Latest / Content, Briefly / Mariela Azcuy on PR, Content and Earned Media

Transcript

Mariela Azcuy on PR, Content and Earned Media · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. Today we've got Mariella Azqui. She's the VP of B2B Strategy and Executive Communications at a company called Carve Communications.
• 0:18
  So as you can imagine, we talk a lot about communications and PR.
• 0:22
  We actually start the episode with some quick definitions, just to make sure we're all on the same page about what these terms mean, at least in the context of B2B SaaS marketing.
• 0:31
  Really interesting hearing Mariella talk about the very proactive approach that she and her team take to getting earned media.
• 0:40
  Some of these things, you know, they're sort of adjacent to content marketing, and I think increasingly that content marketers should be thinking more and more about how to earn attention because channels are constantly decaying.
• 0:53
  You know, there's a lot of chaos going on in organic search world and LinkedIn and the other platforms, so strengthening the muscle of telling great stories and earning media, I think will become increasingly important.
• 1:05
  Great conversation with Mariella. As always, I really enjoyed this, and I hope you do too. Just a quick note before we jump in, a reminder that the Superpath community is now exclusive to Superpath Pro members.
• 1:17
  So as you may have seen me talking about on LinkedIn recently, we actually removed twenty-four thousand people from the community. This was a terrifying thing to do.
• 1:26
  It took us six years to build a community of that size and about fifteen minutes to change it.
• 1:32
  But Erica, who runs our community, and I really wanna focus all of our pretty limited energy and attention and time on making the Superpath Pro experience as good as it can possibly be, and this is a big step in that direction.
• 1:45
  If you haven't already checked out our free trial, come kick the tires for thirty days. Get access to everything, the Slack, the one-on-one calls, the group calls, the weekly co-working sessions.
• 1:55
  We have member-only content and courses. There's so much good stuff there. If it's not the best money you ever spend on professional development, you'll get a refund, no questions asked.
• 2:04
  You can learn more at superpath.co. Okay, now on to this episode. This episode of Content Briefly is brought to you by our friends at Ten Speed.
• 2:13
  You've been part of this community long enough to know that cranking out blogs doesn't quite do the trick anymore.
• 2:18
  SaaS and PLG companies need sophisticated content that builds authority and performs in the AI era, and that's where Ten Speed comes in. Ten Speed is more than an SEO agency. They're your complete content partner.
• 2:30
  From high-converting blog posts and bottom-of-funnel guides to research reports and thought leadership, the Ten Speed team creates content that drives real results.
• 2:37
  They can help you win organic traffic in the age of AI, combat content decay, build lasting brand authority with thought leadership, draw attention with research reports and e-books, and drive pipeline with bottom-of-funnel content and sales enablement.
• 2:51
  If you're ready to transform your content, schedule a consultation with the link in the show notes and be sure to mention Superpath for ten percent off. Hey, everybody.
• 2:59
  Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly. Very happy to have Mariella Azqui, VP of B2B Strategy and Executive Communications at Carve Communications. A lot of communications talk today.
• 3:12
  Mariella, thank you for being here. Would you mind introducing yourself? Tell us a little bit about who you are and some of the work that you've been up to over the past couple of years. Yeah. Thanks.
• 3:20
  You got my name right. That's awesome. [chuckles] And you got my title right, so we're off to a good start. [chuckles] So I'm Mariella. I-- how'd I get here is interesting. I work at Carve.
• 3:30
  I was hired to launch the content team. We are a PR agency that has a consumer and a B2B division. All of the clients sort of are techy, if you wanna put one thing that is the common denominator across them.
• 3:44
  So on the consumer side, lots of toys, consumer tech, electric bikes, things like that. And on the B2B side, lots of SaaS. I was hired because the founder and CEO is an old friend of mine.
• 3:56
  They knew that they could sell content. They weren't doing it right. There was, like, lots of opportunities, and he asked me to join the team. I know him from my 20s, PR agencies in New York. I actually started in PR.
• 4:08
  I started at agencies. Huge one, Edelman, one of the top five ones, then a small one, and then I went in-house. So I was in-house PR at a magazine publishing company.
• 4:19
  Pretty soon figured out that was, like, not gonna be a full-time, you know, gig for much longer.
• 4:24
  Moved to marketing at Univision, so it was Spanish language, and that now it's, like, a brand-new kind of role for me, B2B marketing. That was really all about strategic messaging and positioning, right?
• 4:36
  So how are we gonna position Spanish language media and Hispanic consumers to specific advertising audiences, right?
• 4:45
  So I think what was smart about the way Univision did business is they hardly ever led specifically with their media offerings. They did. There are the upfronts.
• 4:57
  If you know anything about media, there are the upfronts where you sell what's coming up and advertisers buy in. But we had to sell to people who did not speak Spanish.
• 5:07
  So what we did is did a lot of research on Spanish language consumers, Hispanic consumers, how they're different from non-Hispanics, and taught people, educated people about Hispanic consumers, and they basically came to us as a resource.
• 5:22
  And then when they realized that they needed to reach this consumer, they came to Univision because of that, because we were the experts. So of course- That's really cool.
• 5:29
  Yeah, like taking that-- now you take that into content, right, and trying to build up expertise, trying to build up thought leadership, how that works together with PR, and that takes me to Carve, right? Got it.
• 5:42
  I have so many questions for you. I know there's a lot there, but I think there's a thread, right? [chuckles] Definitely. Definitely. I think it might be helpful to level set just briefly.
• 5:52
  I remember back when I was working at Animals, my colleague Ryan Law and I were having a discussion one day about top-of-funnel content, and we had this realization that we were talking about different things.And we realized, like we work at the same company, we talk to the same customers, we write on the same blog, and we're using this term in totally different ways, and that's like we should be on the same page, [laughs] you know?
• 6:15
  And, you know, it-- for the purposes of this conversation, I think it'd be really helpful to just get a primer on when you say PR or comms, like what... This is such a dumb question. What do you mean?
• 6:28
  [laughs] Can you, can you like sort of specifically explain like what does PR mean to you? What does comms mean to you? A-and I think that will help set us up for a better conversation.
• 6:37
  I just wanna make sure we get to the end of it and be like, "Oh, wait, you meant that?" [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I mean, words matter, right? Words matter.
• 6:43
  So for the purposes of this conversation, PR is the practice and the strategies to help influence a group of people.
• 6:53
  Traditionally, it's the media, but I think that definitely has changed a bit over the past decade certainly. So it's traditionally the media, so it's media relations is the bulk of it, but that's one part of it, right?
• 7:05
  When I say communications, I start zooming out, and that's a lot more. That can be marketing communications. That could be content.
• 7:13
  I mean, I'll be specific when we're talking about content, especially for Superpath, the Superpath community.
• 7:17
  But PR, when I talk about it here, it's an eye on the media, number one, but we also obviously work with other stakeholders as well when there are bigger programs. Got it. That makes a ton of sense.
• 7:29
  And a follow-up on that, media, obviously you mentioned that's changed over the last kind of however many years. Like it's changed a lot, I assume, over the last- A lot. Yeah...
• 7:38
  decade plus probably even the last year or two. Are we talking about like independent publications, journalists, et cetera? I mean, there's also like industry publications.
• 7:48
  There's also lots of content marketers writing on behalf of brands who potentially fall into that category. Yeah. I mean, it's anybody that could get your message, your company, your ideas, your executives
• 8:00
  covered and coverage in places that would benefit your company and your brand, right? Yeah. So it's not your own channels. It's ext-external channels.
• 8:10
  So it is The New York Times still, I mean, that, that [laughs] is still very much alive and kicking, but it's also the They Got Acquired newsletter, which we're working on right now.
• 8:19
  It's a small newsletter that's been around for three years, and it helps companies exit. It helps founders exit, right? It could be a podcaster. This could be something... I imagine you get a lot of pitches.
• 8:31
  I imagine you hear from PR people. I don't know. So anybody that could get external, that could get your ideas and your company heard. Got it.
• 8:39
  I would imagine we could probably have a whole separate very long conversation about the creator economy and how that's shaken things up 'cause that's relatively new, right?
• 8:48
  That like individuals have the reach that formerly a publication or brand only had.
• 8:55
  I mean, I would say in the last three years that's really exploded and, you know, for better or worse, you can look at the election and see how that impacted a lot of the results there and new media, like we call it next gen media.
• 9:07
  Okay. So i-i... yes, like all of that, right? And there's a reason why brands are coming to us and saying like, "You're already working on our traditional PR efforts. Can you help us with our influencer programs too?"
• 9:20
  So for example, like we actually don't look at them that differently. Like the process of getting things done is slightly different. Sometimes there's money exchanged on the creator side, sometimes there's not.
• 9:32
  Media, you know, traditional media, no money exchanged, that's why it's called earned media, right? That's a term I'm sure you've heard of, paid versus earned.
• 9:40
  But in the end, you're-- as a PR person, our job is to identify the places we should play, right?
• 9:46
  And that's why now, like on the consumer side, we've worked with a ton of influencers and creators for different toy clients and consumer tech clients, and now we're even doing that on the B2B side in terms of who should we be engaging from a LinkedIn point of view to help us or even our customers, like the customers, our clients' customers.
• 10:03
  Who's a champion of the product? What could we be doing with them that we're not already doing with them? Right. Okay, my brain hurts a little bit thinking about the fragmentation in the space, right?
• 10:15
  You know, let's say 30 years ago is your client wants to get placed in The New York Times or The Washington Post or something. Yeah. And now there's probably a thousand different places that- Yeah...
• 10:24
  might make sense, each reaching kind of overlapping audiences, smaller, more niche, a dozen different platforms, probably nuances to each of those platforms in terms of like what works, what doesn't, is there money exchanged, is there not?
• 10:37
  How do you manage all that? [laughs] You know, how do you keep track of like, okay, we have this client, this is the story they wanna tell. Now what? Yeah. I mean- And that's a big question.
• 10:45
  That's like the whole business, I guess. [laughs] Yeah. Okay, let me break down our strategy. But really it's like it's no different than any other comms like project, right?
• 10:52
  So know what is the goal and who are you trying to reach? What is the outcome you're going for, right? And then what are all the places you can play that story?
• 11:01
  You need to have PR people on your team that are super curious and super plugged in, and that means, you know, back in the day, it used to be like watching MSNBC nonstop and, you know,
• 11:16
  whatever it is, like the, you know, the local news and that, yes, that still matters, and especially for a lot of events and a lot of if people have certain, if brands have certain local goals, regional goals, et cetera, all that's important.
• 11:28
  But you need people that are plugged into what's happening, even the Superpath community. Like this exists for a reason. You have built a, a community for a reason.
• 11:38
  People are paying to be your sponsors for a reason, right? 'Cause you have influence, so like you want people who are very plugged into the places that could impact your business, right?
• 11:48
  So at Carve, we work across, even though B2B tech is what I work on, I mean, the B2B tech ranges from infrastructure tied to energy and utility companies, like we have one client who is digitizing field work in those areas, right?
• 12:03
  So this pen and paper industry is now gonna be led by AI, by what this company's doing. We have an enterprise CMS or really like a DXP.
• 12:12
  I don't know if you know what a digital experience provider isAnd we have a collectibles company, a sports trading card company. Wow. That's a very wide range. [laughs] It's crazy, right?
• 12:24
  But if you work in an agency, this is what you expect for the most part, unless you're like a healthcare agency or something like that, but that, for me, can be a little boring. But so here you are code switching between
• 12:35
  s- sports trading cards and collectibles, [laughs] infrastructure in AI, and CMS, right? And it doesn't matter if you're not an expert in the industry because that's the client's job.
• 12:46
  You will get there, you'll get dangerous, right?
• 12:49
  Like, I don't care about trading cards, and I can tell you over the last two years, I can join any conversation and talk about like un- the unpacking and unboxing and breaking boxes because I've heard the president describe it to me so often.
• 13:02
  Right. Right? That's really cool, yeah. Yeah.
• 13:04
  So you need somebody who's curious and plugged in and then is gonna find those places and know how to dig in to find those places where you wanna be, and obviously it's also in collaboration with the client, right?
• 13:14
  So we bring opportunities to our clients, but then a client will come to us and say like, "Hey, you know, here's somebody that, you know, we'd love to do something with. Can you help facilitate it?" Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:23
  So really the best relationships go both ways, as with anything. Yeah. I'm so... The, the...
• 13:29
  Hearing you talk about that reminds me of my content agency days where it's like a similar situation where like the client has the subject matter expertise. We know the medium. How are we gonna get it?
• 13:41
  How are we gonna get that expertise out so that we can do our job?
• 13:45
  Which sometimes is easy, and sometimes it's not, and it makes me curious where content fits in to the work that you all do because sometimes j- getting it out of the client's head is just a massively important step.
• 13:57
  It becomes content, but it also influences, I'm sure, a lot of other work that you do. Yeah. Yeah.
• 14:02
  I always say that one of the, uh, there are two very important things that an agency could bring to the table, and one is that idea of curiosity and good questions, right?
• 14:11
  Because garbage in is garbage out, and two is objectivity, right?
• 14:15
  So I think one of the interesting things we've done is like kinda think about how we partner with clients both on a day-to-day level and on a founder level, right?
• 14:25
  So we have day-to-day things that we need to accomplish, right?
• 14:29
  There is an event coming up that we need to support, a new product launch, uh, you know, a stunt that we need to come up with that's gonna be media friendly.
• 14:37
  All that is kind of like we put that under the day-to-day work, or sometimes we also call that like tent poles, so like there are tent pole moments. Again, what's on the marketing calendar?
• 14:47
  How can we support those things on the marketing calendar, right?
• 14:50
  Then there's the stuff that is, is what we call more sustainable PR, and that is more of the thought leadership, the always on stuff that has nothing to do with whether there's a product that's gonna be launched or not, right?
• 15:04
  And that's where my team, and, uh, the content team falls under me, works with the founders and the executives.
• 15:11
  So while the PR team is working here day to day, making sure we're blocking and tackling, making sure we're getting the coverage we need here, my team is working with the founders and the executives on all the whys behind we're doing what we're doing.
• 15:23
  What's the vision for the future? You know, what's happening six months from now? How did... Ta- topics that you wouldn't typically think are news, right? How did you build your culture and why?
• 15:34
  What influenced you to build your company culture that way? All those thought leadership topics that then differentiate you and your brand in a crowded market, right? So imagine,
• 15:45
  you know, you're the CEO, a founder of a company. I'm gonna come in, I'm gonna interview you, right? I'm gonna come out of there with a bunch of ideas, right?
• 15:52
  'Cause I'm gonna go in with a reporter's mindset, and I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions, and I'm gonna come out with a bunch of cool ideas that you gave me because I asked you the right questions.
• 16:00
  I'm gonna take that back to the PR team, and I'm gonna say, "Okay. As a team, how are we gonna use these ideas?" Right? It's not how are we gonna build content.
• 16:10
  It's how are we gonna use these ideas, and where are we gonna use the ideas? Where are we gonna distribute the ideas?
• 16:17
  So some of it could be own channels, so my team might be doing LinkedIn feeds, writing bylined articles, preparing for a speaking engagement with the CEO.
• 16:27
  PR team might be pitching those bylined articles on this angle, going after, you know, a certain reporter because now we have a reason to, because we heard something from the founder. So it's another channel, right?
• 16:40
  PR is another channel to distribute ideas. So interesting.
• 16:44
  You know, we at Superpath has dabbled in PR a little bit in the sense that we acquired this website, Help a B2B Writer, a couple of years ago, and that's really the primary use case is, you know, writers are looking for subject matter expertise, and sources on the other side are looking for mentions, links, exposure, et cetera.
• 17:02
  And I actually briefly experimented with, uh, creating a service that runs on top of that,
• 17:09
  where Superpath would try to extract a bunch of subject matter expertise from a client and then send pitches on their behalf to the writer. I found it to be really difficult.
• 17:18
  One of the things that was very interesting about it was that kind of like you alluded to, you know, say the client is like a marketing automation tool.
• 17:26
  Hard to find specific places to mention that, but if you wanna talk about the origin story of the business, the founder's journey, you know, their pitch deck, how to raise money, like there's these kind of adjacent topics that are just like tons of opportunity to get mentioned in those.
• 17:42
  And I abandoned this idea because I was very overwhelmed by it. Let's talk. [laughs] Maybe we could resurface it. [laughs] Yeah, I mean, I think there was something there.
• 17:50
  Like the reason that I wanted to buy Help a B2B Writer is because I was using it myself quite a bit, and although I was building really good links back to the Superpath website by responding to like entrepreneur and startup type requests, nothing about...
• 18:07
  no content marketing ever. You know what I mean? Yeah. Anyways, yeah. That's a whole...
• 18:11
  We could have, I'm sure have another long discussion about that, but- No, and so like let's go back to that tent pole versus sustainable. So-We had a client who recently went through an acquisition, right?
• 18:21
  And we got a ton of media coverage on the acquisition itself, right? Like, fifty-plus placements on the acquisition itself, right? But it shouldn't end there, right?
• 18:29
  Because then, okay, there's the news, but then it's like, okay, now what's being done to integrate the companies, right? How is the CEO approaching merging of cultures? Why did she decide to buy for the first time?
• 18:41
  Like, there's so much rich information there that, like, I feel like is being unused so often 'cause it's kinda like, okay, we're done with the news, we're done with the tempo moment, let's move on, right?
• 18:51
  But like, wait a second. There's a lot of thought here that just goes into the dumpster.
• 18:56
  And, you know, PR and comms in general should extract that because in the end, those are the things that are gonna differentiate you, right? Everybody's talking about the same product features. Right.
• 19:07
  Anybody can acquire a company. Not-- I mean, for the most part, you know, an acquisition is not unique to one company. Yeah. Yeah. But someone's ideas are different. Yeah. I gotta think AI's helping here, right?
• 19:18
  Like, there was a conversation in the Superpath community just recently about brain dumping and how brain dumping is more useful than it used to be. Like, if you record a voice note of yourself talking- Yeah...
• 19:28
  that's actually useful now because- Yeah... it's easy to find, you know?
• 19:32
  And, and at certain scale, like, if you're able to do that with your clients, you can just collect and collect and collect, and then it's so much more accessible.
• 19:41
  I mean, I'm assuming that this is how you're doing it, but how is AI affecting your world? I mean, how isn't it, right?
• 19:46
  But like, uh, so Otter is 100% our friend, and I will say, like, our clients often say things like, "I like being interviewed because it's gives me the space to think about why and how I do things the way I do."
• 19:59
  Like- I love that. Like it's- That in itself is a great service to the client. Yeah. It's just that time, like, they don't take time for it otherwise, so th- here's the excuse, right? Here's the time on the calendar.
• 20:08
  We're doing this at this time. It's gonna happen monthly, and that's what it is. So Otter, like [chuckles]
• 20:15
  you know, we have all of our client conversations, you know, obviously easily searchable and all the ways that it summarizes, et cetera, like we can go in. We had something, you know, a similar...
• 20:24
  A reporter send a query recently that was about is AI going to replace the CEO? And we had talked about that with one of our founders last year at some point. We went back to Otter and basically- It's right here. Yeah...
• 20:38
  drafted up a quote based on that. So good. Got it approved like this because, you know, it basically was his words. We just made it sound pretty and then got coverage because of that, you know?
• 20:49
  And that happens daily, right? So there's those sorts of reactive, like we're seeing queries come in, we respond to them. People know that we work with X amount of clients.
• 20:57
  They're coming to us with questions, and we're quickly turning those around thanks to AI. It's all authentic to the client, authentic.
• 21:04
  Like, you know, I know often people say, one of the things about PR agencies that people say is that, "They don't get us. They don't get me. They don't get our voice."
• 21:13
  Like, that is one of the objections I hear often, and it is hard to get somebody's voice, I'm sure you know. But it has become easier in the age of AI. It, it just has. That's so cool. It's not even a hack.
• 21:26
  It's like it's just genuinely better. It is better. It is better, and it is faster. But then what else?
• 21:32
  Like AI obviously with writing, even asking questions, like we have a client who we were talking to her about, you know, she launched this product for the first...
• 21:41
  They launched a second product, and she said that this was the most-- th-the thing that she was most proud of last year, that they were at a place where they were able to launch a second product.
• 21:51
  To me, like, that's light bulbs in my head, right?
• 21:53
  It's like that sounds really interesting, like, you know, I kind of dubbed it, like, that second product feeling 'cause I hadn't heard anybody talk about that idea that much,
• 22:03
  and now we start breaking down that idea, right? W-why? Like, what is it about launching a second product that made you so proud?
• 22:09
  Oh, it means that we've gotten to know the customer better and enough to be able to help them with something else. It means that our team is now able to sell something else.
• 22:21
  You know, she starts listing this, and this is like a great, like, thought leadership topic, so now I'm going back.
• 22:26
  I'm preparing for a conversation with her, and it's like, AI, okay, here's a couple of things we've written for her based on that topic. What else can I ask her about this?
• 22:35
  I mean, you know, I can come up with questions myself, but why not have a little brainstorm partner? Like, how else can we dive into this topic that would make this infinitely more interesting for external people, right?
• 22:45
  And then we take that to media. Like, what sort of... Like Inc. magazine, Fast Company magazine, Axios, Business Insider.
• 22:53
  Those become stories that external outlets can tell, but you need to have somebody that can take it there, right? If you're not taking it there, it's a lost opportunity. Like... Yeah.
• 23:03
  You know, one thing I wanted to ask you about is the coming and going of channels. So like in the B2B space, LinkedIn, it's like everybody's on LinkedIn right now.
• 23:13
  But we're already seeing, because this happens with all channels, like the hotter it gets, the more limited your reach is, you know, no links anymore. You gotta hide them in the comments, like- Yeah...
• 23:23
  so it gets harder and harder. Yeah. And there will be a new channel at some point that is hot. I-is the muscle that you are strengthening, is it the channel, or is it the narrative?
• 23:34
  And then how do you, like, spin up new channels, train people, you know what I mean? Learn how to optimize for it and then be, uh, kind of always be in the back of your mind ready for the next one also. Yeah.
• 23:46
  So that's an awesome question. So I think the muscle is the narrative, right? But I think you have to pair it with knowledge of the platform because then if not, nobody's gonna see it.
• 23:57
  Like, we had a potential new business call, and the guy, he was, uh, very confident, and he said, "I have great content, but nobody's looking at it."
• 24:08
  You know, my counter to him was like, "Okay, you may have good content, but if you don't know the platform, you need people who know the platform," right?
• 24:15
  Like, there are different, obviously, there are different rules on LinkedIn than there are-Are on X, like whoever's still on there, are on Bluesky, Instagram, et cetera.
• 24:24
  So, like, you need to get to know the platform to be dangerous with your content because if not, it's not gonna go anywhere. But the muscle, I do believe, is about spotting the story.
• 24:35
  That's what you wanna hone, and that's then what's gonna get you the awesome stuff for your own content and the awesome stuff for a reporter, journalist, creator, whatever, [chuckles] whoever that external channel is, right?
• 24:48
  Going back to that idea of PR and PR having evolved, that they're gonna care about, right? And if we can go back to that idea of objectivity, you really have to be able to put that reporter's mindset on, right?
• 24:59
  Because most brands think that everything they do is awesome and newsworthy and should get coverage lots of places, and that's not necessarily the case.
• 25:10
  And that doesn't mean that it will get no coverage from external parties.
• 25:14
  It just means that it needs to be tweaked or, you know, yeah, like, what can we add to it to make it more, or what is that one perfect place that will do something with this?
• 25:25
  You know, you just, you need to take the idea and develop it, and that's part of the muscle too, right? You know, most of the people listening to this podcast, they're content marketers.
• 25:34
  Some may have access to a PR agency or they have some internal folks, but for the ones who don't, are there a couple baby steps that a content team might take to help get either their work or the company's message out there a little more, assuming that they're probably not doing that much,
• 25:55
  uh, beyond, like, posting on social and sending a newsletter right now? Yeah. Baby steps I'd say take a look... So if you're deep in an industry, you-- if you don't, you should know who's covering that industry, right?
• 26:08
  Like, make sure you know who are the reporters, and again, this doesn't matter what channel, make sure you know who's covering that industry.
• 26:16
  So, like, what used to be, like, when we start with a client, we tier a media list and we, like, we do tier one, tier two, ti- tier three based on a bunch of factors. That can be size. That could be influence.
• 26:27
  You know, there's a, there's a bunch of ways you can tier media. So force yourself into, if you're a small team, like, what are the 10 places that would be ideal for us to get coverage in, right, and why? And then
• 26:43
  figure out what is the ideal story for that, and again, that's honing that muscle, story finding. Like, what is gonna work from their point of view and why? Like, what's gonna...
• 26:52
  I-if you're putting a reporter's mindset, it's like why would their audience care about what you're gonna say? And again, it's about the ideas. And then pitch it, you know? Yeah, you gotta get out there.
• 27:02
  It, it is proactive. Y-you have to. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody's gonna come to you. Right. Like, unless...
• 27:06
  I mean, obviously, unless you already have momentum, but everybody starts, unless you, like, have this enormous founder behind you with a ton of backing, like, nobody starts with momentum.
• 27:16
  It's your job to start the momentum [chuckles]. Yeah, yeah. You know? And then go after it. You have to put yourself out there, right?
• 27:21
  And I think what I've seen a lot is I've traditionally seen both from an agency point of view and when I was in-house, that the content and the PR teams were too far apart,
• 27:32
  and they just need to come much closer together- Yeah, yeah... to be able to, like, play off each other more.
• 27:38
  The relationships that we have with clients when we're in step with both the content team, their content teams, and their marketing teams are really, like, you know, I know content falls under marketing, but the person that heads up content and the person that heads up other duties, that's the ones that are most, like, fulfilling and successful.
• 27:56
  Yeah. Makes a ton of sense. You know, 10 years ago, content marketers called this growth hacking.
• 28:01
  You know, like, we would write stuff, and then actually it was expected that the next thing you would do is try to get li-links primarily, but try to get other people to mention it. You know, there...
• 28:10
  It was, like, a little bit more...
• 28:12
  There was more variety, I guess, in the way that people went about promoting content, and then over the last 10 years, the playbook was refined and refined and refined, and then it's like, okay, write it and send a newsletter or write it and have a derivative LinkedIn post.
• 28:25
  And we kinda, I think we as content marketers, I think, have gotten away a little bit from the hustle, for lack of a better term, required to get the stuff out there.
• 28:36
  It, and it is very proactive, and it's like, it's developing the relationships. It's knowing the people. It, it... There's so much that goes into it. Yeah.
• 28:42
  And, you know, you could do little things definitely as a small, you know, content team, but the hustle is real [chuckles] and, you know, you could have the perfect idea that you're matching with the perfect reporter, and they don't answer you, even if you've worked with them before.
• 28:58
  Like, they don't answer you, and they don't answer you.
• 29:00
  But then, you know, you follow up one day because you saw that they wrote a story about X and it was relevant to your client for Y, and then all of a sudden it works that day, right?
• 29:11
  But you need to be on it, and that's the issue is, like, is that you need people that are on it. It can't be, like, a third of your job, right?
• 29:19
  Because somebody else is gonna be on it full time, and you're gonna miss out. Yeah, yeah, or you should consider hiring an agency, KArv being a good one to look at.
• 29:28
  Yeah, or, you know, agency, like, or have people that are dedicated to it, right? Like, because it can't be, it shouldn't be the content marketer's job to also get the, you know, external coverage, like. Yeah, yeah.
• 29:40
  Makes sense. Makes sense. Amazing. Mariel, thank you so much. This is... I love talking about topics like this.
• 29:45
  They're very close to content marketing, but it's like a whole world that, you know, I, like, sort of generally know what PR, but, like, I don't know the nuances of it, so it's great to have an, a real expert come in and explain it to us.
• 29:55
  So thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, and it's funny how, like, I do think you said growth hacking, and we all use different words for the same thing, like, often, you know? [chuckles] And it is...
• 30:04
  I like that, I appreciate that you broke it down at the beginning to level set us, so I appreciate that.
• 30:08
  [chuckles] Ho-hopefully we started at the right place for the content folks listening who are like, "Oh yeah, we should know more about this." You know what I mean? Like, this is an area we should explore. Yeah.
• 30:16
  Get to know your PR people. Tell everyone, get to know your p- Set up a regular meeting. Do it. [chuckles] Yeah, yeah. W-we'll send people to the KArv website. W- There'll be a link in the show notes.
• 30:26
  Anywhere else, your LinkedIn, personal website- Yeah, yeah... other sites? That's my LinkedIn. Yeah. Feel free to reach out. I can, I'll answer any questions. Yeah.
• 30:34
  If anybody wants some thoughts on what could make a good, you know, story for a reporter.Reach out for sure. Okay, awesome. Everything will be in the show notes for people. Mariela, again, thank you so much.
• 30:45
  Hope we can do it again sometime too. Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Jimmy. Take care. Love what you do. Bye. All right. How good was that? Thanks so much to Mariela for coming on. Definitely go check out Carve Communications.
• 30:55
  Make sure you follow Mariela on LinkedIn for lots more kind of info and insights on PR, especially in this B2B space. Just before we go, a couple quick things.
• 31:05
  If you're enjoying this podcast, we would love it if you would give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It really helps us reach new listeners.
• 31:14
  Discoverability is difficult in the podcast space, and this goes a very long way towards helping us reach new people.
• 31:19
  One other quick thing is that if you go to superpath.co/podcast, there is a chatbot in the bottom right corner.
• 31:27
  That chatbot has been trained on all of the almost hundred transcripts from the interviews we've done on this show, and it's actually really good.
• 31:35
  I used Appier's chatbot tool to build it and used Claude and a little bit of vibe coding to get the transcripts into the proper format.
• 31:42
  But now that it's up and running, you can go in there and ask for things like episode summaries. You can also ask about trends over different episodes.
• 31:49
  So like, if, just as an example, if you wanted to say like, "What do people say about earned media or PR, or how PR and content teams should work together?"
• 31:58
  Just ask it and it will pull quotes from various episodes, and it will also give you the episode number and a timestamp if you wanna go and listen to that. Anyways, we don't talk about it much.
• 32:06
  I think it's really cool though. I hope people find it useful. Again, superpath.co/podcast, uh, and you'll see that chatbot in the bottom right corner. We'll see you next time on Content Briefly. Take care. [outro music]