From Storytelling to PR Trends: Katie Zeppieri's Branding Expertise

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and I'm your host, Brett Deis. If you could please subscribe to this podcast at all your favorite podcasting. Absolutely. Have a five star review. Really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing, but this week we're gonna talk about branding. Mm, that's good. Brand strategies and brand, all the things that brands need to understand to actually be well. Aware or people for, to be aware of your brand because that's how we get some sales. If no one knows who you are and you don't get any sales, but with me, I have Katie with me and she's a two time TEDx speed speaker, author, social media influencer, media personality and founder and chief brand strategist of the mic drop agency and award-winning agency. Fast growing boutique PR agency and marketing firm specializing in brand amplification. For innovative companies and people. Mike Drops roster of clients range from high growth tech startups to serial entrepreneurs to C-suite executives and reality TV stars, including Netflix. Love is Blind Star, dip Beat, I think I'm saying that right. And Kelly Chase, who together have a combined total of over 1.4 million followers. But welcome to the show, Katie. So much for having me, Brett. Yes. And the first question is, all my guests is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I am both, but I think my first, cup in the morning is coffee. I.

Any like specifics? Do you just do whatever's in front of you or whatever's in the pot or you, are you like very specific on what you want?

I am a big fan of a company called Balza Coffee. It's big in Canada, Toronto area and get that shipment direct to the door. So I'm particular about this particular blend. I go back and forth. I'll drink my coffee black. If I'm out, I'll order a cappuccino. And then for tea, I'm a big fan of matcha and love a good matcha latte.

Nice. And I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give your listener my listers a little bit more about what you do? I.

I think it's really important to know that I have come into the world of marketing and pr by accident. Like I, I did study radio and television broadcasting in school, but I never thought that I would be a publicist. I never thought that I would be a marketer. In fact, I was really pursuing on air roles at the time, but I quickly realized that I had a, an entrepreneurial spirit. After university started my first business worked in youth leadership for quite some time. That was where my first businesses were. But over the course of a decade, what I was actually doing, and I didn't realize in addition to working on these causes that I was passionate about, was building a personal brand. I was speaking, I, at 22 I submitted an application for the TED Worldwide Talent search and got selected and flown out to Vancouver to give my first TEDx talk. At 22 that was a pretty big deal. I self-published two books. I pitched myself for media opportunities. I became a regular on a Toronto radio station. So all along the way I was building a personal brand and I didn't recognize it, and it's only been within the last few years. And that I realized that the expertise that I had gained could be applied to brands and people. And so the Mic Drop agency was started just in November, 2021. And it's been a fun, fun couple years.

So you did the opposite of me. I actually got a PR degree and was trying to actually do PR and then I switched to podcasting. And you did the opposite of what I just did, which we switched Brett. Anyways. Can you explain the fundamental differences between brand strategy and brand amplification and why both are crucial for business success?

Yes, so I recently read a book called Good Strategy, bad Strategy, and it made me realize that we think about strategy almost as the same thing as a goal. It's not, goals are where you wanna be, strategy is how you get there. So the strategy is almost like your roadmap. If I follow the strategic plan, it's gonna help me achieve my goals. That's how you should think about brand strategy. What are my goals for my brand is one category, but just having goals for your brand is not a strategy. You need to actually say, here's how I'm gonna get there. Here are the steps that I'm gonna take. Brand amplification. Is, how do you get people, ideally your target market to know about you, to know about your brand? There's a wide variety of ways to do that. PR is so much more than just radio and tv, although that's part of it. There's podcasts, there's blogs, there's social media, there's so many different elements. Speaking. These are all ways that you can build brand awareness.

And talking a little bit about data, how do you actually like. Tell your boss what you're doing, because a lot of times PR is not really data driven or tries to be data driven, but it's hard to actually quantify the data because if it's just awareness, I can be aware of a brand, but do I care about a brand? Probably not most of the time.

Yeah, It's so true. It's one of those industries you see so many memes online of everybody thinks that they can tell. Marketers what to do. Everybody thinks that they have expertise in marketing, right? It's oh, we just need to post this, or have you tried this meme? So it's really easy, I think for a marketing professional to sometimes feel like the job can be a bit thankless. And it's also something where I think, if you start showing, oh, here are the impressions this post got, or Here's what this got. People roll their eyes at those metrics, right? It's okay, what does that mean? So my best advice. Is as best as you can possibly do. So always try to tie. Some of the metrics that you're tracking to the fundamental goals of the company, fundamental goals of the company is to make sales. That's period, right? So you're not always gonna be able to have a direct path to showing that, but there's certain things that you can do. For instance, the day that you put out a press release, what were the traffic numbers to your website on that day? What were the number of. Clicks to the book a demo button or to the contact us button. There's certain things that you can do in steps that you can take that can help try to tell a story of how the various efforts that you're making are helping the brand stand out. And I really think it's a narrative play. You have some numbers, but I think in your meetings and update conversations with your client or with your manager, I think you also need to show, here's how we got here's how I think our efforts have contributed to this sale or this success.

So it's like thinking a little bit about marketing, but also like specific things to the awareness tied to it, because I think that's where we get stuck. It's how do I quantify awareness? And it's like you have to do really specific things to quantify that part of the awareness, or it's just what did you do? I brought awareness and your boss is okay. Did that help sales? Did that help bring me new, more people to my newsletter? What is that?

Yes. Track as much as you possibly can, because sometimes marketers can get a reputation of maybe being, it's, people say it's fluffy. Like it's fluffy what you're doing, and we know it's not fluffy. It contributes and there's so many things that you can't quantify that's like this. This essence of people talking about your brand and having conversations that you're not even aware of about your brand, but as much as you possibly can do. And there are so many different tools that you can use, starting just with the analytics on your social pages, starting with the analytics on, the press releases that you're sending, the blogs, like who's reading it, who's clicking, like all of those are the details. Wherever you can pull a number, Brett, you should, because it shows that you're paying attention to how this is impacting fundamentally. Overall growth of the company.

And what are some of the first steps for startups should take when developing a brand strategy from scratch?

So in order to create a really good brand strategy, you first need to know where you're going. And look, it sounds simple but one of the first things that we'll do with some of the startup clients that we work with is what is the problem that you are solving? Fundamentally, what is the problem that you are solving and who is going to benefit from this solution? Like you need to go right down to the very basics to help understand who's the target market for this, because you can't start to set some goals for your brand until you know what's the problem I'm solving. Who's gonna benefit from this solution? Who's gonna be willing to pay for this solution? Then from there you can set some brand goals. Okay, what do we wanna achieve in the next year for startups? Maybe you're thinking about your next investment raise. You're thinking about hitting your first 50 customers, you're thinking about so many different things for larger brands, maybe it's like a sales figure number, like what are some of the brand goals that we have? And then from there you can. Start to put together a strategy. So from like a marketing perspective, looking at the channels that you're going to use that are gonna help you make progress on those goals. And those channels are different for everybody. Whether you're B2B or B2C, there's different channels that you should look at, consider and use. So you wanna make sure that it's really specific on who you're targeting. What do they care about? What platforms are they on? What are they reading? Where do they go? What kind of form of content do they like? Long form, short combination, like what is it? Help understand that target market really well. Only then can you really start to break down here are the strategic steps we're gonna take this year.

And for the difference is for like B2B, would it be like LinkedIn and maybe X? 'cause X does have some value to it, but would it be that for those brand channels for you to communicate? Because B2B, Facebook, you could do it depending on your customers, but a lot of that is more B2C and LinkedIn is very focused on the B2B aspect. Most of their, I think I recently saw the hat an ad for them, and it was about B2B.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. B2B, you need to pay attention to your industry. For instance, we have some clients in the construction tech space. LinkedIn is one of the most popular channels that they're using. We look at what. Publications they're reading, what do people in the construction space care about and wanna read to stay up to date on future transits? All of those things for our reality TV star clients, one of which wrote a book, was selling direct to consumer. She's using Instagram and TikTok. Those are her primary channels, and there's a little bit of a different approach that you're gonna have to each of those with B2B, it's very thought leadership heavy, and what I mean by that is. You have to often educate, especially if you're creating like a new tech that people don't know what it is or how this is gonna help me. You're creating a new category. There's a certain amount of explanation that you're gonna need to do in educating as part of your marketing. So that's one, approach. Whereas direct to consumer, it's I. How do I create a FOMO effect in the case of this book launch where everybody's gonna wanna read this book, there's juicy details, other influencers that people look up to and admire in this target market are posting about the book, sharing about it. There's, really glitzy glam launch events. You have different goals for different groups and you need to pick the platforms that matter.

And for me, with using LinkedIn, I've had people come to me for. Testing out their products. So is it good to find those first adopters? Because the first adopters, especially when you're talking about tech, is everything. 'cause if you don't have those first adopters, it's hard to get moving in the direction. Obviously you have to go eventually beyond the first adopters, but. Is it better to find those through LinkedIn than anywhere else? If you're, if we're speaking about tech specifically,

so tech specifically, I think look, yeah, you're exactly right. Finding those first couple early adopters users are key because what that's gonna help do for you is validate product market fit. What that means is the product that you are offering is a fit for the market need, and they are willing to pay for said thing. This again, sounds simple, but it's not. It's actually really difficult to try to find that. Sometimes companies will build this really cool tech and they think, oh, this is perfect for one industry. But when they actually go start testing and having these conversations, they're like no, actually, like we wouldn't pay for this. And they realize actually maybe their tech could just be adjusted to solve a problem, a similar problem for a different industry. So there's like a whole back and forth thing that happens, but I think the best place. To actually get your early adopters is through picking up the phone and or attending events where the crowd is going to be. I, I'm a huge advocate for experiences, live events. You need to have conversations with people. You need to hear an interview. A big part of what we'll do, even at our agency is helping companies do discovery calls. With their target market, you have to ask them questions. What does their daily workflow look like? What are the tools that should they're using? How do they, how does their company make decisions about what new IT products they're gonna bring on board? Like all of those sorts of pieces are critical to understand you can make better decisions. And you need that real time feedback. So I think. You would do all of those steps before you start scaling, which I'd consider like sure, maybe LinkedIn you use to connect with people and book call with them. But you're gonna learn so much more from those conversations. And then you can scale with some of your other content, ma marketing and other marketing efforts beyond that.

Yeah. And specifically if you go to events, you're actually going to events where people care about the industry you're in for the most part. There's always a few of 'em that don't really care, but Mo, for the majority of them, they actually do care.

Yeah. They're there to learn. And especially like a lot of these like industry tech conferences, I. People wanna know what's next, what's the latest in InsureTech? What's the latest in climate tech like? They're there to see what's cutting edge, and it can be a really good spot to talk to people who can give you feedback and insights that'll help you grow and market your product better.

And what does the role of storytelling play in effective brand amplification? Because we've all heard about tell your story. It's a story. I think for the past, like 10 years, I think I've gotten tired of hearing about telling your story, but I get the

power

of it.

Storytelling is essential and it's interesting because this has been a part of. Human experience since the donna time, right? We tell stories, we learn about the world through storytelling and marketing and PR and comms are a way to channel that for brands. And what I mean by that is I. People aren't just going to care about your product or service, you're going to have to bring them into a story that they can care about and get excited about. And that's the story of perhaps why the company was created, why it was founded, why it matters. For instance, some of our clients who like. Have been in the industry themselves, experienced a pain firsthand. It's not like they're just like, some person outta college who just had an idea of tech. They've actually been in the industry, experienced a problem and built the solution for it. That's a compelling story. When that person gets on a stage to talk to their peers, they have so much credibility because it's like. They have experienced this, so that's why they're creating the solution. So yeah, I think like storytelling and approach. And there's a really great book. It's a podcast all about building a story brand. And that's what the book's called by Donald Miller. And the idea here is you as the business are not the hero. Of the story. You're not, the customer is the hero of the story. You're the guide. So the hero goes about their journey. They have a place that they wanna be. They wanna do work faster, they wanna be more efficient, they whatever their goal is, somewhere along the way, they experience a problem. Too many manual tasks, whatever it might be. You're the guide. You're the wizard who shows up partway through on this hero's journey, and you help that person get to where they want to go. That's how we should think about storytelling. How do we pull in our customers? Make them feel like they are the hero of this story. We have built this solution. We have done this thing for them to help them get to where they wanna be.

And how can businesses leverage this podcast? Because, from my understanding of being a PR person and being a podcaster myself, a lot of marketers don't really understand the power of podcasting or even the metrics themselves. To be fair, podcast metrics are pretty awful. So they're not wrong about it. They're not that great yet, but. How can they leverage all of the opportunities that podcasting gives? 'cause you can turn your podcast into a blog, into video, into audiograms, and a lot more.

Yeah. A few things I'll say about podcasts. Podcasts are. Essential to a good PR strategy. We have had clients that we have booked on podcasts who have gotten a seven figure deal from that podcast that they were on, and we've been able to point back to that. Why? Because they need to be on the right podcast. They need to be on the podcast that their target audience is listening to. It's not just any podcast, right? So for instance, if we book a client on a general entrepreneurship podcast. We're not expecting that to turn into sales if they're building like a climate tech product, right? Because it's an entrepreneur podcast, people are listening for advice about entrepreneurship, but it might help with some other marketing goals, general brand awareness. But fundamentally, if we want them to sell that product, we're gonna need to book them on the types of podcasts that people that they're selling to would listen to. So there's like a real strategy to picking the right podcasts based on your goals. The second thing, which you brought up, Brett, is an excellent point. It's so much more than just this interview. This interview on a podcast is the long form content, but from this, you're gonna get bite-sized videos, clips, audiograms, photos, so much more. Content Marketing is king, right? Content marketing is how brands get to tell their story again and again in different ways. So you showing up and keeping top of mind in people's feeds and online. If they search your company, they could maybe watch these clips to learn a little bit more about you. So it can help in the buying process that way. Huge value. And the last thing I'll say, I'm a podcaster myself. I have a marketing podcast. I interview people who have built notable brands. One of my latest clients that we just signed at Mic Drop was a guest on my podcast. So there's another way of thinking about podcast too. It's not always about having a million impressions, but or listeners, but it's also, who am I interviewing on this podcast that I wanna add to my network? That's a really strategic way of thinking about podcasting too, is building your network with the types of people that you wanna engage with.

And what are some of the common mistakes companies make when trying to amplify their brands? We talked about the positives about it, but what can they avoid with doing it? 'cause everybody has that idea, that goal or that strategy of I'm gonna do this, then all of a sudden it's that didn't work out very well.

Ah, a couple mistakes that come to mind. I think expecting immediate results is probably one of them. Like organic marketing takes. Time and not everybody wants to hear that. It's not like you're gonna post two blog posts this month and you're gonna skyrocket your website traffic and get, 40 book demos. It's just not gonna happen from that. Is it important to do though? Yes, because it ties to this larger strategy. It's building your digital footprint, building brand awareness. It's like compounding interest. It take, it takes time, right? You have to start building with the root and then it builds and grows from there. So that's a big mistake that I've seen and I think as marketers. We need to be very honest with clients about this. We need to say Hey, here are the things that are really important for us to do right now that are foundational pieces, but they're gonna take time to see full results from, it's gonna take 12 to 24 plus months to start seeing some real results from this. But here are some other. Marketing tactics that we could do that's gonna help provide quick short term results. And for instance, that could be things like paid ads or events, right? Getting in at events, at trade shows, and actually meeting you can walk away with a great leads list from that. Much more quickly than you can from building a leads list, just from posting blogs. So I think breaking it down for the client to help them understand why they're doing certain activities and giving them, the one two punch, something that's like long-term and sustaining for growth, but also the things that are gonna offer immediate value.

And how can you do that with being budget conscious? Because right now, I mean we all know everything is expensive. So when businesses are like really starting to tighten the belt, and unfortunately when businesses do that, guess what goes first? It's always the marketing and PR budgets that gets slashed pretty hard. So how can you do that with being like really cost effective with. Showing results.

You're right. And some of the startups that we work with are bootstrapped many of them are venture funded, but some are bootstrapped. They're just operating with kind of what they have coming in the door and building upon that. So I think, look, as a marketer to be a good marketer, you need to be scrappy and you need to be nimble. And you need to understand where your company is, where your client is in the process. If they're in a position where the budget is so tight that they can only really invest in one to two marketing channels, then I would not start with the long. Term build for 12 to 24 months because the company might not have 24 months, they might run out of runway by that. That point they might not have reached sales. I would instead focus on those quick turnaround. How can I get as many leads as possible top of funnel and just pick one to two marketing strategies that you feel. Confident, everything's a bit of a hypothesis, but that you feel confident is going to drive leads to top of funnel so that they can make sales so that they can invest then in, in the marketing, larger marketing budget.

And how can personal branding strategies be integrated into a company's overall brand amplification efforts? And especially for thought leaders and executives? Because, it goes hand in hand, even though, like you said, we're not the hero of the story. We have to interject ourselves into it a lot of times. Especially if you are the founder of the company,

right? Yes. Personal branding. Is essential for companies to be leaning into because you don't just connect with. A brand in and of itself anymore, you wanna know the person behind it, the founder behind it, the story behind it, the people behind it there's other ways of doing this too, for direct to consumer. They'll pick influencers. Oftentimes, sometimes you'll see the face of the company, but they'll also pick the influencers who they feel tell the right story about their particular product or brand. So personal branding, every single person. Who has a job and is working on building their career business, has a personal brand. And essentially how I define it is what someone would say about you if you weren't in the room. So what are the skills that you have? What are your talents? What's your work ethic? What's your style? All of those things are your personal brand. And so I really think we wanna encourage everyone to lean into that. The clients that we work with. We'll profile their founders. We wanna know about their story, their why, how they got here, how they found this problem that they wanted to solve. Why they feel like their solution is the right one. We profile that founder and we don't only post about their career and their business, we also profile them as people 'cause. People wanna connect with other people. So one of our clients, for instance, who's built several tech companies he also flies planes and, flies himself to events. Super cool. We put up lots of content of him in his plane views from out the window, talking about his journey as a pilot, lessons that he is learned from being a pilot that could tie to his. Tied to his business and entrepreneurship mindset, those are the interesting stories that help add so much color and texture to who you are and fundamentally make people connect with you and wanna do business with you.

And how do pr pros like guide those founders that want to be thought leaders or are risk aversions so they don't wanna do it? Because unfortunately in this climate, sometimes if you say the wrong thing. There goes your business sometimes, or at least you lose a lot of, you could lose a lot of sales. So how do you guide them through that? Because it is a little scary if you put yourself out there. Something could happen. Unfortunately,

it's true. And I think, look, it's important to remember. So on the one hand, we'll sometimes come across executives, founders who just don't feel comfortable being in the spotlight. And there's kind of two ways to address that. Like either one, we pick someone else in the company who's gonna be more of the spokesperson and who we feel can help really tell the story of and brand message. But two, the other thing, another way to look at it is it's not. Just about look at me. In fact, good personal branding shouldn't be, look at me. It should be you pointing to something else. So when you start to think about personal branding as idea sharing, I. It's not, Hey, look at me. I'm so great. No. It's like I'm gonna share something with you that might have the ability to impact the future of your business. I'm gonna share something that I learned that helped me, that could help you. Now it's like idea sharing. So it starts to pull it away from, I'm this star, to no, I'm just a person showing up as me. They should be as, fun, authentic as possible and offering new ideas for other individuals who. Just feel a bit nervous about putting themselves out there for fear of criticism or saying the wrong thing. I think it's really important to have somebody on your team that you do. Run by some of the content that you're hoping to post. Like ideally it's a comms marketing professional. But even just having another set of eyes on the content that you're posting. And that's why I think it's important, the work that we're doing with startups not that the founders couldn't be doing this themselves, but one, it takes time. Two, you need to build a good strategy for what personal branding is gonna look like. And three, you wanna make sure that somebody's looking at the messaging that's going out with a bit of a critical eye. And trying to see it from the aspect of, okay, like what messages are we communicating here? Is that in alignment with what we want people to know about our brand and making recommendations based on that.

And what should PR pros be looking at for the emerging trends on brand strategies and brand amplifications? Because there's always new trends coming out. And should they just stick to the basics or should they be on the lookout for these new emerging trends that could actually, I. Be worthwhile,

I think to be a good marketer, you want to leverage your past experience of what has worked well, but you should also be keeping an eye to what's new and coming because things change overnight. Algorithms change. Google recently deprioritized generative AI content. That was a big change. For the first advent of chat, GPT. There were companies just pumping out, 50 blogs a month that were completely AI generated and putting them up on their website and, oh, this is perfect. This is gonna help us with our SEO. Now like Google and other search engines are deprioritizing that content. They can actually tell this is completely AI generated. They're pushing you lower on the results. So there's things like that. There's things happening big changes that happen to platforms, new features, new ways to use tools, right? LinkedIn went from being. Pretty basic in terms of what they offered from a posting strategy. Now they've got some form of almost like an Instagram reels, where it's a lot of vertical video. You can click on a specific tab and you can actually scroll through a bunch of video after video, which is something new. They've got their carousel posts, the swipe throughs, but it's different from Instagram. In the sense that on LinkedIn you upload it as a PDF and if somebody's looking at that document on their desktop, they can actually click to download that PDF. So it's like a really good lead magnet tool. These are things to be aware. So I recommend spending a little bit of time setting up. Sort of your notifications. I think setting relevant Google alerts first for your clients, the customers, their industries, but two, just like digital marketing trends and other kind of key terms that'll help you stay up to date. I think do some searching on these social platforms to see who are some really important thought leaders about marketing, pr. Maybe they have newsletters, maybe they have podcasts, right? These are places that you should. Dial into, subscribe to follow along so that you're always hearing about new upcoming things. And then really it's up to you. Like not every new thing is gonna be a fit for your client or for what you're working on, but you should at least know what's out there and be making, key decisions around what you're choosing and what you're recommending to do and why.

Got you. And people are listening to this episode and wondering where can they find you online to learn more?

Yes. So the mic drop agency.com is our site. You can also find me on social. I'm on LinkedIn and Instagram the most. Also starting up TikTok and getting back onto X. It's just my first and last name, Katie, Zapier.

Gotcha. Any final thoughts for the listeners?

Thanks so much for this conversation, Brett. My encouragement to marketing and PR pros and comms professionals out there is just to say kudos for the work that you do. I know that sometimes it can feel thankless and it's hard to maybe always, remember the successes that you're having and things are always moving a mile a minute, so it's hard to keep up. My recommendation to you is to keep a little folder or a little document of your wins moments where you've had good wins for a client, something that was very successful, a campaign. That was great. Have a little folder of wins. A document where you create hyperlinks of stuff that you're really proud of, that you can go back to, you can go back to for future job interviews, you can go back to on a bad day. And you can reference in future client conversations when you're looking for experience based on what's worked well in the past.

Alright. Thank you Kitty for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew, and sharing your knowledge on brand strategy and brand amplification.

This was awesome,

Brett.

Thanks for having

me, and thank you for listening. As always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting through the five star review. It really does help with the rankings. Let me know how I'm doing. And join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR and marketing industry. All right, guys. Stay safe, get to understanding your brand strategy and brand amplification and get rolling on that if you can. And see you next week later.