How could you make your personality more valuable than your business, or one that you work for?

Jim: 0:00

welcome to this episode of SPEAK pr I am. Delighted to have Omri Hurwitz of Omri Hurtwitz media with me and Omiri actually is with us today from Israel. Hi Omri.

Omri Hurwitz: 0:10

Hey, Jim. Thanks for having me, man. It's a pleasure.

Jim: 0:13

It's my pleasure. Thanks for joining us. In fact, you are first guests from Israel, but we originally connected because you have a, an agency in California as well. Now tell us how you're helping business owners to get noticed. You've got an interesting article in the California Herald talks about how you help companies to build a brand around their company.

Omri Hurwitz: 0:34

Yeah. Sure. So our main services is I starting at an advertising. We do advertising and PR for clients. We help them build a media company around their brand by helping them elevate their podcasts by getting them press coverage, media coverage, and by advertising certain thought leaders with pieces, both on LinkedIn and catching tents on Google as well. So that is our main services.

Jim: 0:58

And can you tell us then this idea of building sort of a brand around the product and the media company around it? Is that accessible for, for anybody or only big companies? Because it sounds like quite a big, a big job.

Omri Hurwitz: 1:13

It is a big job. I think everyone can start out with, with doing it on their own and once they want to scale it, they can work with an agency. But a few specific tactics that you can do by yourself is first, you can open up your own podcast. Podcast is an amazing networking environment. Also, you have an amazing way to reach so many people through, through promoting your podcast. Podcasts is number one. The second thing is writing blogs, being thought leadership videos on LinkedIn on Facebook, on YouTube. That's number two, everyone can do that. Number three is pitching to journalists. You know, for on your company and what are your companies doing? Everyone can start building up his own network of journalists in his specific niche. So I think those are the three main things that literally everyone can start off by now.

Jim: 2:04

You make it sound easy, but content creation is actually not easy for everybody, right? I mean, that's the bug bear for most people is they're building a business. They haven't got the time to then kind of write about or make videos. Can you give people some advice on where to start or how to start doing the Omri? Because a blank sheet of paper is kind of hard to work with. So where do you get clients to first put pen to paper or the cursor to the keyboard?

Omri Hurwitz: 2:33

So I would start off with letting the key players in my client's company write about the things that they are most interested about things that come very natural to them, not to try to write an article, not to try to writesome very complicated blog posts or something, but really use emotion and use their own experiences from their profession and let that flow. I think once you start doing that and you really treat blog articles, or even media articles, More as a personal posts, like, like do you post on LinkedIn? For instance, I think that helps them, you know, free themselves up. And you know, it's like a snowball. Once you start doing that, you start, you started writing the way you really want to.

Jim: 3:17

It's an interesting point that it doesn't just reside with the CEO, for example, or the marketing person. You're suggesting it starts within the organization that you might have the head of production or the head of HR. Right. And ask, is that right?

Omri Hurwitz: 3:34

Exactly a hundred percent right on Jim. So the city L let's say a chief technology officer, I want him to write about and talk about the quality right. Things he knows about there's the, are the sales development reps can talk about his experience as a salesman, the way he communicates, the way he outreaches, the way, you know, the things that come natural to him. Exactly. Like you said,

Jim: 3:55

how do you ensure consistency of voice that are because in the old days, No. When I was working in PR with big corporates before the internet, you know, the company had one voice, one author, one press release channel, one person dealing with the outside world that has been blown apart by the internet. The downside of that is lots of different people speaking about the company from their own perspective. How do you make sure there's a consistent look, feel narrative to the business.

Omri Hurwitz: 4:28

That's a great question, Jim, I tell you that a lot of people out of employees actually are not as comfortable expressing themselves on social media, on, on, you know, on news or news, media coverages. So the thing is you you try to allocate. The two or three or the four extroverts on the team who actually really like, you know, being publicized and you play on their strengths. That's what you do. It takes a lot of time to try to convince someone who's not ready for it to do it. And it's not. And I don't feel comfortable doing it. I just go with the guys who want to want to, you know, turn the show on. Okay. So even like finding the, the people that are natural communicators within the organization and lifting those guys up and letting them have a, have a platform, a hundred percent, every company has two or three individuals who are, who are extroverts who want to market themselves out as well and brand themselves out.

Jim: 5:22

What about those people that are struggling for time? Can you tell us what's your view on using sort of audio and people may be recording an audio and giving it to an agency or a writer because that's another way isn't it to help people that aren't writers, but are good communicators in some way,

Omri Hurwitz: 5:40

100%, a hundred percent audio is, is, is You know, it's really increasing in the last few years. We're seeing clubhouse right now, the new social media app. I haven't tried it yet, but. It's the talk of the town, you know it's an audio for people who don't know. It's an audio app. You basically don't write anything. You just record and talk straight. It's like, it's like a virtual, it's like a kind of a podcast setting and audio is really helpful. So for your quick answer, your question, let's say you don't like writing, but you're on the phone a lot. Why didn't I record to record those phone calls and use it as a podcast. Why not? You're talking to the person anyway, you're communicating. Anyway, you're talking about valuable things that can help a lot of people. Anyway, use that as a podcast, you don't have to go and, and, and, and think about making a podcast. You just have to record conversations that are already happening.

Jim: 6:35

Okay. So this is a great point that it doesn't actually mean extra work. It's just capturing the work you're currently doing. Right. And then you talk about building sort of a media company around the brand. And you talked about these different elements. But Henri, one of the biggest challenges for everyone, myself included is how to get people to know it's there. How do you help with that?

Omri Hurwitz: 6:57

I have one, one answer for you that I, that I truly believe in. And that is advertising. There is no short nor short cut for that advertising. You've got a great piece of content. But th but everything is so saturated. You advertise, you advertise to the return targeted to a very targeted niche. And that's how you promote you're with all these groups that your thought leadership pieces, your podcasts, your blogs, you advertise.

Jim: 7:23

So when you advertise on which platforms, because it seems like. Facebook is like the Sargasso sea, you know, huge and myriad. And then there's LinkedIn, which is very focused or there's Instagram or Omri. How do people choose? Should they be advertising on all of them or, or one what's your guidance on that?

Omri Hurwitz: 7:43

If you're a big B2B company or a tech company and you have the budget, I recommend LinkedIn, you do LinkedIn advertising, and then you can do remarketing through Facebook. This Facebook is a really wide wide audience, but actually look, your marketing works well if you're doing website remarketing through Facebook. So that's number one. If you're a B to C company out stick to Facebook and Instagram. Okay, try to incorporate them both. And YouTube remark YouTube right now is very cheap. It's it's the CPMs are very low. So I would recommend everybody who has a podcast or a thought leadership video series on YouTube to do advertising on YouTube.

Jim: 8:23

How much money we talk about Omri. For those of us that don't, I don't advertise on YouTube. For example, you talked about needing tens of dollars, hundreds, thousands.

Omri Hurwitz: 8:33

Yeah, sure. So it really depends. It really depends on, on. You know, on the budgets for every platform and the, and every company I can, I can dig on it like this. Okay. So if LinkedIn, for LinkedIn ads, for people who advertise on LinkedIn ad for usually have a budget of, let's say $3,000 a monthly up until it was 15, $15,000, right. So I recommend using 20 per 20% or 30% of that to advertise on thought leadership stuff on demand generation stuff that are not lead generation, right. Your podcasts, all those kind of stuff. I think on YouTube, you can get really good results with, let's say a budget of $1,500. I think that is, that is a good place to start off and same thing as Facebook, $1,500. That's what I would recommend. That's that way you can do the testing correctly and you can see if it works.

Jim: 9:27

Okay. So there's $1,500 a month to start to get some traction on, on those two media and and, and more on LinkedIn.

Omri Hurwitz: 9:35

LinkedIn is much more expensive.

Jim: 9:37

Is it more expensive because it's more productive? The ROI is better Omri or is it just because there's a cachet to it? The targeting is, is there is no there's no, excuse me. There's no better place for targeting than LinkedIn job titles companies. You can actually target specific people in specific companies. And on Facebook you can do that. You can't do that anywhere except LinkedIn. That's why they charge a lot.

Omri Hurwitz: 10:02

But I'm a big LinkedIn fan, both organic and LinkedIn nets. And by the way, LinkedIn organic, that's another place to go. Right? You have a good, if even if you're a BBC company, start, start promoting organic LinkedIn stuff, start putting your podcasts, you know, cut a few clips for clips out of your podcast and do a LinkedIn organic. It was amazing.

Jim: 10:22

Can you give us an example of if you like a campaign that you've put together, which has helped to company that had a product, but not necessarily broad awareness

Omri Hurwitz: 10:31

Once let's say you have a company and you're not doing any advertising, right? The minute you start doing advertising and you're doing it correctly, your company's going to grow. You're going to get more leads generated. You're going to get more brand awareness. And hopefully that will translate into revenue. If your company is already doing advertising, but it's all only doing the Lexi lead generation stuff. So derogating eBooks and irrigating webinars and those kinds of stuff. So I would come in and I would add the imaginary stuff. It's like, ungated content more thought, leisure, leadership stuff, work, podcasts, logs, and cetera. And then there's enough there. The company is going to see the impact. They're going to get more website visitors. More people are gonna know about them. And I believe that will translate into, into revenue and the third you know, cases that your big picture strategy is. If a company is already doing demand generation and they were already doing lead generation, I come in and tell them, so guys let's get media coverage for you guys. And then, and then meta coverage completes the whole picture. You mentioned that in between gated and ungated Omri, do you want to just tell us what's the difference? So gated content is content that you ask your potential customers to fill in a form so they can get the info. So for example, if I write a blog and I'm not going to let you, and I'm advertising it to a potential client, But I don't want but if my potential client wants to read my blog, he needs to fill out his phone number, his contact info, his email address, that's gated, that's lead generation. Ungated his dementia nation was when I advertise the blog, but with no commitment from the potential client, he can literally click back and go see my blog without leaving any contact info. I'm a big fan of ungated stuff.

Jim: 12:18

How do you get the proportions right Omri?

Omri Hurwitz: 12:22

So my advice is doing 70% on gated stuff and capturing the demand with 30%. So for instance, the 30% of doing gated content will be remarketing stuff. People who will all who have already seen your logs or podcast or content they're only exposed to you. And then you use a lead generation as remarketing, basically. So that's the 30% and 70% for ungated stuff.

Jim: 12:50

So what about this sort of creation of funnels? I've been working with a client on, on lead attribution. If it comes from PPC, from pay-per-click, it's quite easy. How are you dealing with attribution from public relations? Cause you've mentioned the importance of PR. How are you overcoming that reservation that many clients have.

Omri Hurwitz: 13:13

On the tactical side of it. Through Google analytics, you have a feature to see where your traffic to your website is coming from. So if you have, let's say an article published on, let's say the New York times you can actually see how many people clicked on, on, on on on a back link from the New York, magazine back to your website, right? And then you can track it and see how much attribute attribution you want to locate to that. That's on the tactical side, on the big picture side of the philosophical side. I recommend not doing that at all. If you're doing, if you're doing PR correctly, you feel the PR working, you don't need the numbers to tell you. That's, that's like how I look at it personally. But to answer your question to, to tracking it, you can do it through Google analytics or another analytics database platform,

Jim: 14:01

So it's really changed from the day when public relations or media relations was in print. And then there was a separation between someone reading it and someone may be going to the store or ringing the factory. Right. So, so digital's really brought that together

Omri Hurwitz: 14:16

a hundred percent

Jim: 14:17

are there some companies or people that you think have kind of mastered this brand around the company, you talk about building.

Omri Hurwitz: 14:28

That's a wonderful question, Jim. Okay. so I would start with Ryan Serhant for the people that don't know him. He's a real estate expert in New York. He has he's he's basically a celebrity. He has built his real estate business. Through his, his billion dollar real estate business. If I'm, if I'm correct through Mo through amazing PR and marketing tactics, he speaks about it a lot. You can catch him on LinkedIn, on YouTube, everywhere. The second guy is obviously Gary V Gary Vaynerchuk, right. Things he's doing. He invented in a way, you know, digital, personal brand. I think he's a guy that really does it correctly. So those are the two guys that I think you should look into what they're doing, how they're honing their craft

Jim: 15:17

Any companies that you think are doing as well as those individuals?

Omri Hurwitz: 15:22

Yeah. Yeah. Gong, if you'd be know about gong there and the AI sells sales platform. They've really mastered B2B marketing. They've actually even had a super bowl ad. They had an ad on the super bowl so that they really know what they're doing. I'm trying to think about B2C companies that I think are doing a great job, obviously. Red bull, you know, they're being doing a lot of influencer projects and stuff like that. They're going strong. Yeah, gong red bull. I want to say my clients also

Jim: 15:54

then tell us how people can find out more about you if they want to have you as their consultant.

Omri Hurwitz: 15:59

you can reach me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn. It's it's, it's basically where he live LinkedIn Omri Hurwitz search, Aubrey, her weights, and send me a dam and hope to get in touch.

Jim: 16:13

I'm ready. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your wisdom on this episode of speak PR.

Omri Hurwitz: 16:17

Jim. Thanks a lot, man. I really appreciate it. And keep up the great work.

Jim: 16:21

Thank you. Very kind of you and so thank you for listening to the speak PR podcast. I'm here with Omri Hurwitz, and we wish you the best of health that you have a sustainable business, and that if you are going to be building a brand, think about. Building a brand with multiple sources of content and building a business that's supported by a brand that is as important as the business itself. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of SPEAKPR.