S5 E1: Building Brands from the Inside Out with Bill Southard of Southard Communications

Adrian McIntyre: 0:00:01

From the Public Relations Global Network, this is PRGN Presents. I’m Adrian McIntyre.

Abbie Fink: 0:00:07

And I’m Abbie Fink, president of HMA Public Relations in Phoenix, Arizona and a founding member of PRGN. With public relations leaders embedded into the fabric of the communities we serve, clients hire our agencies for the local knowledge, expertise and connections in markets spanning six continents across the world.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:00:28

Our guests on this biweekly podcast series are all members of the Public Relations Global Network. They will discuss such topics as workplace culture, creative compensation and succession planning, the importance of sustainability and environmental, social and governance programs, crisis communications, and outside of the box thinking for growing your business.

Abbie Fink: 0:00:48

For more information about PRGN and our members, please visit prgn.com. And now let’s meet our guest for this episode.

Bill Southard: 0:00:59

Hi, I’m Bill Southard, founder and CEO of Southard Communications. It’s a firm that I founded actually 30 years ago this year. We’re headquartered in New York City. We are a generalist agency, primarily focused on B2C with a little bit of B2B work. And overall, I’ve got about a little bit more than 40 years of experience in the PR industry.

Abbie Fink: 0:01:22

So the new kid on the block, basically. So often public relations agencies are brought on board, I like to say, because our clients want to get in the newspaper or they want to get out of the newspaper. But they tend to want us for, you know, traditional public relations activities, media relations, you know, talking about their brand and helping them build their reputation.

Abbie Fink: 0:01:47

But in today’s business environment, communications professionals like us really have a much larger role in serving as a counselor to our clients across really their entire business. And you really have some interesting perspective on what that can mean, you know, predominantly in probably in the business to consumer side of things, but certainly businesses of all types are looking to grow. And how do communications professionals these days think about that and bring that focus into our client work?

Bill Southard: 0:02:20

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s a really great point, Abbie. So I, you know, I think the business, as we all know, has evolved over the, you know, the 40 years that I’ve been doing it and certainly over the last five to 10 years for a lot of different reasons.

Bill Southard: 0:02:34

And I think what what there’s a lot of PR people are really smart business people and smart counselors. And, you know, for a long time, we’ve been put into this corner and said, okay, how do we create media opportunities? How do we generate exposure for brands? And in the old days, you know, you used to have a client meeting and if the clipbook was really thick, everybody thought you did a good job. Right. You threw the clipbook on the on the conference room table. It was really, really thick and thicker than the previous month. Then you did a good job.

Bill Southard: 0:03:06

Nowadays, particularly on the B2C side, what you’re seeing is that brands are looking at agencies like all of ours in the PRGN network and outside the network as really business partners, as strategic business partners. And they look at us and they say, okay, we understand that you have expertise in communications and media relations and influencer, et cetera. But really, for you to really add value within the C-suite, we really want you to understand how can you help us build our business?

Bill Southard: 0:03:36

You know, build our business. What does that mean? For some companies, that may mean getting distribution for a product at retail. It could mean driving online sales. It could mean creating partnerships or licensing opportunities. So I think the good thing about being in the C-suite is we’re in the C-suite, right? And we have a voice and it’s respected.

Bill Southard: 0:03:57

But with that comes more responsibility for us to be a business partner for clients. And then one last note I’ll say on this is from a B2C standpoint, I think what’s radically changed and created these opportunities for agencies, because there really are opportunities, is with e-commerce, you know, these days, Clients look to agencies like all of our agencies and say, okay, we understand about corporate reputation. We understand about credibility. We understand about frequency and reach. But at the same time, you know, would like to be able to work with you and use your expertise to show us how can we drive eyeballs to our website?

Bill Southard: 0:04:41

How can we increase sales? How can how can you have a direct impact on the bottom line in our on our business? And I think increasingly, particularly from the B2C perspective, agencies are getting challenged in that manner. And I think it’s incumbent upon all agencies to say, we do great with the media relations and influencer marketing. We’re going to build exposure because that’s what we’re really, really good at. But we’re also smart and have relationships in other areas that will help you grow your business in a really impactful manner.

Abbie Fink: 0:05:10

So your comment about the clip book just springs back. Like my every one of us started our career, I think, and being the one that had to, you know, cut out the clips, measure them, put paste them into some kind of a document and literally drop them on the client’s table. And the louder the thud, the better we were. Exactly. And we measured our success that way. I mean, that was that was how we did what we we could say that we generated 97 inches of, you know, news coverage or whatever it would be.

Abbie Fink: 0:05:38

And that’s that is not the way we do it anymore. And it really is about a more actionable opportunity, right? We have to, we know we did this, but what did that article do or what did that relationship bring? And so I think we have to take a step back a little bit and also talk about, you know, how do we set ourselves up for those conversations, and guide our clients to understand how that works and how we will measure our success. Yeah.

Abbie Fink: 0:06:10

In that new role as guiding the business growth, which is a much more of a return on that investment, right? They really want to see something actionable happen. So how do we set ourselves up to have those conversations and what kinds of things should we be asking our own internal teams when we approach clients, but also what we should be talking to them about in those initial conversations?

Bill Southard: 0:06:36

Yeah, no, that’s a great point, Abbie. And, you know, No, I think it’s all about starting the relationship with identifiable deliverables, right? And, you know, understanding, okay, what is it that you can expect from us as your agency partner? And that could be from a traditional press standpoint and influencer perspective, but it also can be from the standpoint of how can we help you achieve your broader business objectives, right?

Bill Southard: 0:07:05

And if it’s driving online sales, or it’s creating more effective packaging, or if it’s reducing your costs, cost of goods even, or if it’s optimizing on Amazon, you know, how can we create opportunities based upon our knowledge and our understanding of your business to be able to support you in all of those areas and to provide that same quality and that same level of service that we are traditionally providing from the media relations and influencer marketing standpoint.

Bill Southard: 0:07:36

So I think it’s, it’s, it’s you know, Creating an understanding and say, okay, here here’s the scope of what we can do, because we have really, really smart people that work with all agencies. Right. And we understand business, not just how to get into The New York Times or how to get a segment on a local morning show. We understand business and we understand your business and we can support you across a lot of different aspects of that business. That’s going to help drive growth.

Bill Southard: 0:08:05

I think at the same time, to your point, Abbie, which is another really good point. Right. It’s incumbent, I think, upon the principles of the agency to also filter that down to their staff so that the staff who’s traditionally always been focused on, hey, I need to get these three placements. Oh, I need these two influencer reviews. Right. Nowadays.

Bill Southard: 0:08:25

Training the staff and making sure that they understand that deliverables have changed, right? That, yeah, we expect you to continue to be successful from a media relations standpoint, influencer marketing standpoint. But at the same time, what clients are going to evaluate us on are how effective we’ve been, how good of a business partner we’ve been, and how we’ve been able to help them move the needle short-term or long-term in terms of moving their business forward. So there is some internal training, I think, that does need to happen within the organization so that they understand what is expected of them.

Bill Southard: 0:09:02

To me, that’s always been the more exciting part of it. Like so that younger staff can learn about business, not just about how to pitch a media outlet or how to work with an influencer, but you can really understand how a company, whether it’s an established company or an early stage startup company, you know, how do they structure their business? How do they create distribution? How do they sell product? How do they position it? How do they market it against, you know, competitors? To me, that’s always being involved in that aspect of client’s business has really been one of the most interesting things that we can do as professionals.

Abbie Fink: 0:09:37

We always talk about the importance of having a seat at the table, being in the C-suite, as you said, to have these conversations with leadership so that we are, seen as a valuable partner and seen as an advisor that they need to keep in the loop. And typically, conversations around sales and growth would fall to the director of sales or the marketing manager.

Abbie Fink: 0:10:03

How do we put ourselves in those conversations and really establish that as a partnership with those individuals that we’re not trying to, you know, take away their important role within the organization, but to serve as, you know, an enhancement to or in support of the work that they’re already doing. And really establish that partnership mentality.

Bill Southard: 0:10:27

Yeah, and it’s a fine line, right? I mean, you know, at the end of the day, what we want to do is we want to make them look good, right? We want to make them look smart and we want to make them look good so that, hey, listen, and the way that most agencies approach it is, you know, we’re in this together.

Bill Southard: 0:10:47

Like we’re going to succeed or fail together, right? And if we don’t have a cooperative relationship in which we understand the pressures that you’re under, because, and you know this, Abbie, when you start with a client, you always look at it from their perspective. Like, what’s important for them, right? Whether they’re the marketing manager, the CEO, the operations manager, the sales manager.

Bill Southard: 0:11:12

How can we support them because their goal is driving sales or creating interesting marketing programs that help drive sales or impacting the bottom line if you’re the CEO? So I think creating... Relationships with each of those functions within the organization is really critical. I think we need to make sure that everybody’s on the same page, if you will.

Bill Southard: 0:11:36

And that it’s also a very collective experience. And that in a lot of instances, you know, this is giving them as much credit as we get, right? Basically saying, hey, listen, we were able to achieve this sales increase or this enhancement to your corporate reputation because of the collective effort between your sales department, your marketing department, and us as an agency.

Bill Southard: 0:12:01

The challenges are sometimes some companies are a little more disjointed from an internal communication standpoint. In those situations, I think it’s really incumbent on senior leadership, whether it’s the COO or the CEO, to kind of bring them all together and to set the stage and say, listen, this is important to me and to our shareholders or our constituents. And therefore, as you’re going to be part of this process in terms of helping make it run and helping to create the success that we’re looking to create together.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:12:30

Bill, just picking up on your reference to e-commerce, it really is fascinating to me that the way we buy and sell things has steadily moved online to the point now where, although the products and services still happen in the physical world, the transactions are mostly happening on the same screen that we’re consuming all kinds of other content. And it really does remind me that there’s so many communication pieces wrapped around those transactions.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:13:03

You know, if a small business is selling their jam through a Shopify store or they have a product on Amazon, there’s all of the landing page copy. There’s all of the advertising copy. There’s all of the email sequences, the abandoned cart sequence. Every one of these things is a communication. And this brings up for me two questions. One is the sort of territoriality Of some of this, because traditionally there have been agencies that were exclusively advertising agencies or exclusively, you know, multi-channel marketing agencies or exclusively PR firms.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:13:39

And of course, we have internal comms and marketing and advertising folks at many companies as well. Nowadays, there’s a lot of blending. There’s a lot of boundaries being mixed. And you might find somebody running Facebook ads at a more traditional communications firm, as opposed to a large advertising agency. It just depends on the client and on the expertise.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:14:02

The second question is about pricing, but I’m going to save that for a minute. So how do you claim that positioning? How do you demonstrate that expertise in a credible way? And how do you differentiate a firm that has these capabilities from other options that are there for a potential client?

Bill Southard: 0:14:22

Yeah, I think, you know, number one, I think all agencies understand this. I think you need to expand the breadth of the service that you offer. And I think there’s two ways to do that. One, you could build those services and capabilities internally. Or number two, for, say, like paid digital, for example, you know, you could have an outside partner, right, who you could rely on, who could be either white labeled through your company or made part of the team.

Bill Southard: 0:14:49

You need to certainly, to be able to create the opportunities and help build business beyond the traditional PR, you need to expand your service offerings and your capabilities. You know, for smaller agencies, obviously, it’s a little bit more difficult to build that internally, right? So, they may rely more on, you know, third-party partners that can help them do that.

Bill Southard: 0:15:12

And as you get bigger, it tends to be a little bit easier to kind of bring those services in-house, right? If you can serve it. So I think to your first point, it’s understanding what are those services and capabilities that we either have to offer our clients through staffed positions or through reliable partners that we have as an agency. And I’ll give you one example. So we have a lot of B2C clients that are selling on Amazon.

Bill Southard: 0:15:43

And the success on Amazon is how well do you market inside the walls of Amazon and outside the walls of Amazon, right? So the traditional PR influencer marketing that we do are generally outside the walls of Amazon, creating general awareness and driving eyeballs and consumers to Amazon to investigate a product. But if you’re not marketing and advertising and doing SEO and keywords within the Amazon community, then most brands are going to have a hard time hitting the sales metrics that they’re trying to hit, right?

Bill Southard: 0:16:16

So When agencies talk to clients, it’s smart to say, okay, we may not be doing the Amazon optimization directly for you, but we have a partner over here that is gonna work with us and work with your sales department and work with your content development people, and they are going to create a budget, execute the program, And the good thing about e-commerce, at least, is there are more analytics. You can, you know what I mean? Your return on advertising spend, for example, you can say, hey, listen, we’re getting a two and a half return on advertising spend or three return on advertising spend.

Bill Southard: 0:16:57

For me, it’s critically important if you have a B2C client that’s heavily e-commerce focused to convince them that the program should include Amazon Optimization, paid social, and PR. If the client is coming to you and saying, hey, listen, we understand that you’re about credibility and third-party content and corporate reputation and awareness, all of that is important. Sometimes with e-commerce companies, truthfully, it’s undervalued because their number one metrics is, hey, how much am I driving in sales?

Bill Southard: 0:17:34

Like I’m paying you X amount a month, X amount over these certain months. You know, what is that doing in terms of driving sales? PR shouldn’t be totally reliant on just as a sales generator because that’s not really the function of PR. But there are other aspects that saddle what we traditionally do that’s going to help create those opportunities.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:17:56

So this leads directly to my follow-up question, which is how do you now think about pricing these services, given maybe the traditional retainer model in PR doesn’t fit exactly what you’re, the delivery that you’re talking about. And there’s a move generally towards project-based as opposed to kind of retainer-based and other things. I mean, there’s just a lot of that mix. So how do you think about pricing?

Bill Southard: 0:18:21

Yeah. So pricing, one, the industry has forced most agencies to rethink pricing, right? Because, you know, the days of the one year contracts are becoming fewer and fewer, right? So we’re seeing, and I know a lot of the other agency owners that I speak to are seeing these trends as well, there tends to be shorter term engagements, which is more difficult because, you know, how do you staff against, you know, a client that’s six months versus one year? It creates, I think, more difficult opportunities. But that’s certainly the nature of where the business is going.

Bill Southard: 0:18:56

The way that we approach it, and I think a lot of agencies approach it, is that, okay, here’s a line item for our professional staff time to help execute the programs that we would do through our internal services and capabilities. With Amazon Optimization, for example, many of the Amazon Optimization companies will take a very small fee. They’ll make most of their money on the backside of that, you know, a percentage of sales over what that company may be selling currently.

Bill Southard: 0:19:25

Because if you’re really good at that, you’ll make more money if you can take a percentage of sales versus charging a couple thousand dollars a month, right? So we generally will approach that and say, we’re going to create on the Amazon optimization side, we’re gonna have a very small fee that’ll be paid to the partner, our partner, but also our agency will get a percentage of the increase in sales.

Bill Southard: 0:19:46

You know, we’ll split that with the Amazon optimization company because we brought that to them and there’s greater upside for us. And the same thing with kind of the other services, if we’re doing paid digital, we do some paid digital for bigger, bigger budgets. We’ll work with a media company, but we’ll budget those out separately, you know, over and above kind of the staff time for the core functionality of what we’re doing from a client perspective.

Bill Southard: 0:20:15

It creates, you know, we ran into this, I’m sure a lot of agencies ran into this when we started providing social media services, right? Like, you know, Abbie, I’m sure you know this, right? You charge, here’s our budget for social media because we have a social media team. Here’s our budget for PR and digital, et cetera. And in the early days, you know, clients would say, hey, you know, just include it all in there, right?

Bill Southard: 0:20:40

Because it doesn’t, you know, and if you fall into that trap, it’s going to be very difficult to get out of that trap. So the way that we line item our proposals is, okay, here’s our set fee for our hours. Here’s our fee for social media, hours, et cetera. Here’s our fee for everything else that we’re providing over and above what you fall into traditional media relations, influencer marketing.

Abbie Fink: 0:21:05

Well, the pricing model, I think, will remain a challenge for all of us, regardless of where it goes. Include it, not include it. Mark it up. Don’t mark it up. Bring a partner. Don’t bring a partner. It all goes into that. Really, this is where we are a little bit of the practice what we preach philosophy. We are all running businesses as well and need to think about growth and how we staff.

Abbie Fink: 0:21:28

And so we have to kind of ask these questions internally as well as we put that together. But one of the things that strikes me with this is that it, well, my hope is that it is, certainly we have to be budget conscious. We have to be thinking about what we need to do, the things that we need to do, and we need to demonstrate to the prospective client that this is an investment that they can make and we’ll see a return on.

Abbie Fink: 0:21:54

And when it’s a, you know, buy this item type of return, we can demonstrate that. But the non-tangibles on the reputation, you know, what might be a more business-to-business is certainly a lot harder to, qualify with a financial number, but certainly is just as relevant to a B2B company, you know, a law firm, an architecture firm, an accounting firm that is trying to do the exact same thing.

Abbie Fink: 0:22:22

We can still point to clicks to the website, you know, conversions from the landing page to a meeting, from a meeting to a proposal, a proposal to a contract. We can still do that. There’s still a direct line, maybe a little bit more difficult to point to it again, because it’s a longer term sales cycle, perhaps from the business to business side of things.

Abbie Fink: 0:22:47

But in thinking about this conversation and positioning our teams, our leadership and our account teams as that important advisor and important role within an organization, what are the signs we need to be looking at when we’re when we’re meeting with a client, that they’re ready for that kind of conversation, that it’s not just, the one reason they called us into the meeting in the first place, but that we know that there’s more opportunity for them. And if we ask some key questions, we’re going to help them think differently about the role that we can play.

Bill Southard: 0:23:24

Yeah. And I think that’s a good point, Abbie, because I think it’s asking those questions, right? Like, you know, like I always ask, what are your business goals and what are your communications goals, right? What are we trying to accomplish from a communication standpoint? But at the same time, how does that feed what your business goals are, right?

Bill Southard: 0:23:43

And, you know, very often it’s sales, but it could be other things that they’re trying to accomplish. So I think it’s one, I think it’s having the conversation at the highest level within the organization because those people are interested in how we can contribute and what those short and long-term goals are from a business perspective.

Bill Southard: 0:24:03

And then, and then discussing, asking questions about, okay, so, you know, how do you approach sales? Like, you know, we, we, we, when we start with a client, I always ask them, it was a little bit easier before COVID, and we’re trying to get back on this. We want to go on a sales call with your sales team. We want to go on, you know what I mean?

Bill Southard: 0:24:23

We want to see what that, what that experience and what that process is like, and what the message is like to get an understanding about how we can really kind of contribute on that front. So I think it’s all about like asking the right questions. I think it’s about positioning ourselves as business smart counselors and business builders that also have expertise and, you know, media relations, et cetera. But we offer more than what a typical PR agency that’s just out there driving media coverage might be able to offer. I do think that. It’s interesting.

Bill Southard: 0:25:01

The role of building awareness and credibility because of B2C has been undermined a little bit. You know what I mean? I say to brands, and I’m sure all the other agency owners do too, what we’re trying to do is build a brand for you. That’s not going to happen overnight. Maybe we can move the needle a little bit from a sales perspective, but if you want to have a sustainable brand that’s going to be here today, it’s going to be here tomorrow, it’s going to be here 10 years from now, you know, PR is the most important aspect of allowing you to do that, right?

Bill Southard: 0:25:37

Building, getting that awareness, getting that frequency, getting the messages out there, you know, creating reputation, developing reputation and a trust in from the consumer or the B2B audience, right? Right. So I think and the companies that aren’t interested in building brands, but are interested in like short term sales, scare me truthfully. You know what I mean? Because I’m not sure we’re going to completely make them happy. And I’m not sure they’re thinking about it in the right way if they want to have a sustainable business, you know, beyond the next six months or beyond the next year or so.

Adrian McIntyre: 0:26:13

Thanks for listening to this episode of PRGN Presents, brought to you by the Public Relations Global Network.

Abbie Fink: 0:26:20

Episodes are also available on our website, along with more information about PRGN and our members, at prgn.com.