PR Strategies That Actually Work: Storytelling, Social Media & Earned Media | Jason Kocina

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On today's episode of Right About Now, I talked to Jason Cosina.

We talked all the things about marketing today, public relations, earned media, paid media.

What, hey, even the big change happening with SEO and AI.

Are we looking for answers?

Are we looking for questions?

What's it all about?

How do you get ahead with your marketing today, small business, medium business?

We dig into it all right here, right now.

I haven't felt the way I feel about AI since the 90s.

I felt that was a revolutionary time with the internet.

And we're going to another one.

And then people said Google's never going to lose traffic.

To see it happen, oh my gosh,

something's happening.

Mainstreaming of these tools that we've been looking at now for years, but they're becoming accepted and it's a new world all of a sudden.

This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production.

We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month.

Taking the BS out of business for over six years in over 400 episodes.

You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks?

Well, it starts right about now.

What's up, guys?

Welcome to Right About Now.

We're always teaching you a little bit of this, a little bit of that.

It always comes back to business and marketing, typically.

There's a lot changing.

You got AI happening.

You got the mediums always seem to move from one to the other.

But at the end of the day, there's some tried and true.

And that's what we're going to talk about today with Jason Cosina.

He was the founder of Checkerboard Strategic Web Development.

He's an OG like myself.

Now he's the director of digital marketing media relations.

What's up, Jason?

Not too much.

How are you doing?

Good, man.

Hey, we're OGs, man.

You and I both.

I got a little gray in the beard.

You got a little gray in the hair.

We've been around the block.

01 was when I started out in the business.

I never thought I would say that.

I don't feel old, but sometimes I throw these years around.

I guess I do get older.

We were talking before we got started here, and I was thinking that, okay, 90s.

90s is when I started doing a lot of this stuff.

And it's like I know.

Teaching people how to reserve domain names.

That really dates me.

I know.

We joke, things are moving fast now, but I'm still on GoDaddy buying domain names.

So it's like some things haven't changed.

Some things never change, I guess.

I know, but it feels like we're racing towards, I don't know, that changing with AI and everything else and SEO changing and AI giving you answers instead of questions.

I love it when it gives me questions, then I'm going to get better answers.

I know, but it does.

It'll prompt you back.

It'll be like, but what do you want that?

Just figure it out.

Just figure it out.

Oh,

just real quick on AI.

I know you just mentioned it, but I haven't felt the way I feel about AI since the 90s.

I felt that was a revolutionary time with the internet.

And we're going to another one.

And then people said Google's never going to lose traffic.

To see it happen, oh my gosh,

something's happening.

Mainstreaming of these tools that we've been looking at now for years, but they're becoming accepted.

And it's a new world all of a sudden.

It is.

Let's go right at it, Jason.

What works today from your standpoint?

And I know we could get into B2B and B2C and this type of company and that type of company, but I'm going to ask you broadly on the PR earned media side, what's working today for your clients?

Not just, hey, we did these things, but what has impact?

And then maybe even on the more traditional marketing side, website, ads, social, that sort of thing.

Would you go down two avenues there of what's working?

I suppose I would go down the two avenues to some extent.

I think that there's a lot that's the same with PR.

We've always fully defined the client's message before we got started and then adapted it to the news of the day so that we have better chances of getting picked up.

That strategy has always been there and it's still what works in constant communication.

It's harder to get through to people now.

Whether you're calling writers or reporters or you're calling someone to sell to, that's a problem.

What has changed is really the other side of our business.

We're kind of putting a publicist more in charge of PR and SEO and AI visibility and content marketing.

These things all kind of flow together nicely, but what hasn't changed is understanding your messaging, getting it down, documenting it.

It's the only way to let someone else do your marketing for you is if you would go through that process to some extent.

They'll be saying whatever they want to say, and that kind of defeats the purpose.

If they're not spreading the message you want to the right people, then that's no good.

But Earn Media still works to grow brand awareness, blanket.

People have to be aware of you to buy from you.

I love performance marketing better than anyone, but unless you're hitting them at the moment of truth with a pack of gum in their checkout line and they need a pack of gum, short of that, there usually has to be some awareness and then consideration, then purchase.

I think we've shortened that cycle with digital marketing, but PR has always had a role in that awareness bucket.

Hopefully I don't take it too far off.

I was just, the whole time you're saying the gum aisle, I was thinking where that happens is the AI visibility side or the SEO optimization side.

They're ready to buy.

They're going and looking for stuff now.

Boy, you can't.

Yeah.

You find them.

That's who I want.

I want someone who already knows what they want.

I don't need to teach it to them.

So you're right on the other side too.

You need to get the word out there.

I would say that the number of possible channels has changed.

It used to be, boy, if we can get USA Today, everyone reads that and it's going to be out of the park.

Now we can split it down to, I only want to target people who build things out of plastic from Western United States or something.

And there's a show for them.

There's a show out there for them.

In some ways, it's really fine-tuned the targeted instead of the shotgun approach.

But again, it's just the landscape changes and it has changed a lot.

What's the most valuable media then?

Okay.

Podcasts having their day.

You're sitting here on a popular business show thanks to our audience.

And obviously, you see value in that.

And you probably preach that to your clients.

But what are the most valuable media?

I mean, it used to be, hey, TV and everything else in a lot of ways, unless it was like a major newspaper or something.

Unless I mean, newspapers, yeah, tough.

Yeah, when we used to do retail launches, oh my gosh, we got a football player to wear something and that was like the hugest thing.

And getting on, what was the show, the Today Show, and they'll still have a lot of viewers.

That's your target market is.

There's still a great place to go.

But boy, you're asking me, where do people go?

I think that we always lay it out based upon who their target markets are.

Do a little research on that.

And any kind of marketing, competitive analysis helps.

Let's see what other people are doing.

What keywords are they targeting for?

And how are they coming up number one for this?

So marketing is, is i learned it as marketing is always played with your cards face out so everyone can see what you're doing right yeah so incorporating that into your strategy a little bit or at least understanding it helps you kind of were asking which channels i think that the channels that we do have been broadened dramatically 95 of our business was through earned media in the past and now it's less than 50 we're doing paid media we're doing blogs we're doing marketing automation tools sales was always like the fifth element that we partnered with, but we didn't necessarily get involved with.

But then that automation stuff, you start to work with the salespeople.

Whenever I've talked to a salesperson and asked if they had enough leads, they've always answered, no.

We need more leads.

So

I like helping those people out too.

If SEO is changing and AI is starting to erode traditional SEO, How should small to medium businesses be thinking about

how to get show up from an AI perspective?

Focusing just on on the AI, it kind of encompasses both elements of those shopping you mentioned before.

For the people that are browsing or just starting to look at it, the AI element often would place it right in the top.

Say Google, you go to Google, you do a search.

Well, Gemini puts up there the answer.

If you're not shopping, you're just researching, you might see the answer there.

It's important that you're getting at least...

reference there.

That helps so that your name gets out there more.

And then when they do get into the part where they're actually ready to buy, then you want to make sure that you're coming up and searching.

obviously search is important to me but i have seen partially because what we just talked about traffic from search going down for our customer your global campaign just launched but wait the logo's cropped the colors are off and did legal clear that image when teams create without guardrails mistakes slip through but not with adobe express the quick and easy app to create on-brand content brand kits and lock templates make following design guidelines a no-brainer for hr sales and marketing teams and commercially safe ai powered by firefly lets them create confidently so your brand always shows up polished, protected, and consistent everywhere.

Learn more at adobe.com slash go slash express.

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There's organic traffic going down, seeing more traffic coming from ChatGPT, from Gemini, from Grok, or the other platforms.

But let's just go down the rabbit hole.

In a world where more and more people are adapting, prompting, and asking GPTs and language models these questions versus typing in Bojangles near me

as a southern guy in South Carolina.

Bojing still isn't as good as local stuff, I don't think.

But if we're moving towards that space, I just wonder how will there be selection if there's only one answer?

Those are the things that I think about, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah.

And it kind of has been that way to some extent, though, right?

You're going to Google and type in that same question in there, and it's going to give you the answer.

Number one, whoever's number one in the search results.

Yeah.

But I will say that I would consider a technology user.

I would be someone that's kind of out ahead of a lot of people.

And my usage for tech support stuff.

Here's a hint.

I don't know everything.

You know what I mean?

When people ask me, why is my email not working?

Or whatever question they have, nine times out of ten, I know enough about it that's the right question.

And it was Google before, and now it's ChatGPT or whatever.

My habits have changed that much.

And now we're seeing that apply to the mainstream.

Are you seeing the companies that you guys work with?

With ChatGPT, you've got AI that can act as agents and do things.

Are savvy businesses needing more agencies or less agency help?

It is becoming, to some extent, more about having responsive, high-quality people that can execute on those programs.

Use the ChatGPT or whatever to really formulate what you're asking for better.

That's always been a challenge and something that you need someone in there to kind of smooth that process out.

Smart marketing people can use the tool, but I would say it's probably best to formulate a plan or starts of a plan so that you can make a request and then have professionals execute on it.

I like it.

It's a great tool.

I have plenty of SEO prompts and ways to really use these tools to their maximum to get the most out of it.

But it always goes to our professional writing team because they make it unique.

To some extent, people that are smart in a particular topic are going to be more efficient with the tool.

But I don't know that you're going to be able to sit someone down that has no idea how to program and say, just program me everything, blah, blah, blah.

And it'll just do everything.

I set up one of our programmers in front of it and they ask very specific questions and they get to the answer a lot faster.

If that makes sense.

No, it seems to be making us more efficient.

So we might can bill less hours.

You still need some amount of hours to get the final output that are needed.

It brings more value that way as far as the efficiencies brought into it.

The more paid advertising, getting out of sort of the PR side and even the SEO side, which is organic to a degree, social media has such an impact and it's where so much attention is.

It's hard to ignore.

Is it knee-deep in your playbook with just about every client?

I wouldn't say every client, but certainly channels of our.

We have a B2B customer that's doing stuff and they have a great LinkedIn program and they're putting out content on LinkedIn and they're using it to expand the networking that they do at trade events.

And do you remember the days of Facebook?

for local marketing before they removed a lot of our capabilities?

I still miss that some days

where you could say, I want to target friends of all our friends that are interested in this in this area, da-da-da-da-da.

And it just worked so spectacularly.

I don't see it as well, but I still see it as an awareness tool, Facebook advertising and most of the product work we do where we're doing retail stuff.

Yes, we are doing awareness in some direct sales through that channel, but a lot of Google stuff for that.

Google shopping.

I'm just talking advertising channels.

Yeah.

So I would say if you ask me those questions, it's going to be Google primarily that we use for advertising, Facebook, LinkedIn.

You can buy commercial advertising, TV.

You can Google ads now.

So that adds a whole nother aspect to what's

programmatic.

Yeah.

Now you can not only buy the ad space just like you were doing before you can use the ai to help produce a video or whatever i don't know that one i haven't been able to get to work yet i watched these beautiful videos made by ai it goes back to that same thing they probably understand video and then they went to the ai tool and they could say just apercature or whatever words they use it in their area of talent to get these beautiful things made i go there and i'm like oh what is this garbage that kids produce when they produce the videos for you yeah i haven't corrected the code on that one either been more time than if I had just edited some b-roller footage we already have or something.

So I don't know.

Jury's out on that one for us too.

And a lot of what I do with it is just, hey, my ideas don't always flow linear order.

So I'm going to dump all my content into the system.

Then I'm going to say, okay, clean it up.

Make it make sense.

Put it in order or whatever.

I'm feeding it what I want it to say, and then I'm just saying, clean it up.

Jason, as we finished out here, any tips, tricks, leave our audience with a nugget for something maybe they're not thinking about that they should from a marketing perspective.

I would say get the CEO's guide to marketing.

This is about the basics of marketing.

So, basically, what I'm suggesting is get the foundation down for your messaging, your target audience, all that stuff, because the channel side and the environment is constantly changing and it's an ever-changing process.

So, get the foundation down so that you can more easily adapt when you get into picking which channels to push your content through.

Everything will perform better if you understand who your audience is, what motivates them, what creates the emotion.

That stuff has been consistent for a lot longer than I've been doing this stuff.

That's past the test of time.

It makes it easier when you're focusing on all the stuff that changes every day.

It feels like I can't do anything because I start a Facebook page and then Facebook's no longer popular anymore or whatever.

That's what I'd say.

Get your messaging down.

I know it's not very exciting, but it sure will make your efforts more effective.

Yeah.

And allow you to pivot as needed when channels change.

You know, as needed, yep.

I think that also people need kind of that.

We have this paper interview side where we do a ton of PR and it's all based on how big the audience is and those types of things, depending upon how much it costs.

We only charge when you get in the news when it actually airs.

But on the other side of it is the adaptable side where you have a sharp publicist that's more than just someone that is pitching the media for you.

They're also, they have enough understanding to talk with our other talent, SEO guy, or how do I be found in Chat GPT?

That's kind of the, where our business has been going more towards that type of thing, where you have just someone that can smart and pivot, work with you to get your messaging down, and then try, analyze, measure what's working.

And here's where we should do next.

Jason, drop some links or places they can keep up with what you guys are up to.

The CEO's guide to marketing is on Amazon and publicity.com.

We're in the midst of a brand new changeover to a new site.

So that one, I'm excited for that new site because it just simplifies how people can onboard with us and get to understand us.

But publicity.com is where you find more information about us.

Perfect.

Publicity.com.

We'll have that in the show notes.

Jason, really appreciate you for coming on.

Thank you.

Hey, guys, you know where to find us?

RyanisRight.com.

We'll have the highlight clips, the show notes, and the links to publicity.com there where you can get in touch with Jason and their team.

We appreciate him for coming on.

We appreciate you for making us number one.

We'll see you next time.

Right about now.

This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network Production.

Visit RyanisRight.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities.

Thanks for listening.

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This is the story of the one.

As head of maintenance at a concert hall, he knows the show must always go on.

That's why he works behind the scenes, ensuring every light is working, the HVAC is humming, and his facility shines.

With Granger's supplies and solutions for every challenge he faces, plus 24-7 customer support, his venue never misses a beat.

Call quickgranger.com or just stop by.

Granger, for the ones who get it done.