Three Entrepreneurs Share How They Took Their Public Relations Strategy To A New Level

If people aren’t paying attention to your business, it’s time to re-think your PR , even if you’ve been previously successful for a very long time. But it’s never too late. This week I had a return visit with Bhupinder Nayyar, cofounder and COO of publishing site Bameslog for existing and aspiring writers and entrepreneurs. Together we identified three founders who’ve recently re-tooled their PR: The owner of a national senior care franchise, a successful real-estate investment expert and an executive leadership coach. Here’s what led each of them to their moments of truth, and what they’ve done to turn the process around.

Amada Senior Care

Tafa Jefferson is a former lineman for the Chicago Bears. Following career-ending injuries that forced him to leave the NFL, he went out on a limb in 1997 with a home-based business. The concept was simple—he identified a niche market of seniors who need in-home caregiving services, which ultimately resulted in a national franchise--Amada Senior Care.

The San Clemente, Calif.-based company achieved its early success by delving into advocacy initiatives such as support for military veterans in the VA healthcare system. Jefferson’s challenge was to build awareness of his service model to medical professionals in his community. His initial PR solution was to build a repertoire of collateral materials to deliver to his targets. The strategy was successful on a local level, but not nearly as impactful as he needed it to be to elevate his company into a national concern. “I needed an awakening of sorts from my self-inflicted PR wounds,” he said. To achieve a national footprint, Amada implemented the following four ideas into his bootstrapped program for a new level of PR results:

A strong brand strategy. This required a style guidebook that defines proper use of copy, marks, logos, fonts, color, tone of voice, photography trademarks and deliverables. These are essential components for expanding beyond a local community and initial customers.

A targeted audience. Amada conducted market research to identify ideal clients. At a minimum, this should include demographic data, economic trends and consumer psychology within your space, statistics on current consumer purchasing, and validation of customer willingness and level of pent-up demand.

Resource-based collateral materials. Value-add resource materials was essential for Amada’s business. For your own business, think of guideline books, self-assessments and check lists that can teach prospects what they need to know about the space you address. This form of advertising educates rather than selling, allowing customers to recognize you as a trusted source and to make their own decision about the services they want to pursue. These resources encourage customers to engage with you and with other customers who are employing your services to achieve word-of-mouth trust that far exceeds a hyped-up testimonial page.

Measured use of chosen mediums. These include

• SEO, PPC, SEM, media relations, public relations
• Paid advertising
• Non-traditional outreach (Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Instagram and Linkedin)
• PR agency support for news releases, expert source interviews and events.

It is helpful to work with both traditional and non-traditional media (such as social media) in your approach to a PR re-start. Be sure to budget and measure results for all efforts and track the return on every activity to determine which are worth continuing. If you engage a PR firm, as Amada did, speak to other similar organizations who’ve used the company you’re considering. At this stage, look for a boutique firm that is well-equipped to launch small or unknown brands into a bigger arena. Get to know the individuals who’ll be supporting your work in advance. Start the program at a moderate level and based on success, increase the program from there. The PR re-start was successful for Jefferson: Amada is now the #4 ranked senior care franchise in the top 10 on Forbes.

Clever Investor Cody Sperber

A master at all-things involving real estate, Cody Sperber has made his fortune by flipping more than 1,000 houses in 15 years. More recently, he started a mentoring program in Phoenix called the Clever Investor, to help others looking to break into the business to find their way to success.

After a short and unfulfilling career as a bookkeeper, Sperber got his start as an entrepreneur by learning everything he could about real estate, despite pressure from his wife, family and friends telling him he was wasting his time. In fact, he quit real estate several times before finally cracking the code that worked for him and finding his niche as the Clever Investor. But PR was not the initial priority on his list.

“Often times, a cohesive PR strategy is something that gets put off as a business,” he said. “We put all our energy and effort into serving real-estate investors, developing tools and systems, and growing our business. When we finally looked up, we had an eight-figure business with a website and brand image that looked generic, old, and didn’t reflect the energy and fun we were putting into the process of real-estate investing.”

Sperber bemoaned the fact that no one would have guessed his company had made the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing private companies three years in a row. So the team buckled down and changed its PR strategy in 2016. “We spent 11 months working with a firm to develop the new CleverInvestor.com. We invested a ton of time and resources into making and recording hundreds of videos to show off our culture and tell the stories of hundreds of our students across the 50 U.S. states, Canada, Puerto Rico and Europe we’ve helped to succeed and gain financial freedom through real estate.”

“On social media, you have to play full-out,” Sperber said. “I put a lot of time and effort into networking and putting out the best possible content on Instagram, which led to becoming the number-one most-followed real-estate investing account (@cleverinvestor) on that platform. We also became one of the top 30 followed accounts on Periscope.” When a new social-media channel is gaining traction, it’s important to get your feet wet and see if you can amass a following, Sperber says. Then, if the platform reaches critical mass, you’re ideally positioned to capitalize on your first-mover position as the platform matures.

“A big mistake I see people making is that just because you haven’t been able to monetize something like Snapchat yet doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be in there and growing your following,” he said. “Any platform that has millions of daily users is likely to become important, and when it does, you’ll be kicking yourself for not being there first.” “With Clever Investor, we always focus on the product first,” Sperber continued. “Is it actually providing value to our target market? Could we back that up with thousands of reviews and testimonials? Once we could answer those questions, we knew it was a no brainer to double down on PR.”

Leadership Coach Joshua Spodek

Joshua Spodek is a New York City-based executive coach and academic (he’s an adjunct professor for NYU) who is passionate about transformative leadership, creativity, strategy and motivation. His problem: A great book that nobody knew about. “I signed my contract with a publisher [the American Management Association] almost exactly a year ago to write my book, Leadership Step by Step,” Spodek said. “When I finished, I faced what many successful authors had told me, but I hadn't felt in my gut until then: No matter how good my book is, it won't matter if people don't know it exists.”

Spodek was confident about the book's quality. “It teaches people to lead,” he said. “It’s not about leadership, like nearly every other book on the subject--it’s about how to lead. It's the difference between a book on music theory and one that provides the exercises you need to learn to play the piano. My book is like musical scales for leadership.”

But while hundreds of students and clients have benefited from the book, billions more have never heard of it. “When I took my head out of the sand after finishing writing, I realized I needed to get the word out,” he said. “My first step was to get blurbs for the book. I'm an entrepreneur and I know how to hustle. I got endorsements from leadership bestsellers, top TED speakers, professors from Harvard, Columbia and NYU, a 4-star General, a Presidential Medal of Freedom Honoree and other luminaries.”

Spodek’s “a-ha” moment arrived when he realized that quotes from authorities like Dan Pink, Seth Godin and Marshall Goldsmith don't publicize books. He needed to reach aspiring leaders. However, he was heartened to realize that people who’d read the book (particularly the luminaries) had valued it enough to put their names on it. For Spodek, it highlighted what had held him back from publicizing his work: the fear of being negatively judged. “Deep down I realized that if I publicized my work, people could reject me and I could fail,” he said. “So I didn't do it, thinking I could seek publicity later.”

The supportive reviews from other best-selling authors affirmed for Spodek that he should have begun his PR long before. “Even negative reviews would have helped me improve faster,” he says. “Looking back, I had no good reason not to publicize my book.”

First, the resolve. Spodek’s first step in turning his PR around was the recognition that succeed or fail, he’d help myself more by trying than waiting instead of passively hoping for the best. “There is no going back.” He adopted a three-part strategy:

1. He hired an experienced online marketer to get the word out through online channels,podcasts and guest blog posts, to create a sales funnel to facilitate aspiring leaders to buy the book and online course. Online marketing has the advantages of control over the message, he notes, and allows for direct two-way communication, the ability to track effectiveness and the ability to provide a call to action.
2. He is now in the process of hiring an experienced public-relations team to spread his message more broadly to broadcast, print and other mainstream media. “Mainstream media has the advantage of reach at the cost of control, since journalists and editors interpret the message,” he says. “Still, I see this cost as a benefit for forcing me to understand, refine and communicate my message clearly, succinctly and effectively.”
3. He is hustling harder than ever with his network. “No matter how much of an expert someone else is, nobody cares about my work and success more than I do, nor do they understand my message and goals like I do,” Spodek says. “Moreover, since even the most withdrawn person knows people who know people who know people, anyone can work their network. Once I committed to act with everything I had, I found connections, help and resources I hadn’t thought of that were staring me in the face.”

Next, the results. While Spodek is still in the process of ramping up his PR and marketing efforts, he’s now being interviewed on podcasts 1-2 times per weekday and is guest posting. He’s being interviewed on video for several major periodicals. He’s speaking with increasingly prominent people.

As one of his most insightful discoveries, Spodek notes that “PR isn't just about getting my message out. It's also about listening to the market. It's a discipline that clarifies my thinking and communication. It forces me to distill my message down to its essence and cut out the fat. Working with professionals makes the process faster and more efficient. It's expensive, but it enables me to get out what I put in, which motivates me to put in more.”

Time will tell the ultimate outcome for Spodek’s book and its influence on his business, but the PR approach he’s now taking is a winning strategy for any entrepreneur.