Podcast With Brett Farmiloe

Boost Your SEO with These Digital PR Hacks with Brett Farmiloe

Show Notes

Want to boost your SEO and transform your digital PR strategy? In this episode of the Agency Insider Show, Brett Farmiloe, founder and CEO of Featured.com, shares game-changing digital PR hacks to help you rank higher in search engine results and drive organic traffic. Discover how businesses can strategically use media placement, expert positioning, and backlinks to build visibility and credibility online.

Learn Brett’s insights on leveraging his innovative platform, Featured.com, to connect experts with publishers, craft high-quality content, and stay ahead of evolving SEO trends. Whether you’re an agency owner, marketer, or small business, these tips will help you navigate Google's latest updates and unlock the power of expert-driven content to achieve top search engine rankings.

Ready to take your SEO to the next level? Watch now and empower your business with actionable strategies for 2025 and beyond!

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:44 - Creating Feature: The Journey

02:25 - Feature.com vs Other PR Platforms

03:27 - Measuring Impact of Feature

05:37 - Power of Media and Expert Positioning

07:04 - Feature for Niche Businesses' Voice

08:18 - Importance of Backlinks in SEO

09:57 - Feature.com Compared to HARO

11:19 - HARO's Revenue Model

14:09 - Chances of Getting Published

16:16 - Balancing Quality vs Quantity in PR

17:12 - Exceptional SEO Results Example

19:45 - AI's Impact on PR and Marketing

21:01 - AI's Influence on PR Agencies

24:33 - Key Elements of Startup Culture

26:17 - Advice for Founders in Tech

28:13 - Community's Role in Startup Success

32:51 - Tips for Marketers and Business Owners

35:20 - Activating Employees in Marketing

37:31 - Best Advice Received

38:50 - Brett’s Favorite Productivity Tool

39:02 - Debunking PR Myths

39:31 - Brett’s Professional Bucket List

39:50 - Final Thoughts

40:31 - Outro

Transcript

Introduction

0:00 hello everyone and welcome to the agency Insider show I'm your host navit kosel and today we have a very special guest

0:07 joining us Brett farmlo founder and CEO of feature.com a groundbreaking digital

0:12 PR platform Brett is an expert in public relations marketing and the evolving role of AI in this industry we'll be

0:19 exploring Brett's Journey insights on the future of digital marketing and practical tips for businesses looking to

0:25 make the most of media placement it's going to be a valued pack talk so let's dive right

0:31 [Applause]

0:38 [Music] [Applause] in welcome Brett it's a pleasure to have

Creating Feature: The Journey

0:44 you here yeah thanks for having me yes so let's start at the beginning bread you founded feature.com which has been

0:51 making waves in the pr industry can you tell us about the Journey of creating feature.com and the unique problem it

0:58 aims to solve sure so just a backstory on me I ran a digital marketing company

1:03 for for 10 years we and basically started a a digital marketing company because we ranked on page one of Google

1:09 for the term digital marketing company so I had no intentions to ever start a digital marketing company but um I was

1:16 getting so many inbound calls that decided to actually start an agency and scaled that to the point where we had

1:22 about we serviced about 500 small businesses over the course of 10 years and the biggest problem that each one of

1:27 those small businesses had was building visibility and credibility online and so the thing that I was noticing is that every small

1:35 business owner has an abundance of expertise to share but nowhere to really share it and so we created the platform

1:41 as a way to get our clients placed in the media um in order to actually do

1:46 that effectively we needed to open it up for others to share their thoughts and perspectives as well so we could create

1:52 these articles and so the platform started to scale faster than the agency sold the agency at the end of December

1:59 21 and I've been focused on uh growing featured for the last three years and so the problem is really twofold it's how

2:06 do you build exposure for experts and how do you deliver really high quality content to Publishers and so by

2:12 featuring voices um and essentially asking questions from those Publishers over to experts that's essentially what

2:19 we do is we make that connection between experts and and Publishers to create content okay and what differentiates

Feature.com vs Other PR Platforms

2:25 feature.com from other PR Platforms in the market yeah I think that there's you

2:31 would have to ask our customers and from what we typically hear it's just easy to use and pretty intuitive so I think that

2:39 the user experience is pretty straightforward especially for folks coming from an SEO or search engine

2:44 optimization backgrounds I think that if you look at the founding origins of feature.com it it originated from a

2:50 search engine optimization agency and so a lot of the features that you're going to see on there um speak to that Persona

2:57 so for our paid plans you could essentially see whether a uh placement will result in a do

3:03 follow or a no follow or an unlined opportunity you're able to prioritize based off of the authoritativeness of

3:10 each website which is filtered around domain rating from HFS so there's um there's quite a few different features

3:16 that make it really easy to use and time to value is around four minutes in terms of being able to sign up submit an

3:22 answer and ultimately get placed into an article wow that's fast now how do you

Measuring Impact of Feature

3:27 measure the impact of featured uh for for businesses using it I think that

3:33 that would be a question for them I think that we've seen we've seen a variety of different ways to measure the

3:38 ROI on using our platform um a lot of folks will measure it in terms of what's

3:43 the increase in domain rating others will look at increase in organic search traffic some others will look at you

3:49 know how does this actually translate over to leads and sales and then others are you know there's a lot of agencies

3:57 that use the platform as well and so I think that they're really looking at it from a perspective of is this profitable is this a profitable

4:03 service that is scalable repeatable easy to deliver on and ultimately our

4:08 clients's happy with it and so I think that there's a lot of different uh qualitative and quantitative metrics to

4:14 to measure Roi okay now I'm sure with the with the new Google updates emphasizing more on

4:21 Brands Google emphasizing more on Brands I mean it's helping feature.com grow more because that's what the brand

4:27 mentions will do to the brand you know it's funny like I ran an SE Agency for 10 years and now we're doing this and

4:33 there's always a new Google Update um and I think that the biggest thing to keep in mind is just to you know do the

4:40 right thing like be be helpful and create great content that that readers ultimately want to consume because I

4:45 think that that's Google's ultimate mission is to what was the mission statement it was like to make stuff universally accessible and useful to a

4:52 reader so I think that if you keep that in mind then you don't have to worry so much about all the all the Google updates but to your point um you know

5:00 expertise experience Authority trust eat I think that that's been a central pivot

5:05 from over the last seven eight years uh with with search and we're seeing more and more importance placed on identity

5:14 uh in terms of who is actually saying this information can you attribute it back to an actual person or brand

5:20 because that's going to differentiate it from any kind of AI generated content so I think that the importance of sharing

5:26 your knowledge and sharing your expertise online is important from the Eng perspective from uh an expert

5:32 perspective and from a publisher side of things okay now let's talk about the power of media and expert positioning in

Power of Media and Expert Positioning

5:39 uh one of your uh in yourf live interview you discussed the power of media how do you see the media landscape

5:46 evolving especially for businesses trying to establish themselves as thought leaders yeah I think that it's

5:53 been pretty I mean here we are at the end of 2024 at the time of recording this and looking ahead at 2025

5:59 uh this has been a really crazy year for for publishing in terms of the landscape um Ai and the evolving nature of a zero

6:07 click search experience is is really transforming the landscape and you know for for someone who's looking to

6:14 establish her thought leadership and visibility online um that translates in a variety of different ways uh we've

6:20 seen people use feature to essentially land these placements on you know sites like inc.com and Fast Company and Forbes

6:26 and Fortune and entrepreneur and those logos immediately go up on a LinkedIn profile in the in the you know the

6:33 background to say as featured on XYZ so I think that there's still a need to

6:39 validate yourself and your expertise in your business and how that translates depends on the the expert are are you

6:46 going to share it on a LinkedIn profile are you going to incorporate it into your sales collateral are you going to put it in your email sub subject line or

6:53 signature so there's a lot of different ways that that you could leverage that but the bottom line is there there's an

6:58 unmet need to build exposure and establish credibility online right now you have worked with a

Feature for Niche Businesses' Voice

7:06 diverse range of client from trenchless pipelining companies to horticulturist how do you help nich businesses find

7:13 their voice in the right platform to share their expertise that's a really good question and that goes back to why

7:19 I founded the platform uh because as you mentioned we were working with the trench of peline pipelining company we

7:25 were working with a criminal defense lawyer out in Seattle you know and even even like an eyelash extension Supply

7:31 Company here here in Scottsdale Arizona so how do you bring out the expertise and knowledge from each one of those

7:36 businesses and get and make it useful for for readers and so I think it starts with asking the right question and

7:43 finding an outlet that wants to feature that expertise and so that's essentially what featured is made really easily easy

7:49 for uh for Publishers and for experts where we're suggesting questions that Publishers can ask they'll essentially

7:56 accept those questions and then that goes into the ecos system where now we can invite Ved experts to answer that

8:02 question take their insights put it into an article and get that published onto a publisher site so in order like everyone

8:09 has expertise about something it's just a matter of how do you how do you unlock that and make it useful for for readers

8:14 and Publishers okay now let's talk about the importance of back links in SEO and SEO

Importance of Backlinks in SEO

8:21 in this context of course no conversation can be without the back links because eventually as an SEO first

8:26 thing you think is the back links so how does Fe .c balance the need for business need of businesses for SEO benefits with

8:34 maintaining the Integrity of the content for Publishers yeah we put it all on a publisher so if you look at Google's

8:40 link scheme guidelines and you look at it's basically like you have to give

8:46 there's you can't put it in a contract or an agreement that a publisher must link to someone because that's against

8:52 you know like you essentially be considered a link in that scenario so what we've done as a platform is we've

8:59 given Publishers full control over whe whether they link to experts um how they link to experts in terms of like do you

9:05 make make it a do follow or no follow or just have an unlink and then we make that transparent for the expert who's

9:12 answering featured so that they can manage expectations if they were to submit an answer will this likely result

9:19 in a do follow link or a no follow link and so I think that that's the best way to balance it because you essentially

9:25 have three different players in this you have Publishers you've got the expert who want those backlinks and you have a

9:31 search engine who's kind of like sitting on the sidelines seeing if this is Kosher for for everyone so as as a

9:38 platform we've made some really conscious decisions everything from the business model down to the tools and the

9:45 transparency that we operate with and so I think that's the right stance because you can't just sell links um that's

9:52 that's pretty pretty against of you know what Google say right now now H how does

Feature.com Compared to HARO

9:59 uh question like how does feature.com is different when it comes to Harrow for that matter because Harrow the

10:05 journalists are asking question here people are submitting answers so is it some similarity or is this not at all

10:11 similar yeah a lot of our customers would say that uh this is like a help reporter out 2.0 of the ease and

10:18 transparency where if you look at help reporter out which I you know they announced a couple weeks ago that they

10:24 were discontinuing op operations permanently they they've shut it down uh they rebranded over connectively and

10:29 then have taken that out of the market what they were traditionally doing was putting all of their opportunities into

10:35 an email newsletter blasting that out three times a day uh without any kind of personalization or um and it was just

10:41 grouped and sent out to everyone which is really really effective people love help there's a lot of nostalgia for it

10:48 but it was founded in 2008 and so Technology's evolved a lot since then and so if you look at how featured

10:54 approaches it we looked at help reporter out and said well there's a lot of noise in the platform and in inbox so how do

11:00 you include personalization so that you're asked the right question at the right time to bring out the right Insight so what that does is it produces

11:08 a lot higher success rate in terms of being able to submit an answer and actually get that placed uh so there's a

11:15 lot less wasted knowledge sharing I would say and a lot more use in terms of connecting that expert with the

HARO's Revenue Model

11:22 publisher okay so so let's say you your model is when you subscribe and people can submit unlimited answers but to the

11:28 questions which are of course picked by Publishers so is there a guarantee for how many Publishers will pick or nothing

11:35 yeah so the business model it's a premium B2B SAS business model uh where you could answer up to three questions a

11:40 month at no cost and then if you want to answer unlimited questions then you could subscribe to our Pro Plan which

11:47 starts at $49 a month it's $39 a month if you pay annually and then there's a

11:52 business plan where you could answer unlimited questions but also submit by lined articles where you could author a

11:57 full length piece and get that placed in Publications as well as conduct interview profiles so essentially say

12:04 here's the topic I want to be interviewed about here's the publication I want to be interviewed in and then conduct a 10 Question Interview to get

12:10 an interview profile placed and so there's three different content types that we're operating with and essentially three different plans and so

12:17 there's no guarantee that you're going to be placed in an article it's strictly if you answer a question that speaks to

12:24 your expertise and experience then there's a pretty high likelihood that that'll be valuable for a publisher to consider

12:29 so now with the Advent of AI has it become a problem where I take a39 or a

12:35 $49 subscription and use chat gp2 to create unlimited answers so my point is

12:41 has the quality been uh issue lately where publisher will say or is there a quality check you introduced because of

12:48 this yeah so we actually tried very early to police everything and to try to

12:53 be like an AI filter and found pretty quickly that a lot of the tools are inaccurate and we were having a lot

12:59 false positives and a lot of false negatives and so ultimately what we decided as a platform was two things one

13:05 was pushing the responsibility over to a publisher because we saw that the Publishers that we work with each of

13:12 them had different AI policies and different ways to essentially filter and decide whether or not something was AI

13:18 generated so we wanted to essentially push that responsibility onto a publisher and then as a platform we took

13:24 the stance that if someone's willing to attach their name image and likeness to a quote then we're essentially saying

13:31 hey this person's reputation is on the line there's a digital signature that's attached to this answer so that's

13:37 validation enough for us for them to be able to submit and then it's ultimately on the publisher to decide whether or

13:42 not to feature that in an article okay so besides paying $39 or $49 there are

13:48 no other fees involved correct there is and then one other thing I would add to

13:53 the business model and then the flexibility with plans is we introduced uh credits which is a pay as you go

13:59 model so if you wanted to for example not subscribe and just answer a couple extra questions you could purchase

14:05 credits and submit those extra answers as well as if you wanted to try out like our by line article or interview profile

Chances of Getting Published

14:11 features you could purchase credits and then submit for those as well but how

14:16 what I mean of course at the end of the day anybody would know what are the chances of getting published I mean one

14:22 in 10 two in 10 provided everything as the the content is valuable uh is what

14:28 are the chances what what is the success rate you see yeah I think it really just depends on how you're using the platform

14:34 so as long as you're answering questions that pertain your expertise and you're really really well qualified for that

14:40 your success rate is going to be really really high what we do see is users who sometimes will come in and answer every

14:46 question regardless of of whether or not they have expertise or not and so that really skews the success rate depending

14:52 on how you're using the platform what I would say is that people who are coming in and really sticking to to what they

14:57 know without having to use use chat gbt or without having to do a Google search those answers are really going to be

15:03 really high quality and Publishers have a an unmet need to feature those insights versus someone coming in and

15:09 downloading every question that's on featured putting it all into chat gbt putting it all into that submission

15:14 process your success rate is going to be generally pretty low and and typically how much time does it take once somebody

15:20 answers the question to get published so once a question it really depends on the

15:25 publisher there's so much variety within uh our eco system where we work with over a thousand Publishers and each one

15:32 of them has different publishing timelines so for example one of the prominent business Publications that we

15:37 work with Will typically have like a really long lead time uh where we'll turn in the article we will then wait

15:45 probably about one to two months before it actually goes live um but it's part of their overall content calendar versus

15:50 another really prominent business publication that we work with it's like next day someone will sit submit and the

15:56 article will go live the next day featuring their quote so it's anywhere from one day to a

16:01 couple months and so I think that that's you know it's really hard to to answer and I would probably say on average it's about a 2 to three week turnaround all

16:08 right all right that that's fair enough because obviously everybody would have a different editorial system right yep now

Balancing Quality vs Quantity in PR

16:16 what do you think how should agencies balance the focus between obtaining high quality placement versus a high quantity

16:22 of placements I think it depends on the agency and the client like if and what the client goals are and how placements

16:30 factor into that overall marketing strategy so if someone's looking to say

16:36 like Hey we're we're in this really competitive you know industry uh where

16:41 we need we need placements to outrank a competitor for a particular keyword you

16:46 know what's what's the what's the the gap between where that client is and

16:51 where the that next position is and how many how many links or placements do you ultimately estimate that you're going to

16:58 going to need and how does that impact using a platform like ours and others to to get

17:04 those placements so I think it all just goes back to the individualized marketing strategy what you actually

17:09 need and and what you're in it for right now uh is it possible for you to share

Exceptional SEO Results Example

17:14 an example where featured helped the client achieve exceptional Su results yeah when we were doing it uh for

17:21 ourselves and our own agency you know uh we had one particular client like very early on we you know 25x their their

17:28 organic traffic within 12 months so they went from I don't know I don't know what the the number was um I think that when

17:35 we started they were probably at like a couple thousand organic search visits a month um and then within 12 months we

17:41 were able to 25 exit and so uh it was pretty significant their domain rating jumped significantly there was quite a

17:47 few really prominent placements that we were able to to get for that client but since then we haven't done any kind of

17:53 agency work so I think that I'd be interested to hear from our customers on on what their success stories look like

17:59 so on a mix or do you have more agencies or do you have more direct clients I mean on your plate yeah right now we've

18:06 got over 50,000 experts who are answering questions on on featured and there's a good mix of those who come

18:12 from agencies uh both PR firms and SEO agencies and some digital marketing firms who are starting to add on

18:19 featured as a service that they're offering to clients which is really interesting like I think that's a a great overall trend that you're seeing

18:26 in the space you're seeing like everyone from like a social media management firm uh latching on and saying okay we're

18:32 going to develop thought leadership as a service we're going to develop uh executive brand building as a service

18:39 and they're using featured as a way to deliver that that service in a really predictable way so I think that that's a

18:44 really cool Trend that that we're seeing as well okay now now does does a small business for example a plumbing plumber

18:51 or a hbac guys will come to you or it's yeah absolutely yeah those those agback

18:57 guys are are in hi man interior designers the horticulturists the makeup

19:02 artists everybody so I think that it's really interesting because you're seeing Publishers and their business models

19:09 adapt in a way where they're focusing on some really Niche topics and to focus on

19:14 those really Niche topics they need really Niche experts and so we've developed a pretty healthy base of

19:22 experts around virtually every different industry vertical including the the people who are you know uh Plumbing for

19:29 a living the electricians you know um so we really focused initially on business

19:34 topics human resources technology Finance marketing things like that and over the last year or so we've really

19:40 gravitated out into some different verticals okay now let's talk about

AI's Impact on PR and Marketing

19:47 navigating AI in marketing in PR uh AI is reshipping of course every industry including PR and marketing how do you

19:53 see AI being integrated into content creation and media outreach

19:59 I think the the pretty obvious one is is you know a trend that I saw when I was running my agency really early was uh we

20:07 were using the platform I think it was called Jarvis which is now Jasper Ai and

20:12 so really early like when I was running that agency I recognized like hey this is a really good way to you know

20:18 generate content to reduce costs and I think that that's you know really started to to gravitate as chat gbt and

20:25 other platforms have been adopted so I think that that's like the natural tendency for Content creation to just be

20:31 fully automated by AI we've tried to go in the opposite direction where we really value human generated content and

20:38 so um I think that as AI gets adopted then human content just becomes more and more important so it's really around how

20:46 do you have ai like support and power a lot of those those workflows so that that real humans

20:53 can share their expertise add value on top of what AI can generate so that ultimately readers and Publishers can

AI's Influence on PR Agencies

21:01 benefit okay now what are the potential challenges agencies face with AI tool

21:06 like Char in PR well I think with any service AI has

21:13 the potential to enhance and disrupt so whether it's a a marketing agency

21:19 whether it's a professional bookkeeping services firm AI can do a lot of the things that traditionally you had to do

21:26 manually so for for agencies it just means a hard look at some of those standard operating procedures and

21:32 figuring out where within those workflows AI can support and also looking at it from a client perspective

21:39 to say okay if I'm a client I'm thinking about this as well I'm thinking about what am I expenses okay I've got this

21:46 expense that I pay out to my services firms um Can is there an AI tool that could help help me do that in place of

21:53 the agency and so I think that for any agency owner who's running a business it's to look at AI as a way to enhance

22:00 your existing workflows and then look at it from a client's lens to say how how's the client thinking about AI disrupting

22:06 the service that I offer and how do I make that service stronger so whether that's enhancing relationships whether

22:13 that's innovating on the services that you're offering I think that it's just a it's a hard audit at what what you're

22:20 looking at and what the client's looking at okay now do you think AI will replace

22:25 certain roles in PR or will it primar serve as a compl ment to human creativity I would be an optimist and

22:33 and uh and side towards the latter I I think that they it's it like everyone

22:39 says it's pretty early and it really is um and so I think that you need a human in the loop no matter what uh so you're

22:48 probably able to do more with less um and I think that's a general thing that we've observed for for example featured

22:55 is a team of seven uh right now so um if this were not 2024 2025 and this was

23:02 like 2018 our our team would probably have to be 35 people you know so it

23:07 would be substantially different if we didn't have ai supportting a lot of a lot of our workflows and I think the

23:13 same would be true you know for a PR firm where um you just are able to be more efficient no matter what your no

23:19 matter what your role so I think that's you know one thing that I would keep in keep in mind okay now what what do you

23:26 think will be the ethical what ethical consideration should agencies keep in mind when using AI for media

23:33 strategies well I would just keep all the stakeholders in Minds you know when you're thinking about media strategies

23:39 think about each stakeholder that's involved in that starting with the the in reader like if you're using AI to

23:45 generate any sort of media initiative how is this going to impact you know the the person who's consuming it so I think

23:52 that ethical considerations need to start there and need to extend out to your partners so beyond reader who are

23:59 your partners in that equation are you working with a publisher think about them and their business what what are their AI policies how does your

24:06 initiative fit in with that AI policy and then ultimately like what are your own core values at your company how how

24:11 is it's really exciting to adopt a new technology and to realize some of the

24:17 benefits but ultimately how does this align with align with some of the characteristics within your own organization and um I think that if

24:23 you're keeping all of those stakeholders in mind from the in reader from your partners from your employ emplo es then

24:29 uh you ultimately arrive at the right answer okay now let's talk a little bit

Key Elements of Startup Culture

24:34 about startup insights and your personal experiences of course you have been involved in the startup ecosystem and

24:40 including your experience with the startup a right yeah yes so so so what

24:47 would you say are the key elements of successful startup culture grit persistence there's a

24:54 picture right in front of me that it's uh I look at it often and then I Look Away really quickly

25:00 because it's a picture of a desert and it's I'm here in Arizona the pictur is

25:05 of a desert there's also like black lava that has taken over this desert and then

25:10 in the in the very background there's this mountain all right so when I look

25:16 at it my interpretation of it is the startup Journey it's like you've gotten your shoes stripped off you you've got

25:23 to walk Barefoot over this lava over across a hot desert across many different miles only to be able to earn

25:30 the right to get to the mountain and then you have to climb the mountain after having taken that journey and so like startup startup life is very much

25:37 one of persistence grit pain Agony tears sweat you know all of those different

25:42 things and if you're able to get through that initial tough stage then you in the

25:48 right to now climb a mountain and and try to try to make it so there's nothing fun about it like it's it's very very

25:55 it's very very hard and I you know nothing fun about it there's highs and lows every hour like

26:00 you know so I wouldn't have it any other way like I I think that you know my general professional purpose is to start

26:06 companies and to lead a team through you know that experience and to you know keep up the keep up the vision mission

26:14 and so that everyone's got the endurance to to make it okay okay what advice do

Advice for Founders in Tech

26:19 you have for Founders looking to build a scalable business in Tech space find your first customer find your

26:27 second customer find your Third customer so I think one of my favorite Frameworks is the business model canvas by Steve

26:34 blank and the business model canvas has I think it's like seven seven or nine different quadrants but the two most

26:40 important quadrants are right in the middle the value proposition and on the far I think right hand side customer

26:48 segments and so what you have to do as a startup founder is you have to do everything that you can and as quickly

26:55 as you can and as efficiently as you can to find product Market fit and what product Market fit is is this alignment

27:02 between your value proposition and your customer and so you're constantly refining what's the value proposition

27:09 who what what am I offering that is very valuable to who and so that constantly

27:15 changes of you might have the right value proposition but the wrong customer or you might have the wrong right

27:20 customer but the wrong value proposition and so constantly what you're doing as a startup founder is finding someone who's

27:26 willing to pay for that value proposition and seeing if that market is big enough to build a real like Tech

27:34 startup type of business so a lot of what I've done as a Founder is you know I talk with customers and I try to

27:40 validate that that's the right customer segment for us and that we've got the right value proposition to ultimately fill an unmet need that is different and

27:48 novel enough that uh it could withstand competition and see if there's a way to build a viable uh business from that so

27:55 for anyone who's looking to start a tech startup I would encourage you to look at the business model canvas fill out your

28:01 value proposition fill out your customer segment find someone in that customer segment who's willing to pay for that

28:06 value proposition repeatedly and see listen to everything that that first customer has to say so that you could

28:12 find your second one okay okay and what role does

Community's Role in Startup Success

28:17 community play in the success of startups particularly in the tech and PR Industries I think that our entire

28:24 marketing is built on Word of Mouth and success of our customers so in terms of community what we typically see is

28:31 people will be featured and they will share where they've been featured and there's a a network effect where if they

28:38 share that then there's one or two other people from within their Network who might get excited about it and check out

28:44 featured and sign up and we see a lot of growth from from the community success

28:49 uh so for us it's making sure that that success is maintained that you know essentially we have a healthy balance

28:54 between our Marketplace of supply and demand to make sure that there's there's positive sentiment that's surrounding

29:00 featured and the community is the the growth and the the engine that really drives our business forward okay now how

29:08 has your leadership style evolved since founding featured I don't know that's that's a

29:15 good question for probably a couple of our employees who were were with us when

29:20 I was running my agency and when who have transitioned over to the tech uh you know startup that we have today I think

29:27 you know biggest thing that I've evolved into and how I've matured as a leader is

29:33 getting more clarity around what a leader actually needs to do so what a leader really needs to do or what I would consider it is three

29:39 responsibilities it's people it's strategy and it's Capital make sure that

29:45 you have the right people to execute on the strategy and make sure you have enough money to do it and so I think

29:51 that like having that level of focus helps me be a better leader because I

29:56 know if there's anything outside out of those three areas it's probably not my responsibility and I should probably

30:02 delegate it or just get it out of my my system altogether so I think that if you were to look at how I was managing an

30:09 agency typically when you're running an agency you are doing like everything you are you are writing the content you're

30:17 getting the placements you're doing the accounting you're doing all of this different stuff and so if you really

30:23 want to grow and scale a business you need to ultimately find someone who could take those responsibilities so

30:29 that you could focus on what you need to focus on and that's ultimately what led me to sell the agency uh I be a u

30:36 basically like a COO you know someone who um could manage the operations and Define the Sops and do all of those

30:44 different things that I was not good at doing and didn't have the patience to do and one year later after making that hire I was able to to sell the business

30:51 and use that year to essentially exit The Business Without exiting the business and by exiting the business

30:57 focusing on the things that weren't the day-to-day type of client operations which allowed the business to really

31:02 like breathe and thrive on its own so um it's a really good question but I think that it just comes from um having a lot

31:08 of confidence in what you should focus on so how many people were there when you sold your agency yeah we had about

31:14 15 20 employees uh at the time so yeah pretty I mean pretty small team but

31:20 small and mighty team okay and so do when you were decided to sell your

31:26 agency do you had feature.com in your mind or it just yeah yeah so what

31:31 happened was I you know had hired the director of operations I had hit like

31:36 that 10-year Milestone of running the agency and everyone that I talked to man when that 10y year mark comes you're uh

31:43 you're a little fatigued and tired and and and ready for a ready for a new challenge and so for me that new

31:50 challenge actually came by attending an event it was called Venture Madness uh here in Arizona it's like a big startup

31:57 pitch competition and there was about 16 Founders who went up gave a 5minute pitch about their

32:03 their business talked about the problem talked about the solution talked about how it works their pricing their funding

32:09 you know competition everything and I sat there all day and was like you know what I feel like this is for me I feel

32:16 like I could be one of the people who is up on that stage given a pitch competition running a tech startup and

32:22 it felt like a very exciting thing that was a natural natural Next Step because we had already built the platform

32:28 internally um and so it was really just getting the confidence to take that next

32:33 step so bottom line you know sold sold the company and then about three months

32:38 after selling the company I was presenting that Venture Madness and you know and doing all of that so like yeah

32:45 like I wouldn't have it any other way it's a it's a really good challenge okay okay now

Tips for Marketers and Business Owners

32:51 uh let's talk about advice for marketers and business owners based on her experience what advice would you give to

32:58 marketers or business owners looking to leverage media and expert positioning to

33:03 grow their business what we typically see people

33:09 unfeatured are they will start off with our free plan and they will start off with the

33:15 agency owner answering those three questions they'll then gravitate to a

33:21 subscription and they'll still they'll answer unlimited questions for the agency owner and then if we're if they

33:27 have success they will build a service around it and bring all of their clients on and so what I would say whether it's

33:35 with featured or any other service is find a way to trial it find a way to

33:40 make it work for your agency and learn all the ins and outs of everything and

33:45 then scale it to your clients and because if you could find success for yourself then you could probably find

33:52 success for your clients and you could probably dramatically scale and grow your business so the thing that I would also say is and the thing that I love to

33:59 say is that there's more marketing agencies and coffee shops in the US where where we're at um there's over I

34:04 think 70,000 marketing agencies and I think that that's like way too much I

34:10 think that like and I would be very like and I'm sure every agency owner feels

34:16 this but winning clients is probably tougher and tougher and is only going to

34:22 get tougher and tougher so I would constantly try to think about how do we best service clients and what does a

34:28 client mean to us like what's the perfect client how do we really hone in on that that one client and replicate

34:34 that success but and I would innovate on the the service Suite that I'm offering to that client so that you do everything

34:40 that you can to um you know keep a client that's been with you for two years how do you keep them for two more

34:46 and the only way that you're going to keep them for two more is to keep it fresh keep it thrilling you know innovate on the different service

34:52 offering because doing more of the same is not going to keep a client right and it's especially when it comes to Ai and

34:59 of course every second day client get your anybody's client get pitched by jillions of other agencies I think

35:05 that's something is important jillions jillions of other agencies my agency

35:10 itself get pitched for so many agencies to outour the work to them it gets funny all the time yeah absolutely right right

35:18 now now uh in one of your interviews you mentioned the importance of activating employees to become part of company's

Activating Employees in Marketing

35:24 marketing effort so can you elaborate on this and how businesses can implement it

35:30 effectively yeah that's a great question I've always said that probably one of the the best marketing opportunities for

35:36 companies is to enlist their employees as marketing ambassadors

35:41 because in today's day and age everyone has a voice everyone has a personal brand and part of their personal brand

35:46 is the company that they work at and so are you able to essentially help them

35:51 leverage and develop their own thought leadership to benefit the thought leadership and the brand of your company

35:57 featured a really good example of that where anyone can go on share their expertise and essentially get

36:03 attribution back to the company and so at featured we've got three software Engineers we've got a product manager

36:09 we've got a community manager and a Partnerships manager all of us I'm encouraging to answer questions on

36:15 feature that speak to expertise because if there's a software engineering related question I'm not the best person

36:20 to answer that like one of one of our software Engineers is and so if they answer that question and they get placed

36:27 there's a benefit for Featured and for the employee because they're featured in the article they've developed their thought leadership up a little bit but

36:34 there may or may not be a link back to our company website just by virtue of saying it's okay to share your thoughts

36:42 and to share your expertise so I think featured is a really good example of where I think marketing is headed where

36:49 every employee at your company is similar to the comment about how Community empowers the growth of a

36:54 company I think your community exists with your customers but it also exists within your own employee base so if I

37:00 were to wish anything on you know an Enterprise level customer like for example you know like Microsoft for

37:07 example probably every day there's hundreds of employees that wake up at Microsoft thinking that thought

37:13 leadership is their job and Microsoft I think has done a really good job to enable those employees to feel like

37:19 thought leaders and I think that you're going to see a lot of other companies follow suit where everyone has thoughts to share uh around a particular uh

37:29 okay uh so quick fire rounds I'm going to Let's lighten things up with a quick

Best Advice Received

37:35 fire round I'll ask you a rapid question and you can give me I mean you should

37:40 give me the first thing that comes in your mind all right let's do it man there's a lot of questions already so

37:45 yeah know I'm I'm just coming towards the end of the show I know it's the end of your day it's the beginning of mine

37:51 so here man I got got a little coffee let's go yeah you can take a sip if you like it's all good man

37:58 okay let's do it uh what's the best piece of advice you have ever

38:03 received put on a costume and be it which is basically like Halloween like

38:08 Halloween is like a 4-day holiday in in the US at least when you're in college and you could dress up and be something

38:15 and if that costume kind of failed that night you put on a new costume the next day and and be that and so I think that

38:22 when you're looking at careers and even like your business model canvas put on a costume and fully own that costume and

38:28 if it doesn't fit man put on a different costume and uh and try that and I think that's a good way to good way to evolve

38:34 in in with careers and business okay one book every marketer should read delene

38:40 startup by Eric rise I think that's that's a pretty good one we'll we'll stop with that one okay

38:48 your favorite tool or app for productivity feature.com

Brett’s Favorite Productivity Tool

38:56 no uh yeah know future is a great way to to be productive and in PR but probably

Debunking PR Myths

39:02 chat PT okay biggest PR myth you would like to debunk man that's a lot of lot of myths

39:10 that that it's hard okay I would say I would say like

39:16 just to expand on that like you know a lot of people look at PR as this black box and I think that it's not like

39:23 especially if you look at you know a platform like ours that tries to make it a little bit easier I think that the playing Field's getting getting Level

Brett’s Professional Bucket List

39:31 okay and uh what's next on your professional bucket list grow featured I

39:36 mean uh that's we're three years in and you know I think that there's still

39:41 still the mountain to climb with it so just leading leading the team up the mountain okay okay uh Brett it's been an

39:49 absolute pleasure having you on the show before we wrap up any final thoughts or messages You' like to share with our

Final Thoughts

39:54 listen yeah thanks for having me on I would say that you know if anyone's looking to get in touch feel free to

40:00 look me up on LinkedIn Brett falo or drop me an email Brett feature.com

40:05 um love to talk with customers hear from customers especially ones that um are

40:11 new to the platform and have some perspectives so you know help us help us grow feature.com by providing your

40:16 feedback okay uh thank you so much Brett for joining us and sharing your incredible insights and bearing with so

40:23 many of my questions yeah man I'm definitely going to need this coffee now so so I appreciate you having me on I

40:28 hope hope everyone got something out of it okay yeah and to our listeners thank you for tuning in to the agency Insider

Outro

40:34 show don't forget to subscribe for more episode featuring industry leaders until next time keep innovating and excelling

40:41 in your agency Journey Take Care thank you