decisions. And so whether it's a candy bar or PR services or whatever it is, they're gonna look for the credibility, excuse me, out in the marketplace. And so that has to be part of a plan, whether you do it by calling up Forbes and saying, hey, I'm ready to be quoted if you want. Now that's a different discussion, but you definitely need to build credibility in order to market yourself. It's just, you can't have one without the other.

04:32 Andy Splichal Is the old saying, there's no such thing as bad press, do you think that's true?

04:40 Christine Wetzler Sometimes, I wouldn't say all the time. It, you know, it's like everything else. When we first started doing SEO, you know, there were all kinds of like the wild west. And then now we have a black hat, white hat tactics. And I think PR is kind of that way too. There are some times when, if you're a celebrity, if there are certain situations where that saying is true, because as long as your name is in the paper, as long as your brand is in the paper, it's, that's what you want. I don't think there's a lot of people that want that and don't want to manage the negative side of it. It is difficult to manage, even for people who've done it for years and years. Like I have a crisis, Tom, and negative listening is a tough thing to manage. But so the answer is no, it's not correct. It's just for most people, it's not correct. You want to focus on positive PR that you can get out there not really have to deal with the negative. You can get away with it.

05:52 Andy Splichal In your experience, how much attention do you think that most companies give to their public relations, to their media relations?

05:56 Christine Wetzler I don't think they give enough. I'm an avid reader, avid reader, avid social media user because of the work that I do. And I can see very clearly who's doing it right, who's doing it wrong. It is something that it shouldn't be that difficult if you have the right partners, if you have the right people doing it. It's something that needs to be ingrained in to your kind of operating procedures. So I think the short answer to that is no, I don't think companies are doing enough. And I think a lot of them are misled into thinking that they don't have to do anything proactively. You just react to whatever is happening. And I can't tell you enough how untrue that is. Reacting to something is the worst strategic situation to be in. So working on proactive PR, even if it's just rivals every week, every day, that help you keep the platform there. So when something bad does happen, you have a platform to stand on, to use, to protect yourself. I wish I could give you examples, but obviously because of confidentiality, I can't, but it is so hard to scrape up the pieces in a reactive scenario. Whereas playing offense is a lot easier in my opinion. So.

07:38 Andy Splichal So in playing offense, what are some of the top ways that you have found to get your clients PR?

07:48 Christine Wetzler Well, the first thing that you have to do, everybody has to, and this is for personal branding too, is decide the top three to five things you want to get across. So, if you want people to know that you are, you can quickly write things. You're not intimidated by deadlines or whatever it is, your five things. So, whoever you talk to, anything you participate in, goes back to telling people about those, that handful of messages. And that is the, that's the crux of PR. That will inform the rest of your strategy, because I think that most people or most brands know where their customers live. They know where they are. So, if they're on Facebook, you're going to do this on Facebook. If they're on TikTok, you're going to do it on TikTok. You know, it's not, it's not, there's no magic button. There is a magic button for each strategy, but if you, if you make the, make the error of thinking that it's, it's just a silver bullet that everyone has, and you just need to get your hands on it, it's not like that. It has to be personalized to the company and to their, the journey they want people to take. So, I would say the first thing you have to do is start with the messaging and work backward from there. You know, what are the best ways to get those messages across? And it will become clear whether you're a PR person or not.

09:24 Andy Splichal So, what are those best ways, after you have gotten those three to five messages on what you want to communicate about yourself or about your business, how do you start getting that out there?

09:37 Christine Wetzler So, I think the first way is to make sure that all of your bio material, all of your website materials, everything, not only radiates those messages, really gives a good sense of what people are gonna get from interacting with you or your brand. So, you know, one of my favorite things to do, and this is really easy, is to put whatever it is up on SurveyMonkey, you know, take the brand out, of course, or retract it. But we've done this with websites, we've done this with ads, we've done this with all kinds of things. Be creative for Google Ads. Just throw it up on SurveyMonkey and ask, you know, 50 to 100 people, tell me what you think about this company or tell me what you think about this person or whatever it is that we're trying to communicate about and see what feedback comes back. Because you'd be surprised how different it can be. And then, you know, you can also see when people don't do that, you know, everyone's seen the ads on TV or the social media gaffes when somebody kind of steps in it. It's because they didn't do that. It's because they didn't have. And, you know, the old way of doing things was focus groups and these big coordinated things. You don't have to go that far. SurveyMonkey work, mechanical torque work, it's cheap. You can just ask, that's the big question. What do you think this company does by reading this ad? And if you don't get the answer back, you need to change it.

11:16 Andy Splichal Yeah, that's a great tip. So SurveyMonkey is the name of the tool. I've used PickFoo for different things, kind of similar. I don't know if you've heard of that one. Yeah. So I've been focusing quite a bit this year with my guest discussing the customer experience. And you had brought that up earlier in the show. But in your opinion, how much should a company focus their resources on customer acquisition versus the customer experience?

11:46 Christine Wetzler I think it needs to be half and half because it's easier and more cost effective to keep customers. So, you know, when you're doing lead gen, you wanna make sure that you're doing it, quote unquote, properly, so that the people that are coming into your funnel are, you're gonna get an ROI for the most part out of those leads. And then once you have leads, that's the way to keep them, right? Is the customer experience. How do you talk to them? What resources do you offer them? Are they confused about what you're doing? Again, I think, you know, 20 years ago when I started, a lot of companies do NPS reports to do this. It was kind of a lower tech way of just continually asking customers, what do you think? How did this look for you? And we've kind of gotten away from that because of social media and technology. Everything's just much more immediate, which is great. But I think it's pulled a lot of marketing groups back from asking those questions regularly. And we need to get back to that. So I would say do your own NPS. It's taking, you know, like put a QR code on your packaging, says, did you really like this? Let us know, you know, and make it short. Don't ask them 30 questions, just ask them two. You know, did it meet your needs? Did you enjoy opening up? Yes, yes, great. And then that way from marketing standpoint, at least you're getting some feedback and you're also fostering a culture of feedback that you can then put in for refining your lead gathering process. Because everything that you learn on both sides is gonna help you improve the people that stay in your ecosystem, you know, the leads that stay in your ecosystem. But I would definitely say it's half and half because you have to do one to get the other. If you get, if you don't spend a lot of time on lead gen and you push a bunch of people in your funnel that aren't gonna be, you know, valuable to your company, it really doesn't matter what the customer experience is because they're not there that have that experience for the right reason. So, you know, I think you have to keep both of them at the top of your strategy.

14:07 Andy Splichal So you had mentioned getting customer feedback through a QR code saying, do you like this? What have you found a response rate to be like using something, that kind of tactic?

14:17 Christine Wetzler You know, it depends. We get, you know, people are obviously a lot more inclined to do that kind of stuff because they're just more tech savvy in general. I also think that, and I include myself in this because I've owned my company for 20 years and been doing this for 25. And so I'm old enough now to say that I'm one of the older generation that remember before social media. So it is hard for me sometimes to automatically think about greeting somebody or, you know, it's not in my workflow the way it is for my nieces and nephews who are in college. So, you know, I think it's hard to say because it really depends on the medium. You know, my B2B clients, you're not gonna get a lot of QR code stamps. You're just not. What about B2C? Oh, B2C, yes. We have a lot of, well, so our clientele is usually food and bed. And so we're in the wellness space and also sustainability. So our audiences are very in tune. It's, you know, part of the value of working with our clients is because they want, you know, a tea that has sustainable packaging, or they want, you know, a cocktail that does, is gluten-free and doesn't have a lot of calories. You know, they're already interested in consumers. And so we do get, I would say for us, success would be around the three or 4% mark. If we were to send out, you know, say we got re-blanketed most of our customers with an email blast or, you know, something like that, I would say that our sweep thought for an actual download or, you know, a survey or something like that would be in that, you know, two to 5%. But that's because we also counsel our clients not to pepper people with things that they don't want. So we do, we usually do a tiered notification system, especially with the B2C clients, because it can get out of hand really quickly. And those emails then end up turning back or those outreaches end up turning back, you know, 20, 25, 30% engagement. So, yeah, it really depends on the audience, you know, that you're going after. And also that you're asking them something relevant to them.

17:08 Andy Splichal So for your e-commerce clients, where do you find, typically is the most profitable marketing channel for lead gen?

17:13 Christine Wetzler Again, it varies, depends on who the target is. If you're targeting, you know, household people, like say for a cleaning product or something you'd use around the house, curtains, rugs, houseware, things like that. It's gonna be a lot different than if you're talking about an electronic device. It's just inherently gonna be different. So it's kind of hard to say what works the best all the time. But I can say there are a lot of companies that do it well. One company, we don't work with them, but I really love their marketing, is a women's face care line called Fresh. They do a fantastic job of talking to customers via email, offering the right kind of giveaways, offering the right kind of support without devaluing their brand, because it's not a completely expensive. It's not as they lauder expensive, but it is more than what you would buy at Target or, you know, it's more in line with the support or, you know, it's more in line with the Sephora. Andy Splichal And what media channels are they using?

Christine Wetzler They're using email and social for the most part. So- Facebook. That's right, yeah. Facebook, Instagram, and, or so Meta, and emails are their biggest thing. I also think they don't bother me and I love them for it with tech.

Andy Splichal Oh, you're not a fan. You're not a fan of SMS.

Christine Wetzler No, not really, no. The only thing that I am is if there's a way to act on it personally. So like, for instance, another good example is World Market, the store. We have one down the street. They send texts about in-store promotions. That is very valuable because I can actually do something about that. I may be at the grocery store already or somewhere else, get the text and go, oh, I can go over there if they're giving 30% off today. You know, that's, but if it's a situation where I'm in the grocery store, I get a text and it's not something I can stop and do anything about, it's just, it's gonna get lost. And so I think your, you know, texts really have to be a local situation more than anything. Now there are people that can fight me about that and I understand, but with my experience in the food and bev and beauty industries, it's gotta be a local, it's gotta be a pop-up shop, it's gotta be something you can react to personally.

20:13 Andy Splichal What about SMS in the customer journey, like your order is shipped or your order's out for delivery today?

20:21 Christine Wetzler As long as it's not every single time. So we've seen where if you email or text once or twice about shipping, you're good. You know, the open rates are good. Once you start getting into three, four, five, eight emails about it, then the efficacy starts falling. So again, it comes back to strategy. Yes, you want your clients, your customers to have a good visibility into the journey that they're on, but you also don't wanna overdo it because that can do more damage than you really wanna have to deal with.

20:58 Andy Splichal So you had mentioned you're an avid reader. Have there been any business books out there that you could attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

21:06 Christine Wetzler Oh yeah, gosh. So I think I mentioned that this year and so it's kind of weird to recommend this book, but it is such a good refresher. It goes back to so many fundamentals that you kind of forget over time that you need to do that occasionally. Profit First is a fantastic book for that. I mean, I think, you know, we've started putting together some kind of side line businesses or different P&L centers for us. And that has just been amazing to be able to come back and get like back down to basic and get my head more grounded. So Profit First is a fantastic book for that. Another one that's really good is the E-Myth. I think it's been updated, the E-Myth revisited now and they have one for every industry. Love that book, same thing. Super simple, super easy to read, but it has some of the most fundamentally based and I just find that those things, even though they're basic, they have a tendency to bring you back out of the weeds and say, actually, that's right. I don't need to worry about that or I don't need to spend money on that. I'm gonna pair back. So I'm always gonna favor kind of those classics, but not unlike marketing, you gotta go with what works for you. What's going on in your head and what you need help with first is where to start with that. So next year you could ask me to be something different.

22:57 Andy Splichal Now, do you have a favorite success story of a client that you could share?

23:00 Christine Wetzler I've had so many. When I first started, we had clients for eight, 10 years. So I can definitely say a lot of that stuff. One of the companies that I worked with that I really enjoyed sounds kind of weird because we're focused on sustainability now, but I was a fractional CMO for a public pool company. I loved that role and so did my team just because we were given the opportunity to basically touch every single bit of the marketing from website copy to annual report copy to everything. And so, just like anybody else that is excited about their job and grateful to do it, that opportunity was a fantastic one. And that's, even the crisis management and stuff was, we got to do all of that. So in terms of ones that I've enjoyed or had a success story from, I would say that's probably the biggest one. Lately though, I'm really proud of all the stuff we've done on the food and beverage side. We have a client called Taskin Kettle. They have alcohol in their drink. And so for the people listening that do this kind of thing, you know that that is fraught with a lot of obstacles, especially on the PR side. Just can't talk about it, can't email about it, can't do certain things. The rules are really prohibitive. So the fact that we have gotten traction with them, that's something I'm really proud of

24:48 Andy Splichal Absolutely. So how is Petrilla PR, how do you think, or how are you different than the competition? What are you offering that the competitors might not be?

25:02 Christine Wetzler I think for me as a business owner, this is what I believe is the most important. And that's that, well, first of all, we're all senior leaders. So there's no like, you talk to me and you love what I say. And then I read even five people that are interns or whatever come in and start doing the work. We don't work that way. If you're talking to me in the pitch, I'm working with you. And so that's number one. With the gig economy now, that's not super different than a lot of people. I think the thing that is super different is that we pick and choose our clients too, just because there's two of us at the core. So obviously we can't pick everybody. Yeah, bandwidth issues. Exactly, and we don't want to because I don't wanna get to that point where we're 60 people and I don't know what's going on on any of the accounts. Unless somebody comes in my office every week and tells me that's not the kind of agency that I want. So we get a chance to pick and choose who we wanna work with and if we wanna take on those challenges. And I think that puts us in a much more transparent position with our clients. And I think, I hope that when you ask them that they find that very helpful because we're more of a partner rather than a vendor at that point.

Andy Splichal And how does your fee structure work?

Christine Wetzler That's a good question. So we do value billing. Value billing. Yeah, we do value billing. So I have some people that do bill a little less and would additionally bill a little less per hour. But because the majority of us, Alicia and I are senior leaders, we bill like a blended rate for value billing. But what I do is if we've been working together for a long time, this is usually how it goes. After three months or so, we take a look at how many hours we've spent and what we've accomplished and say, why don't we kind of take the median of that and then use that as a retainer. And so we will create a retainer based on value. So the value for us is we can get a longer term contract with a set amount of money every month. The value to clients is they've already had best friends. They know we're doing what we need to do. They know we're already succeeding and they know how much time it takes to do that. And so we're not coming out of the gate saying, oh, it's gonna cost 10 grand a month then take it or leave it. Like we don't do that. So we start small.

28:03 Andy Splichal How much do you charge in those first three months while you're figuring out what value?

28:07 Christine Wetzler So we charge $175 an hour. But we bill on the quarter hour. So yeah, it's a lot of, if I make a phone call, one phone call, we're not gonna bill you an hour for that. It's just silly. So, but the value billing makes it a lot easier because then the other thing that we're doing a little differently and some of my PR friends probably scream at the computer when they hear me say this is we're taking a look at some of the things that like traditionally used to happen in PR and billing and kind of turning that on its head. So one of the old ways of doing things with like press releases, for instance, was to say, okay, well, when we bill a press release we can never bill less than four hours because the press releases have to do. For certain things, yes. The thing is press releases take a while even if you do them on the same day and the news moves faster than that sometimes. So, I mean, there are times when you legally have to put out a press release, so that's a different story. But do press releases work in general? If you have a good strategy behind it, yes. It can't be the only thing you ever do. I see a lot of people like that. They just put it up on business wire and think that's plenty, it's not. And it looks exactly like you're paying somebody to do your homework, that you can tell by looking at it. So I wouldn't recommend doing it unless you had a strategy behind it.

29:45 Andy Splichal Now, who is the perfect client? You had mentioned Food and Bev. Is there any other verticals that you guys work with or who's out there, if they're listening now they should pick up the phone and give you guys a call?

30:03 Christine Wetzler Yeah, I think anybody in the CPG or the consumer product space that is interested in kind of their value proposition not just in selling, because everybody wants to sell their product, right? But a lot of our clients have a greater mission. Doesn't have to be philanthropic, but a lot of them have sustainability effort that they're trying to bring into their communications. And then on the B2B side, same thing. We work with a lot of packaging companies, a lot of professional services companies that want to capture a certain kind of customer. And they're more like us where they're okay saying to the wrong customer, it's okay, we just can't help you. They're willing to walk away from things that don't work for them. Those are the kinds of customers that we want on both sides, B2B and B2C here.

31:06 Andy Splichal And how can an interested listener learn more about value or working with you?

31:12 Christine Wetzler Yeah, our website, which is p-i-e-t-r-y-l-a-p-r.com. You can also just email me, which is christine@patrilapr.com.

31:24 Andy Splichal Great, and I see you also are the managing editor of boostfrontline.com. What is Boost Frontline and how long have you been involved with that?

31:38 Christine Wetzler So I created it. I have in my past career trajectory been on the publishing side of some of the trade magazines that I've worked with and still write for them. If you take a look at my LinkedIn. And I started to think there's all of this business information out there. There's not something to kind of speak directly to a mission focused leader. And by mission focused, I mean, you know, the CEOs, the startup people that are creating the companies because they have a passion for what they're doing, not just because they have a passion for making money. And so, you know, there are some magazines like entrepreneur I really love. They have such a wide array of people. Some people would criticize the fact that they use these leaders. I love it because there's such different perspectives in writings across the different industries and whatnot. And I kind of wanted to create something like that, that where you could see yourself in other bits of business that didn't have to do exactly what you're working on every day. So went out, hired a team of writers, set up the infrastructure, kind of start putting that together. And so we have these fun.

Andy Splichal How long has that been going?

Christine Wetzler About six months. Six months. Yeah, so not super long, but yeah. We're eventually, I'd like to monetize it, but I don't want to do that until we have the readership and the information. Because again, I don't want to bother our readership with things. So until I can get a handle on what they want and what they expect and what their threshold for being bothered is, I don't want to monetize it before it becomes useful. So right now-

33:40 Andy Splichal It kind of reminds me of Internet Retailer Magazine. In a way. I think they're out of Chicago as well.

33:46 Christine Wetzler A little, we focus on retail. You know, obviously since I'm part of the editorial team and we focus so much on packaging and CPG, it does lean toward that, especially since that's the most of the startup besides tech are. However, we do have, and we have a lot of really good contributed articles coming up. And once in a while we talk about things that you don't always necessarily see talked about, like layoffs and how to work with somebody, how to fire somebody that's not performing. I mean, those are things that are kind of tough to write about if you haven't had that experience or, we talk, well, there's a lot of articles on there about failing, about what if your startup goes under? What do you do next? Kind of helping a business owner put their head in gear to keep thinking and keep creating opportunity for themselves.

34:48 Andy Splichal And is this newsletter printed as well or is it a hundred percent online?

34:51 Christine Wetzler A hundred percent online for now. And it is a fresh and completely unmonetized. So it is a good place to go and.

Andy Splichal So no ads or anything like that?

Christine Wetzler Nothing, no. We have one at the top for our agency. That was it. But nothing else, nothing else. And we certainly don't push anything. If we do push anything to like our subscribers via email, it's about our content. We're not selling anything on that website.

35:23 Andy Splichal Got it. Well, this has been a lot of fun, Christine. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

35:29 Christine Wetzler No, I enjoyed this. I love talking about marketing. I'm just, I always feel bad when I have to say, it's different for everybody. But if somebody were to get on the phone with me, and explain their situation, I would love to tell you exactly what you need to do. Even if we don't end up working together, it's just strategically something that I enjoy. So give me a call and I'll help.

35:55 Andy Splichal Great, well, thanks for joining us again.

Christine Wetzler Yeah, thank you.

Andy Splichal For listeners, remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple podcasts and leave us some honest review. And if you're looking for more information on Paterla PR and our Boost frontline or connecting with Christine, you'll find all the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcast.makeeachclickcount.com. We have compiled all our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information in case you would like more information in the services I've discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.