Dive deep into the insightful world of marketing and PR with our expert guest, Jen Hartmann. Discover fascinating insights on mergers, strategic networking, and innovative PR tactics like News Jacking. Packed with relatable stories and expert tips, this episode is a goldmine for agency owners looking to up their game.
Here are a few topics we’ll discuss on this episode of Masters in Marketing Agency Podcast.
- The art of strategic networking.
- Importance of community in agency growth.
- Innovative PR tactics that work.
- Hiring practices that set agencies apart.
- The impact of M&A on your agency.
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Quotables:
- 38:11 – I pay for their coffee and I ask them all about them. I do not make the conversation about me. In fact, I talk very little when I am taking somebody out to dinner or coffee. I just wanna learn all about them and what they’re working on. And then what I do is I do something for them. I don’t expect anything in return. I want nothing in return, in fact in that moment. But I will make an intro to somebody who I think they should meet. I will review their website or their marketing strategy, their social media, I’ll give them tips, I will send them a contact of a journalist. I do something just because I think I should do something for that person and that comes back tenfold every single time. They will open up doors for me that I would not have been able to open myself. And so that has been really impactful.
- 28:28 – Josh: How did you guys get your first client?
Jenn: Oh my gosh, okay. Let me think back. My network, this is still something I do a lot of, but I do a lot of networking and I go on a lot of coffee dates and dinner dates and whatever it may be. But I really leveraged my network to get our first couple of clients back in 2020 or back in 2019 really. And I still do it today. I still do a healthy amount of networking and that really helps to bring in clients. I mean of course we have a sales team and we’re doing a lot of lead gen and closing deals on the phone, but like I’m still out and about having conversations with people. I’ve just noticed that when I meet people they, not to toot my own horn, but people like me very quickly. And when people like you, they trust you and they wanna buy from you. - 47:34 – And that’s truly not the way to do PR in 2024. I think that worked maybe 20 years ago. But things are just different nowadays. So for example, we do a lot of news jacking, which sounds kind of wild, but essentially what it means is we’re constantly looking at trends and breaking news and we’re figuring out how can we latch our client onto that trend or that breaking news topic. And so we get a ton of features for our clients from doing that. So other agencies see it, they like it, they bring clients to us.
- 20:02 – Josh: Because this is something that we’ve talked about a decent amount, especially if the owner was an athlete or something like that and they find a lot of value in hiring athletes. Do you see the same thing?
Jenn: For sure. I would say that a high percentage of our employees played professional sports or competed at like the top level of their sport, whatever that might look like. And I think athletes do have certain traits, they know how to work really, really hard and they also know how to take feedback. They’re very coachable. And so yes, I think athletes develop these skills that do carry over into the workplace. - 36:31 – So a piece of advice I would definitely give people right off the bat is start building your network before you need your network. If you need a network and you haven’t built a network, it’s too late. Like you, you’re already starting up behind. So start building up your network years before you need them. I have always been a really great networker. I think I got it from my dad. My dad has a great network, he’s a talker, he’s very friendly, people like him and I think I just saw what he did growing up and I took it and I started doing that when I was in college. So any networking event they had in college, I would go any opportunity to meet CEOs or CMOs from companies around town, I would go and I would take it. I took every internship opportunity I could throughout college just for the sake of building up my network. And it honestly really paid off.