Ep 254: The 60/40 Rule Marketing Strategist Lauren Harris Uses With Every Client

SHOWNOTES

Lauren Harris says even MrBeast probably watches his own videos and thinks, “I should’ve gotten more views.” It’s a small, funny moment in our conversation, but it points at something bigger: most of us are chasing the wrong numbers in our marketing, and it’s keeping us stuck. Lauren is a marketing strategist and co-founder of Reliable PR and Marketing, and in this episode she walks through what separates a business that’s simply “doing” marketing from one that’s actually strategic about it.

Lauren co-founded Reliable PR and Marketing after building it from a fake business she dreamed up for her master’s degree in marketing at Northeastern. Since then, she’s grown it into a full-service agency handling launches, PR, and marketing strategy for businesses across a range of industries. Her focus is helping business owners move past random tactics and build a strategy — target audiences, content pillars, and the analytics to match — that actually compounds.

We Also Talked About

• How Lauren went from a graduate school class project to co-founding a full-service PR and marketing agency.
• The difference between “doing” marketing tasks and marketing with real strategic intention.
• Why copying a competitor’s tactics can backfire when your audience isn’t the same as theirs.
• How Reliable PR builds a marketing strategy from the ground up: business basics, competitor analysis, target audience psychographics, and content pillars.
• Why each of your five content pillars should tie back to a specific audience and a specific goal.
• How to get past the fear of analytics by matching the right metric to the right goal, instead of only watching likes and followers.
• The real difference between a marketing strategy and a marketing plan.
• How to think more strategically by stepping out of your own preferences and into your audience’s.
• Lauren’s “60/40 rule” for balancing what your audience wants to see with staying true to your brand.
• Why the generations aren’t as different as you’d think when it comes to doing their due diligence before they buy.
• How to start making short-form video even if you never want to be on camera.
• Why PR matters for small businesses, and how to pitch your own story to journalists and local media.

Resources Mentioned

• Reliable PR and Marketing — reliablepr.net (free guides and checklists for business owners)
• Reliable PR and Marketing on Instagram — @reliable.pr

My newsletter is for people who need a way to make money from home so they can build a better life for themselves and their families:
👉 https://onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter

_____________

Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

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Episode 254: The 60/40 Rule Marketing Strategist Lauren Harris Uses With Every Client

Trudy Rankin: [00:00:00] Lauren Harris thinks that even MrBeast, a guy that many other creators dream of matching, probably looks at his own view counts and decides that they should have been higher. It’s not really a joke about MrBeast. It’s about a specific trap that nearly every small business owner falls into with their marketing numbers.

And once you see it, the way you look at your own analytics changes. In this episode, Lauren and I get into the real difference between doing marketing and having a strategy behind it, why chasing what your competitors are doing can quietly wreck your results, as well as a much less intimidating way to start showing up on video if the camera terrifies you, and why local businesses in particular are leaving trust and money on the table by skipping PR.

Now, Lauren is the co-founder of Reliable PR and Marketing, where she’s helped businesses move from posting the spray and pray way to [00:01:00] marketing with an actual plan behind every post. Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m Trudy Rankin, and if you’re someone who needs a flexible work from home option, I help you grow the online side of your business so you can earn more, stress less, and have greater freedom in how you live.

Trudy Rankin: Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m your host, Trudy Rankin, and today I’ve got Lauren Harris with me.

Now, Lauren is a marketing strategist, and that is a different thing to a marketer in some sense, and we’ll get into that a little bit later. Now, she’s the co-founder of Reliable PR and Marketing, and those two things can go together very nicely, and her focus is helping people stop just doing tactical things and starting to focus on strategy instead, and you having that first.[00:02:00]

So we’re going to get into that a little bit more deeply as we go, but first of all, Lauren, thank you for being on the podcast.

Lauren Harris: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to get into all of it.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. So before we get too deeply into the marketing strategy side of things, which every business needs to be thinking about tell us a little bit more about yourself and where you got to the place where you actually are a marketing strategist.

Lauren Harris: Yeah. So I always feel like I’ve been marketing my whole life. My father’s a veteran, and he was in the Army, so we moved every year or two. And when you move somewhere new, you assess the situation, your target audience. You sort of learn, you know, who you need to be, how you need to fit in, right? And then my family owned a few businesses as life went later on, and I always had great ideas for campaigns and things that would bring people in.

So I’ve always really been thinking it. But then I got my bachelor’s in English and journalism, and after that, I decided to get my master’s in marketing, specifically at Northeastern. And while I was studying there, I loved every minute of it, and [00:03:00] for our final, like, cumulative project for graduation, we had to make a fake business and market it.

So make the website, the socials, do everything that we’d learned, basically. And I was like, I don’t know. I came up with Reliable PR. And, uh, so I did it all for Reliable PR, and then right after that, I had my daughter, and I stayed home for a little while. But then once I was ready to go back to work, my husband said, like, “Well, why don’t you try and do Reliable PR?”

He said, “Give it, you know, all you’ve got for, a year or a few years and see how it goes.” And basically we went all in, and got a few clients and then it just cumulatively just grew. And now we do a lot of launches for businesses and a lot of PR and just across the board. We offer all services.

We got a team, and it’s just grown to everything I could have ever imagined it to be from a class project.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. I have to swing back a little bit because it’s really easy to say, “And we just got a few clients,” and stuff like that. And you’ve got listeners going, “How the heck did you [00:04:00] do that?” So tell us a little bit about what it was like to go out and get your first clients.

Lauren Harris: Ooh, yes. So it was actually… I guess there was a little more of a smooth intro to it than that. So when I had my daughter, of course, those first six to nine months, you basically can’t do anything else because it’s just constant. But after that, I always need to do something. It’s just who I am.

And so I started, businesses that I knew in town just working and running their socials. Sort of social media manager status, you know? And so creating content and posting for them and all of that. But as I was doing it, I gave them a lot of the strategy. Like when I was studying, basically everything that they taught us about the platforms and the algorithm and everything changed, and it just changes immediately.

But what they taught us about strategy and understanding your audience and targeting and, you know, the copy and all of that, that all applied. So I was growing these accounts very well while staying home with my daughter. And so it was sort of a smooth intro into it, and so we had a few of the [00:05:00] monthly.

And then when it came to getting bigger clients and bigger contracts, it was a lot of positioning and PR and reaching out to people and just putting yourself out there and explaining to them. What I usually did was a free audit. So I would go through, and I would tell them, you know, “This is working.

This isn’t working. This is what you should be doing, and I can do it for you,” basically. That’s sort of how we got in there, and now we’ve got a little more referral based and stuff like that. But in the beginning, it’s really just about explaining to people what others are doing that’s making them successful, because all they see is the successfulness.

They don’t see what they’re doing to make it happen.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, and that is one of the tricky things though, because even though they can’t see what they’re doing to be successful, sometimes trying to copy somebody else is the biggest mistake that you can make. Because what they’re doing is for their audience, and your audience might be completely different.

So can you maybe talk to us just a little bit about that whole [00:06:00] concept of, we’ve called it tactics, but basically the doing versus the thinking side, you know? Making sure that we’re sitting at a strategic level before we actually get into the doing. Can you talk a little bit about that and why it’s so important?

Lauren Harris: It is. It is so important. And the way I like to sort of explain it is successfully marketing your business is an action. It’s something that can be achieved through the right set of actions. You know, updating your Google business, making sure your website, SEO, and your GEO, and all that’s good to go, posting frequently.

That is actionable. If you make the right steps and you are consistent, then you can mark that as good. You are doing it. The thing is, though, is a lot of people are like, “I’m doing everything, but it’s still not working.” And when you realize that it’s not just simply the art of completing the tasks, but completing them in a way that they have intention behind every single one of them.

I think, a few years ago maybe, it was [00:07:00] enough to be there. It was enough to have all of the touchpoints and to make sure they were all filled out and findable. But in today’s day, everybody is doing it, especially with AI and people are posting, and it’s not enough to simply show up anymore.

And so what it really is about is understanding who and why. And that’s what I really focus on a lot, is understanding who it’s for and why they need it or why they would want it, what it’s going to do for them. Just showing up is good, but showing up with a purpose and understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing is the most important.

And so before you start to do everything. You need to understand exactly who you’re speaking to so you can understand how to speak to them. And a lot of founders, I think when they start their business, they understand, they have a purpose, they have a why. They’re doing it for a reason.

And but then they can’t get that [00:08:00] across through the marketing. And what’s really hard is that when you speak to a founder, they can have that conversation with you, and you can understand everything. You fully get it. But with marketing, what you can do if you do it successfully, is to make sure that someone who you’ve never spoken to can understand it just as well as someone who you just had a conversation with.

And that is what successful, intentional, targeted marketing can do for your business.

Trudy Rankin: I’ve got several questions that I want to follow up with, but I’ll start with this one, and that is that one of the biggest pain points that I’ve both experienced and I… With my clients that I work with, they’ve experienced, is that it can be really tricky trying to find the people that you should be talking to right at the beginning so that you can actually understand what it is, you know, that whole thing about the why, who it is you’re talking to and why you’re talking to them, how are you helping them.

What’s your favorite way of actually getting out there and finding those people and answering [00:09:00] those questions?

Lauren Harris: So what we do actually at Reliable PR, before we dive into any client or any project or any anything, we do an in-depth marketing strategy. And it’s adjusted per client, and different things are added per one, but the structure stays the same, and it’s really important.

And so basically, in the beginning, you break down the business, about the business, all the classic information, services, offerings, products, what you do, why you do it, all of that, right? But that’s all of that. Then you get into the background. So you look into your competitors. And it’s not just the competitors that, like, you know well enough.

It’s the competitors that are the closest to your brand, the ones that have the most similar offering. Then once you know that, you figure out how you are different. So against each competitor, what do you do differently/better than them? You mark that down. Then you get into your target audiences, and in your target audiences, we go, we do three, sometimes five, but three is a pretty [00:10:00] manageable number.

And basically, to find those, what you do is now you know your business, right? So you can look at the target audiences of the competitors as well, see who they’re targeting. Some of those may cross over, and they may be similar, but there may be ones that, you know, don’t apply. But then basically for the target audiences, what we do is we break down everything about them.

So aside from their demographics, how old they are, income, all of that, we learn their psychographics. You know, what do they think about late at night? What do they need to hear from you with your offering? What do they need to hear from you? Who are they as people? And that is really what is the most important, is understanding who they are, not just the information that you need to put in for an ad.

You need to know who they are as people. And then once we know that, then we get into the strategy side of it. So you take the offerings, you take the competitors, and then you take the target audiences, and then you build the strategy behind it. So what are your goals? And then how are you [00:11:00] going to speak to them?

What kind of words are you going to use? How are you going to relate to them? And you build the content pillars, and the content pillars are across marketing as a whole, not just your socials. It is going to be, you know… It’s sort of our secret sauce, and we usually do five. And basically, each content pillar is designed to reach one or multiple of the audiences.

It also is designed to reach one or multiple of your six-month goals, and then it has copy and examples attached to it. So on the website, you would use this call to action. On socials, you would post this reel. It has something attached to it. And then basically, if you touch base in each of those five pillars every month, then you have a testable strategy.

And so we test it every month, every quarter, and every year. And if you are testing it, and it’s right, you know, all of your analytics are in the right direction, then you understand where it’s going. And so right after the strategy, we put the analytics that you need to be [00:12:00] watching, because we’re all watching views, and we’re all watching likes and followers, but each of your goals has an analytic attached to it.

If you are trying to get new people, or if you’re trying to get new customers, then you need to look at link clicks. If you are trying to get a bigger, stronger community, you need to look at certain engagement analytics. And so what it is truly is just there are certain ways of technically finding your target audiences, but most of us know who is going to want this product, but we don’t understand why they’re going to want it.

And so that’s what you really have to focus on, is exactly how are you going to make their life better or easier or something? How are they going to benefit from moving forward with your business?

Trudy Rankin: So I’m going to just extend the question just a little bit. And I agree, you know, that’s really important.

That is important. But how do you find those people to ask them in the first place?

Lauren Harris: Ooh, so there’s a few ways. So you can do, um, focus groups. Focus groups [00:13:00] are good. And you can just genuinely speak to different groups of different ages and things like that. Or what you can do is you can reverse engineer the search.

So what you can do is you can look at the competitors that are similar to you, and you can look through their followers, you can look through their sales, you can look through their reviews, you can look through all of that, and you can see the different groups of people that are there. And that’s how we usually do that.

And unfortunately, there’s not just a site where you can type in, what’s my target audience, but if there was, I would know about it. But most of it, it’s a lot of thinking. We spend most of our time in the strategy department on that page and on the content pillars page because they’re the most important.

And so it’s also testing a little bit. So the reason we break down the strategy before moving forward is because what you’ll notice over six months is that certain content pillars, you know, over [00:14:00] monthly, if a content pillar is not really performing over three months, then you test a new one. And if it performs better, then you remove the old one and you put that one in its place.

Same thing with the target audiences. If you run an ad for this target audience and it is entirely unsuccessful, then you test a new one, and if it does better, then you replace it. So you put a lot of thought into the initial determination, but then you also test it, and if it doesn’t work, then you test out new ones.

And then basically what happens is after about six months, you have a high efficiency, amazing ROI set of target audiences and content pillars, and so… But the problem is, is when you don’t have it all mapped out, you can’t track what you are and aren’t doing, and so there’s no way to test anything

Trudy Rankin: So I’ve got a couple of follow-up questions from that.

The first is I know that a lot of people when they hear the word analytics, their mind immediately goes blank, and, you know, they hear fizzing [00:15:00] noises in the background because they think that it’s all a bunch of numbers and they’re not going to understand it. Google Analytics is confusing, all of those sorts of things.

So what would be a couple of things that you could share that would help people get past that fear of analytics?

Lauren Harris: Ooh, that’s a good question. Getting past the fear of analytics is about understanding which ones are the most important to you. Most of us before we dive in, we’re focused on likes, followers, and sales.

And that’s it. But if you’re focused on those sort of things, then there is no, like, ceiling to success. So you’re never going to feel like it’s… this is good. I say all the time. I think probably even MrBeast looks at his videos, and he’s like, “I should’ve gotten more views,” you know? So those are not the ones that you want to look at.

And so getting past the fear of them is truly just pinpointing which ones are important. So, like, what you have to look at is things like on your website. You can look at how far they [00:16:00] scrolled. If they exited out of your website before they click to checkout or clicked a button, where on the homepage did they give up?

Did it happen frequently? Is there something about that section that isn’t really converting well enough? Should you test something else? If you are looking to grow a community, how many what would I say? How many shares are you getting? Is your target audience relating so well to your content that they want to share it with their friends and family?

That’s what you want to look at. And so each goal is attached to a different analytic. And unfortunately, actually not unfortunately, beneficially for us, they give them all to us, but they give them all to us together, so it’s a little overwhelming. You know, and if you’re on socials, one thing I would say is you want to look at your watch time of the video.

How long did they watch the video, and when did they swipe? It’s about looking past the first three that Instagram puts on your analytics page and scrolling a little bit and looking at them deeper. [00:17:00]

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no, it is seriously a thing that I think puts people off because it’s so much easier just to avoid having to figure it all out than it is to just let things keep rolling and you keep doing stuff, and it’s not working, and you don’t know why. But you’ve got to spend the time to understand your analytics. I have another question, so that follows on a little bit from that one, and that is that a lot of people don’t really understand the difference between a strategy and a plan.

So can you just talk to me a little bit about your definition of those two and how you differentiate between a strategy and a plan?

Lauren Harris: That is a good question. I would say the difference between a strategy and a plan is that a strategy is figuring out what you’re doing and why, and a plan is the execution of that strategy.

I think that’s how I would break that down because the plan is going to be what are you [00:18:00] updating, what are you posting, what are you launching? The strategy is going to be what is inside that, what are the posts about, what is the copy on the site, what are you doing? So I think that’s how I’d define it.

The strategy is what you’re doing, and the plan is how you’re doing it.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. No, that’s a pretty good definition, I think, or a set of definitions. And so that brings me to my next question, and that is that not everybody is born with a naturally… a brain that naturally thinks strategically, but it is something that can be developed over time.

So how would somebody who’s really more oriented towards doing tasks or implementing a plan, doing the things you need to do to implement something, what are some things that they could do that would help them just think more strategically?

Lauren Harris: Ooh, that is a good question. I think [00:19:00] thinking strategically requires taking a step back.

It requires stepping back from the action and thinking of, like… Oh, how would I say that? I would say, for somebody who struggles with thinking strategically, you have to take a moment to understand that, one, you already are. You already are thinking strategically. If you’re posting, if you’re writing copy, if you’re designing anything, you already are thinking strategically, but you’re thinking strategically as to what you desire.

You’re thinking as to what you would want to see as a post or what you would want to read as a consumer. Thinking strategically requires taking yourself out of your own desires, your own thoughts, and your own brain, and putting yourself in someone else’s shoes completely and entirely. You’re not there to think about if you would buy the product.

You’re there to think about if the people who you [00:20:00] want to buy the product will buy it. And so that’s what I would say there is thinking strategically is stepping out of your own thoughts and putting yourself in someone else’s thoughts.

Trudy Rankin: That is actually a really, really good answer, and I’ll have to say, though, as a follow-up, that is also a really, really difficult thing to do if you haven’t really done it before.

And if you finally get to the place where you realize that, oh, hang on, that was what I wanted to do, maybe that’s not what they want to do, then you’re back to that conundrum of, how do I figure out what it is that they want and that they need and that they desire? So can you talk just a little bit more about that?

Because we’re going to keep coming back to it, I think, because it is almost like the Holy Grail of being able to figure out how to talk with your clients, is that whole process of figuring out what it is they actually need. So how much… when you’re working with your clients and you’re helping them do their [00:21:00] thing, what’s the split between face-to-face, focus group, like you’ve already mentioned, and competitor analysis and all that sort of thing? Want to kinda give us a bit of a rounded picture of the mix of things.

Lauren Harris: The mix of things that allows you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes?

Trudy Rankin: Yes, yeah.

Lauren Harris: Okay. I think the mix of things…

Because when I say you have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, that is thinking strategically, but when it comes to doing that for a business, you’re doing two things at once, right? So you always have to stay true to the business, which is why we figure that out first. And then that sort of takes a backseat.

It’s a list. It’s a list of things that you know to be true, your values, your systems, all of that. You keep that, and that’s just sort of like it applies. It applies to everything that you do moving forward. So you take that application, that’s baseline. Then you understand how you need to be different from everybody else, right?

So you already know what everybody else is doing, so you don’t really need to do that because they’re already doing it, and it [00:22:00] either is or isn’t working for them, but it’s already full. So then all of those things and those ideas, those are cut out of the picture. So you’ve got your baseline, then you’ve got your comparison chart.

So this is what we should be doing, and this is what we shouldn’t be doing. So then if it moves on from that, then you have your audiences, and understanding your audiences is a lot easier when you get their psychographics, when you understand where they are in life, when you understand if they have children, and they’re overwhelmed.

If they’re retired, and they have, an income that is set for monthly. When you understand those things, you understand who they are. So then you know who you’re talking to and exactly what they need to hear from you. And so what it is, the split I would say, is thinking about…

that’s a good question. I would say it’s about, like, 60/40. It’s about 60% of doing what your audience wants to see, and what [00:23:00] they want to hear, and what they would think is cool, and about 40% of staying true to your business, and staying true to who you are, and making sure that you are, you know, comfortable and showing up as you feel represented in your business.

And I think that’s really what it is, because the truth is, like, a lot of us the target audience is Gen Z, and we can’t fill our business’ page with memes and embarrassing reels. We just can’t. And so it’s a little bit of a give and take. You give them a little bit, but you’re still showing up true to the business and legit, and reliable.

Trudy Rankin: I mean, there’s a couple of questions that come out of that as well. In terms of the clientele that you work with do you see a lot of difference between the generations in terms of how they operate or what they’re looking for in terms of help?

Lauren Harris: The biggest difference I see between the generations is where they’re at.

So which socials they’re actually on, or which [00:24:00] platforms they use. So I’m a firm believer in content optimization. If you’ve got it, post it, all channels. But that being said, there are channels… Like, when you are marketing a business and you figure out who those audiences are, right? The biggest difference between the generations is where you can reach them.

It depends, where would I, what would I think? So, like, we have a bunch of clients in healthcare, and so the different healthcare clients, if it’s a local business, you’re always going to focus local, and you’re going to want to tag local. But, like, if it is younger people, you’re going to want to be on TikTok, you’re going to want to get them on TikTok.

If it is moms or an older generation, you’re going to want to be on Facebook. If it is sort of that middle ground, you’re going to want to be on Instagram. They show up different places, and that’s why I am so strong in believing that, like, you have to be everywhere so that everyone can find you, no matter where they’re at.

But the biggest thing is understanding that no matter where they are, what I [00:25:00] have seen is not the difference between all generations, is all generations still do their due diligence. And so they still are going to look across all of the touch points to make sure that you show up. And so if they discover you on socials, then they’re going to go to your website if it’s linked in your bio.

So you need to make sure whatever the link in your bio is, is where you want people to go. And so then if they go to your website, and they scroll, and you pass that test, then they’ll either check out or they’ll go deeper. They’ll go look at the reviews. They’ll go look at your Google. If you’re a physical address, they’re likely to go look at your Google.

So then they’re going to go look at your Google. And then if your Google passes the test, then they’re like, “Okay, well, I’ll move forward.” So it’s about understanding that all of everything needs to line up the exact same, not one channel says this, one channel says this, what our website says this, our Google says this.

You have to make sure you’re consistent everywhere [00:26:00] because while we’re in it and a lot of times these days, people are hiring freelancers to run one of each, and they’re all putting out different messages. They’re all seemingly different businesses with the same logo, and so it’s confusing to the consumer.

You have to make sure that you are the same everywhere

Trudy Rankin: That’s kind of interesting because I’ve been around long enough to sort of see the pendulum swing from here to here and back again. And this side is you gotta be everywhere, and this side is no, just focus on just very specific ones that move the needle.

Lauren Harris: Mm-hmm.

Trudy Rankin: And I have to say that the be everywhere thing used to feel really, really overwhelming, but it is much more possible these days with AI and things like that. How do you help your clients get over the overwhelm of be everywhere?

Lauren Harris: Yeah, so the overwhelm of be everywhere is based in the overwhelm of not having your strategy laid out.

Because what it is is the wake up, figure out what you’re going to [00:27:00] post, is unbearable. It is a cycle that will lead to burnout every time. And what it is is when someone hears, “I need to update my Facebook, I need to update my Google, I need to update my website, I need to do this, I need to do this,” it just feels like a lot of tasks.

And you don’t know what you should say on them. You don’t know what you should post. You don’t know what your tagline on your website should be. You don’t know all of these things, but they all have to be figured out. If you already have all of this messaging figured out, then it’s not as overwhelming that you need to update all these things or be all of these places, because you already know what’s supposed to be said, and you already know how you’re supposed to say it and who it’s going to resonate with.

And the other thing is too is the content pillars help a lot with that. Because what you do is you build those content pillars out, and if you share it on all platforms, you do that with short form for sure and with statics and carousels as well. But what you can do is supplementary content.

So what we do for our [00:28:00] clients at Reliable PR is we do it monthly. So we sit down, we do have a strategy session, talk about, what they’re trying to promote, if there’s anything they’re trying to push, any ideas they have. And then we go out and we fill in those gaps, and we find some things that are, popular, that we can sort of interpret but not copy.

We figure out some initiatives that need a little more attention and some core messaging that needs to go out, and we build all of the content at once. We build, and if it’s website updates, we map out what those updates are going to be, and Google profile, photos and things like that. We do it a month ahead.

And what that does is it allows you to look at an entire month worth of what you’re going to be doing to find those gaps of like, “Oh, well, we didn’t mention this,” or, “Oh, we didn’t talk about this at all, and we need to,” or, “Oh, we did a lot of this, and we did none of this.” When you do it all together, it allows you to step back and see where the gaps are, and that’s really what we do, and we fill in those gaps with supplementary content.

If your target audience is on LinkedIn, then yes, you [00:29:00] still share all of this stuff to LinkedIn, but you do supplementary text-based posts that are long, that are native to the platform. Same with Facebook. If your target audience is on Threads or X, then you do supplementary short-form text as well.

So you build out the entire strategy with the core being short-form video. It’s just where we’re at today. And then you fill in everything else with different formats.

Trudy Rankin: Oh, that’s kind of interesting. We could go probably a couple of different ways with this but I mean, especially that comment about that the fact that short-form video is core because I know a lot of people go, “I don’t want to be on video.

Can’t do that. How do I…” You know? So that is a known problem, a known challenge for small businesses who, yes, they are trying to be everywhere, but knowing that they need to do videos is kind of like the last straw, and they’re going, “No. No way.” How could somebody who’s going, “I couldn’t possibly do a video,” how could they actually [00:30:00] get started?

Just put their toe in the water and get started with doing short-form videos.

Lauren Harris: So if you are terrified of doing short-form video and being on camera, then you don’t have to be. Don’t record yourself speaking. If that’s not your cup of tea, then when you do it, it’s not going to resonate anyway because they’re going to tell you’re not comfortable or enjoying yourself.

And a lot of people have some stage fright when the camera turns on. What you can do instead is different ways of providing video. You can do either video, like B-roll of your location or B-roll of your product. Or B-roll of your product being used or just an aesthetic video. If that’s too much, you can even pull it further back.

You can do stock video. You can find, if you’re a drink company, and you sell a water-based supplement, then you can do a stock video of water being poured into a cup and put text on screen about five facts about your [00:31:00] product. You can even dial it even further back. You don’t even have to put an action video in it.

You can do a graphic-based video with a solid background that is a video, and text that enters the screen slowly and teaches them something or provides some information. I think a lot of people forget that a reel is just anything that is an MP4. That’s it. That’s all it is. It can be any format of a video, but as long as it’s a video, it’s a reel.

And unfortunately, reels are just so important because that’s where we’re all scrolling. It’s on the feed. You know, you click a reel on Instagram, and all of a sudden you’re only going to see reels until you get off the app. It’s just the way that it has shifted, and so you just have to be there so that they can find you.

But then on your page, you can do all the other things because once they find you, you’ve already got them. Then they need to be able to learn everything about you.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. No, that makes sense. [00:32:00] That does make a lot of sense. We’re getting close to the end of our time, but I did want to touch on one other thing that I know, a lot of small businesses kind of think about and then immediately shy away from, and that is PR.

And why is it important for small businesses to consider and then actually make some attempts at getting some PR about their business and kind of maybe a couple of ways of actually getting started with that?

Lauren Harris: Oh, definitely. So PR is so essential for your business because it does a lot of things.

Number one, it establishes credibility. If they search you and they see all of these things that are connected to your account from reliable, credible sources, then you have legitimacy. Now two, it also enhances your search visibility. So if people search you, then you’re more likely to be found because of these articles and these things.

But what I would say is it’s most important [00:33:00] for local businesses. For local businesses, it’s really important to have good PR because they’re going to know these news stations. They’re going to know these locations. And if they think that you are well-established enough to write about you and to endorse you essentially, then you get that immediate trust factor.

Now, for products and things like that in PR, it’s really important a lot for launches. I love PR because it gives you an opportunity to explain things that people won’t sit and listen to on social media. You can focus your PR on anything you want it to be. If you want it to be why you started your business, then you start telling everybody why you started your business.

Now, that sort of naturally leads me into the execution of that PR. And when it comes to execution, there’s a lot of different ways, and there’s some that you can, like, go online, and you can pay for, like, mass market, across the board, which [00:34:00] sometimes has its purpose. But the biggest thing is, is uncomfortably reaching out.

For anybody listening, it’s going to be uncomfortably reaching out to people you don’t know and asking them to tell your story. And that’s the biggest thing is when you do PR, you now have these contacts. You have these warmed up, so you can reach out to them, and they’re not strangers.

But if you’re doing it yourself, You’re going on the news station’s website. You are searching. You are going, and you’re finding emails, and you’re sending them emails. And they just have to be very compelling emails. You have to pitch them basically of what it is, what you want to talk about, why they should care, and then how to move forward, what to do next.

And sometimes it takes sending them a few emails a few different emails, and then they wear down. That’s what I would say for anybody trying to do PR that doesn’t have it yet is pick the most interesting thing about your business or something new that you’re launching or something that is newsworthy and pitch it.

Pitch it to anybody and [00:35:00] everybody.

Trudy Rankin: I think that PR is something that people still sort of naturally recoil from because, I don’t know, for a lot of businesses it’s almost like there’s this desire just to be quiet and sit in your corner, but you still want people to buy from you.

And it just doesn’t work like that. You really do need people to know about you, especially given the new way that search works, and PR really, really helps with helping you to be found and having the AI tools recommend you. Lauren, it’s been really good talking with you. And if people were interested in finding out more about you or maybe reaching out for some help, where would they go?

Lauren Harris: Yeah, so if anybody needs to get any more information or any help, you can find us anywhere on socials at reliable.pr. And you can also visit our website reliablepr.net, and I would suggest going there because a lot of the questions that you’ve asked today, we have guides and downloads on our site that are helpful for business owners.

And we developed all these just because we saw a lot of [00:36:00] misinformation on the internet. So there are checklists for PR, there are guides for content pillars. There’s a lot of stuff on there, and it’s all free to download. So I would definitely check that out if anything I said, you know, is overwhelming and you would like some expert guidance on what to be doing.

Trudy Rankin: Excellent. No, thanks for that. I’ll make sure I put that in the show notes. Lauren, thanks again for being on the podcast. It was just lovely talking to you.

Lauren Harris: Yeah. Thank you so much.

Trudy Rankin: Well, there you have it. If Lauren’s got you thinking about that one platform that you’ve been avoiding because you don’t want to be on camera, here’s an easy way to get started. Grab your phone, film 10 or 15 seconds of B-roll, things like your workspace, your product, whatever you’ve got in front of you, and then layer three lines of text over that about what it does or why it matters.

That’s the reel. There’s no talking required, and it does count, and you don’t even have to show your face. Lauren’s site and her free guides and checklists are in the show [00:37:00] notes, so have a look there. If this episode was useful, hit follow so the next episode just turns up without you having to remember.

And if you’ve got a little bit of time, a quick review really does help the right people find the show. And when you want practical help building the online side of business landing in your inbox each week, come grab my newsletter at onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter.

That’s onlinebusinessliftoff.com/newsletter, and I’ll see you next time.