---
title: "PR & Marketing"
date: 2019-02-26T06:00:00-05:00
author: Sean Smith
canonical_url: "https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-7/pr-marketing/"
section: Podcast
---
<!\[CDATA\[YII-BLOCK-BODY-BEGIN\]\]>[Skip to main content](#main-content)![Lyndon Johnson](https://website101podcast.com/uploads/hosts/_200x200_crop_center-center_none/lyndonjohnson_1456952403_49.jpg)Guest Lyndon Johnson

Lyndon founded Toronto-based COMMS.BAR (https://comms.bar/), a company that provides early-stage companies with affordable, transparent, and measurable pr & marketing advice.

<https://comms.bar/>[ ](https://twitter.com/THINK_Lyndon)[ ](https://www.linkedin.com/in/thinklyndon/)[ ](https://www.facebook.com/THINK.Lyndon)

Season 01 Episode 7 – Feb 26, 2019   
54:01 [Show Notes](#show-notes)

## PR &amp; Marketing



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[](//dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/website101podcast.com/uploads/mp3/season-01/07-Lyndon-Johnson-PR-and-Marketing-master-final.mp3)

What is PR and Marketing - a look at the traditional approach and then a discussion of how Lyndon is turning that approach upside down.

<a name="show-notes"></a>### Show Notes

There were a couple of technical issues from 30:00 to 31:50 resulting in some overlapping voices. Once past this section everything is back to normal.

- Public relations is the process of building strong mutually beneficial relationships between a stakeholder and an organization.
- Marketing is getting people to do things that have a commercial value.
- We talk about how a small business can get PR and Marketing without the deep pockets of a large conglomerate. And how your company website can be utilized in this area.
- Relationship strength and mode of communication is very important.

### Show Links

- [Startup PR, Marketing &amp; Publicity – The Future is Lean](https://comms.bar/reinventing-pr-marketing-publicity-entrepreneurs/)
- [The Lean Communications Framework](https://comms.bar/business-model-canvas-public-relations-marketing/)
- [Maserati’s SuperBowl “Strike” Was Public Relations NOT Advertising](https://comms.bar/maseratis-superbowl-strike-public-relations-not-advertising/)

Powered Transcript Accuracy of transcript is dependant on AI technology.

**\[00:00\]** **Sean:** Hi, welcome to the website 101 Podcast. My name is Sean Smith. I'm your host and today I'm joined by Lyndon Johnson from Combsbar and we're going to be talking about PR and marketing for small businesses. Lyndon, could you introduce yourself?

**\[00:16\]** **Lyndon:** Yeah, I sure am great to be here. So I'm a Brit, obviously. The accent is a bit of a giveaway. I've been in Canada for nearly nine years and my background is as a broadcast journalist that's what my degree is in and I worked in public relations and marketing companies in the UK before starting a company that's dedicated to helping entrepreneurs with public relations

**\[00:39\]** **Sean:** and marketing. Wow, so you've got a lot of experience in the field and you're living in Canada now. That's an interesting change for you.

**\[00:52\]** **Lyndon:** Yeah, certainly this time of year as well and it starts to get cold. It's definitely an interesting change. I've honest, I've trade the cold for the wet. I was never a big fan of the rain so we don't get much of that in Canada so it's not so bad. But I've been here nearly nine years now and this is home and so far I'm enjoying it. Awesome, awesome. So let's

**\[01:15\]** **Sean:** get down to business here and let's talk about PR and marketing and one of the things you're going to like to do is you've told me that you're more about upending or changing the way PR and marketing works. First let's define what traditional PR and marketing is and

**\[01:35\]** **Lyndon:** then let's take a look at what your approach is. Absolutely. One of the problems with defining traditional PR and marketing is become such a homogenized collection of things that nobody's really clear. The traditional agency offering is really media relations. It's pitching journalists to write about your business which in my book is publicity and I'll explain why in a second. But it's become a combination of things, a content marketing, social media. All of these things have kind of become included in the term now marketing and the lack of definition. One makes it really difficult to measure and secondly for entrepreneurs it's really hard to understand what it is you need and so what I've tried to do is break out the core disciplines so that it's clear exactly what we're trying to do and it helps entrepreneurs understand what part of the kind of public relations and marketing mix they need to achieve a specific outcome. So my definitions are kind of really straightforward. Public relations is a process of building strong mutually beneficial relationships between a stakeholder and an organization. That's really what it is. There's nothing about how you do it in it. It's simply the process and the way that you go about building strong relationships that then become actionable and actionable relationships are really the key to marketing. Marketing's getting people to do things and if you're in business it's getting people to do things that have a commercial value. If you can't do that and that isn't the outcome then it's not marketing and in most cases publicity what agents is described as being public relations. The awareness piece doesn't drive action. A lot of marketing campaigns using marketing term in brackets is really publicity. It's awareness and so being clear about those things helps to define what a small business or a startup needs but also makes it important that we can measure

**\[03:41\]** **Sean:** it. Makes it possible to measure it. Oh well that's kind of interesting. So PR, public relations and marketing, it sounds to me like your definition said they're very similar. Is that correct?

**\[03:59\]** **Lyndon:** They're connected. I wouldn't say they're similar but they're linked in a way that if you don't have one of the pieces it makes it very difficult to achieve specific goals. So I always explain that in order to get somebody to do something they need to have a reason to do it. They also need to trust you're asking them to do something that isn't going to harm them and in a business context has benefit for them. You can ask people to do things that have value for you but if there's no reciprocal value for them chances are they're not going to do it. If you don't have the relationship strength that's necessary to compel them to take the action it makes it really hard to convince them to do it with or without a benefit. I always explain that if I need three bucks to get from downtown to where I live on the TTC I can pretty much ask anybody and I'm like to find somebody that will give me three dollars because I'm stranded I can't get home. I left my wallet at home. If I'm asking somebody for fifty dollars it gets more difficult and then the chance to finding somebody is less the reason that somebody needs to be given to give me fifty dollars increases. If I'm asking somebody for fifty thousand dollars or half a million dollars or five million dollars to invest in the business the relationship needs to be stronger and so the strength of the relationship really varies based on what you're asking somebody to do. And then awareness which is the publicity piece is far easier if it's with people you know because the biggest thing that small businesses startups run into with publicity is that people are paying attention it's a noisy world out there. If they're not paying attention it doesn't matter

**\[05:51\]** **Sean:** how loud you are they simply won't he? Well so as a small business maybe I'm running a shop selling widgets or I'm providing a B2B service. How can I build publicity? I'm not this big giant conglomerate with deep pockets. What can I do to help my business get the publicity

**\[06:18\]** **Lyndon:** and marketing that I need? Well the first thing is you need to understand who your customer is, who you're selling to, who has a need for your product or service because if you're talking to people that don't have the need the chances are they're not going to be interested in what you sell even if you can get them to the shop. If you know it's interesting in another episode that I recorded

**\[06:41\]** **Sean:** earlier today we also talked about knowing what your customers need and want so this seems to be kind of a common thing that everybody needs to be aware of. Yeah and it's critical and it's one

**\[06:53\]** **Lyndon:** of the biggest areas of issue that people don't look at they assume that everybody has a need for their product or they can convince people to buy it simply by telling them about it simply through the awareness piece and it's just simply not true. Okay so we talked a little bit about the

**\[07:14\]** **Sean:** conventional approach to PR and marketing. What is your way of innovating or turning this PR

**\[07:23\]** **Lyndon:** and marketing engine upside down? There are two ways. First is in the model so the business is designed for start-ups and small businesses so we always say that we're trying to make it affordable, accessible, transparent and measurable. They're kind of the four main complaints from agency customers so we have designed a business model in a way of working that works for our customers.

**\[07:47\]** **Sean:** They pay increment. Can you go over the forer again? I didn't catch all of them. I got a

**\[07:52\]** **Lyndon:** affordable, transparent, measurable and more accessible. So the traditional problem is that unless you have deep pockets you have five ten thousand dollars a month and a minimum for three or six months most agencies won't talk to you. In order to get the help you've actually got to give them money first and that's out of the reach of most small businesses. So what we've done is make it pay as you go where we can actually give you advice and keep you moving forward, get you unstuck for a relatively small amount of money and in that way we can actually add value and keep entrepreneurs moving their businesses forward without the need for huge investments. The other thing is that we've developed a framework. It's like a business model canvas but for public relations marketing and publicity that's available to anybody. It's something that they can

**\[08:44\]** **Sean:** download. So this is a framework that I could take myself and using what's in it. Take care of my

**\[08:53\]** **Lyndon:** own PR and marketing to a certain extent. Yeah, absolutely. The framework has been designed to help you build strategy hypotheses to what you think is going to deliver you an outcome and test it to find out what the likelihood is of it working or not. And it will also identify where there are issues so you can make changes. So you don't spend a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of resources on something that's ultimately going to fail. It gives you the ability to check it in small batches before you actually do anything at scale. And that's part of really what we wanted to do is to give entrepreneurs the ability to get so far then when they get stuck or they need a specialist help with air to support them and the business works like a genius bar where you can get help when you need it, rather than needing five, ten thousand dollars a month or having to pay that money up front

**\[09:44\]** **Sean:** simply to get through an agency's door. Well, that sounds really interesting. So I can download this. I can do it myself. Where can I, where can I find this, this canvas and

**\[09:59\]** **Lyndon:** the instructions on how to do. Yes, if you go to comms.bar.comms.barr on one of the main menus, it says link communications framework. If you click that, it will take you to where you can download the framework, which is a series of four canvases that we've developed. And also the Quick Start guides, which talk you through filling them out and how to look at them in a way that then enables you to kind of figure out whether or not the assumptions you're making about what will work are actually founded in truth or to test them to find out whether they are or not or in learn from it.

**\[10:38\]** **Sean:** All right, well, that that sounds very good. I will definitely link that up in the show notes. One of the things you mentioned is that we go through this and we test out some of our ideas in small patches. So this would be sort of like an A, B test where we're testing different ideas and then we choose the one that gets the most traction and go with that going forward.

**\[10:59\]** **Lyndon:** It can be, it can also be qualitative as well. So if you need to know the answer to question, the best way to actually get somebody to take an action or the best way to inform somebody about a product or service, for example, you can actually define an audience group, people that are your ideal customers and test it. So you can find out whether or not it's via traditional print media, whether it's online, whether it's via an online media site or your own website. So you can actually test those things to find out based on a very small sample group and a very focused sample group. The best way to communicate with them, the best way to build a relationship with them or the best way to inform them.

**\[11:44\]** **Sean:** Right, well that sounds very interesting. All right, so we've done some batches, we've looked at this and we're proceeding, but I'm kind of stuck. I'm not getting results from having trouble interpreting it. You have the comms bar. Is there any other agency or type of person who does similar work? Maybe they have more specialty specialized in my field? Or are you really the only person that I can talk to to get help with your approach? There's me obviously as the founder

**\[12:21\]** **Lyndon:** and I work with a team of specialists that have different domain specialisms, so different communication skills and also specialisms in different industries as well so that if you need to talk to somebody with retail experience or industrial, manufacturing, there's somebody there that understands the industry that you're working in and somebody if you need help with online or something with actually getting people to take a nation, then we have people that specialize in kind of the different disciplines of PR marketing publicity so that you get to talk to somebody that specifically relevant to the challenge that you face and can give you advice that's based contextually in your business but based on best practices in the field itself. Okay, so what about traditional PR or

**\[13:13\]** **Sean:** marketing? If I'm more inclined to go with a traditional company or I like the way traditional PR works at or maybe I've just got deep pockets, do you have any advice on how I would go through with something like that? And remember, our target here is really small businesses that don't necessarily have a lot of experience and they just want to know more about what they can do to help choose the right path for them. Yeah, we're always having to talk to entrepreneurs that are

**\[13:45\]** **Lyndon:** going through that question to help them make the right decision for their business. So my contact details are on the website, they're on most of my social media feeds as well including my cell phone, which my wife tells me if somebody will phone me if I put my cell phone number on social media. But if people have questions they can always get in touch via email or text me or call me if they've got questions. Another way that we found the resource, the framework that we've developed helping entrepreneurs is allowing them to validate what they're being told by an agency. Agency strategies from my experience are typically a combination of products that they sell or services that they sell. The framework allows them to allow our customers or people that are our customers are working with an agency to actually test the veracity of the logic of what they're being told by an agency. And I've got a number of customers that are doing that right now where they're working with an agency but they're using the framework to actually validate what they're being told to see whether it makes logical sense and to see whether the decisions that are being made that ultimately costing them money are based in reality. That's really interesting. So it's not an either or a situation. Absolutely. Some of the customers that are using it with agencies still use Combsbar for appointments where they'll come and say we're being told this this doesn't make sense. How do you see it? And you know they're getting a 15 minute appointment, half an hour appointment where we're just looking over what they've been told by the agency, looking at what they're seeing in the business and saying you know you might want to dig a bit deeper about that or you might want to ask this question. You know you might want to look at getting a metric that's kind of measuring this rather than that so they can actually kind of work with the agency asking form questions to make sure that they're getting good advice from the agency and their money if they're spending five or ten grand a month. It's actually being spent in a productive manner.

**\[15:40\]** **Sean:** Interesting. Interesting. So I'm looking at I believe this is the article that where we get these various frameworks that you mentioned you sent this to me earlier and one of the things that you're talking about in this article is PR is about building and maintaining relationships. How does your approach work with that and we talk about PR then we talk about marketing and then publicity. Can you go into that a little bit and then maybe we'll talk about the different

**\[16:18\]** **Lyndon:** canvases that you've offered. Yeah sure. Building relationships is the thing that people neglect and it's really the most important part of a communication strategy whether you're a small company or a large company you've got to have strong relationships based on mutual benefit with those people otherwise it's unlikely they're going to take an action a commercially valuable action that benefits your business but also delivers value for them. I give the example of VW. VW is basically a club that you know the badge is the car. The membership card is the VW badge on the front of the vehicle and people that have VWs hang out with other people that have similar value sets and they probably also own VWs or they encourage other people to buy them because they want to be a part of the club that actually kind of drives VWs but having those strong relationships is critical and what we see more often than not is people go out and try and get people to do things without having the relationships in place or as we talked about earlier on they're not strong enough to support the action that you're asking somebody to take. So it's really it's a fundamental part of the success of any communication strategy it's not about awareness it's about mutual benefit and kind of having a relationship with the organization first once you've got that in place then you can ask people to do something unless your business is transactional unless it's a commodity coffee shops for you know a commodity business clothing to some degree depending on the brand but the relationships are really key in making sure that you've got the relationship to the requisite strength before you ask the action sometimes you only get the chance to ask somebody to do something once I was listening to something on the radio today talking about the the congress in the US and saying about politicians and you know somebody who approached a voter a few years ago and said I trust I can count on your vote and apparently they turn around and said well why would you think that and he said well you know you normally vote for the party and they're interested yes but you've not asked me said a big part of getting my vote is actually asking me to vote for you and that's the thing that don't ask you to know that it's having the relationship strength to know that actually if you ask somebody to do it there's a high probability of them doing it it's one of the big things that people overlook you know talking about where as well is about you know conversion rate the focus is typically on driving traffic getting people to the site but unless they're compelled to do something when they get there it's unlikely you get the outcome you want they won't make the purchase the transaction I also kind of you know tell people that a big part of transaction is actually the word action and so you've got you've got to ask them to do it but there's got to be mutual benefit there's got to be something in it for them people don't want to buy stuff online you know we're in store for nothing they want to get something in return for their hard-earned cash but you've actually sometimes got to ask them you know so you like you know the shirt the pants the shoes do you want

**\[19:38\]** **Sean:** to buy it okay so let's take take a step back and look at this the focus we're going to be on is marketing but how or PR and how we can use our website to help with that so one one of the things that you say also is marketing is compelling people to take an action kind of what you were talking about now how can I compel somebody to sign up for my newsletter or buy my widget or take my online video course or some other thing that's going to give me benefit as well as give them benefit like what are these how can I improve my conversion really about being able to

**\[20:24\]** **Lyndon:** demonstrate value if somebody thinks that they're going to get value from taking the action whether it's signing up for newsletter they're going to get content that's going to give them information they can't get elsewhere or asking to buy a product you know they have you know a need for you know a replacement for what they have or something's not doing what it used to for them then they will likely take the action you've got to build trust they've got to believe that you know it's a company that they want to buy from they've got to believe that you know the value that you promise them if you tell them it's going to fix a problem for them or it's going to you know improve something in their their lives you know it's professionally or privately you actually have to deliver on that promise and then the most important things you have to ask them to go back to the voting example you actually have to say so you know we've shown you something that we understand you know that it fixes a problem for your ads value to your life in some way but you know you like the company you trust us that you know the product's going to live up to your expectations um so would you like to buy and it's one of the biggest issues that we see on websites is people get there but they don't take the action and it's really hard to understand looking at web traffic why they don't take the action because you have no other point of reference other than the fact that they were there

**\[21:45\]** **Sean:** and then they didn't yeah I my clients sometimes struggle with that actually I struggle with that myself on my own website I don't always know why I don't get the conversion when somebody's looking there's a lot to know uh so let's maybe we can try and give a little bit of practical advice to somebody who's a do it yourself or or maybe they're going to hire an agency or someone like you and let's look at really small businesses maybe it's a freelancer who's a copywriter and they're writing web copy for businesses or it's an interior a boutique interior designer with only one or two employees or possibly like a personal trainer at a gym how how can they improve their PR and marketing what what are some practical tips to understand the customer in

**\[22:40\]** **Lyndon:** huge amount of detail understand you know why they would choose you over a competitor understand the value that you deliver understand what is likely to make them take the action to book course or to buy a product or to you know ask you to develop a site the second thing is understand how to make the request do you need to make it in person you need to make it online you need to provide them with a link to click um so that they go to the page where they can actually just click and you know put the credit card details in and and finish the transaction uh it's one of the biggest challenges that um I see with websites is that people have to navigate and generally people don't like to navigate once they've made the purchase decision they just want to go to wherever they need to go to to actually complete it and complete the transaction they don't want to have to

**\[23:32\]** **Sean:** search for it so by navigate you mean uh click around so basically when they get there they want to click once and then it's over I've I've signed up or I've started the checkout process or whatever's involved in this particular action is that correct right okay so you're the it's about a good user experience the minimal number of actions in that case uh I think this is a good time to segue into taking a look at your canvases and I've printed up this article uh which I'll link to in the show notes called startup PR marketing and publicity the future is lean uh written by yourself of course and I'm looking at the first one key relationship mapping canvas and I see what looks like a seating plan for a wedding uh a big circle with a number of smaller circles right could you explain

**\[24:30\]** **Lyndon:** what is that seating plan for a wedding you're right um but it's in the same way that seating plans at weddings you want to see people together that are going to get on and avoid sitting people together that don't get on it's very much uh you know the same approach for the canvas the idea is that it works two ways if you have a strong relationship with a person or a group of people to use the VW analogy again they likely hang out with people that have similar values similar kind of brand uh perspectives they shop at the same places they go to the same uh entertainment outlets and stuff like that but people in the middle can help you to reach more people like them that also have a need for your product or service and if you put those people in the center circles it's very easy to then start generating uh new uh business leads from their networks and use those people to actually introduce them rather than you going out to try and find them cold the other way is that if you need to put a relationship with somebody that you don't have a relationship with you put those people in the middle and then find out who the people are that you have existing relationships with that can help you to build a relationship with that person and again those people that are on the outside and they're giving you advice and so you know what's the best way to contact somebody do they like to speak on the phone do they like to kind of shake hands and meet in person are they tea or coffee people all those kind of things that then give you an ability to start to build a relationship through the relationship that you already have with somebody

**\[26:04\]** **Sean:** else um to kind of this sounds like something you could uh do use LinkedIn for because LinkedIn shows you first and second connections so i want to connect with i want to connect with uh Brian but i don't have any i don't know him personally but i know someone who knows him i can get an introduction and maybe get a little bit of inside information on how i can best talk to him absolutely the old definition is kind of a strength of the relationship that they have with

**\[26:40\]** **Lyndon:** the person you're trying to uh start a conversation with with LinkedIn people connect but they don't really have a relationship with somebody they kind of just you know got an invite they clicked accept and now it shows them as being a first generation connection so the question always hey we're all guilty of it. I've been guilty over the last few years but we're all guilty of it it's easy to do but the question is how strong is your relationship with that person how you know are you just connected because you accepted an invite or do you actually know the person personally do you know them through other people now so you understand the context so that when you're starting a conversation you're you're kind of giving them a call or sending them in an hour it's like you know i was talking to Sean and you know Sean said that you might be interested in something i'm working on this is what i'm working on um you know is that correct you know or you know i understand you met Sean at an event you know you were talking a similar topic at a conference panel or something um you know it kind of appears that you might be interested in this topic if that's true i might have something that's interesting for you and so using that kind of information using the relationships but understanding how strongly relationship is to give you an example i've got an advisor of mine who wants to introduce me to some vcs in Silicon Valley because of what i do and the fact that it's relevant for startups but he's only going to do it when i've demonstrated certain things because it's his relationship that basically is on the line if he introduces me to people that respect him he has a strong relationship with and i can't deliver what they want then it weakens his relationship with them because they start not to trust him you know some of the introductions that he makes whether it's you know for people like me or whether it's companies that they might want to invest in

**\[28:38\]** **Sean:** well i totally understand that i'm very careful about giving referrals to anyone i want to know that they can deliver on the referral that i'm giving because it's absolutely so i

**\[28:50\]** **Lyndon:** at least give them a recommendation when you can prove this i'll make the introduction i'm happy to do it but before i do it i want to know that if they ask you for this or for that or to demonstrate this or they ask a difficult question you can handle it and so it's really really important that you understand that context and if you don't feel that it's strong enough to be valuable or it's not something that is comfortable for the other person to make that introduction that you respect that and you understand that you know it's not a stronger relationship as perhaps you thought it's not as strong as you need it to be for the introduction to have any value

**\[29:32\]** **Sean:** so i guess in some ways with a relationship that has a very low strength we might need to do something to nurture it. So moving that so we can get to the big house.

**\[29:44\]** **Lyndon:** We're talking about there's a box at the top of each of the circles that has B&amp;R it's a benchmark relationship strength where is it now? Is it a zero on a scale? of zero to ten? Is it zero? Because actually we have no existing relationship? Is it a one or a two? Because we may be met in an event exchange business cards we've connected on LinkedIn but there's not really anything else much there. Or is it a ten? Is it somebody that you've known for years and you know they're essentially waiting for you to pick up the phone or send them an email saying could you do this for me? When you know what the benchmark is you can figure out what it needs to be to get them to do what you want them to do and work on building it. You can measure

**\[30:22\]** **Sean:** the progress between where it is now and where it needs to be. Yeah I don't know too many people that have a lot of tens on the relationship scale that would be a lot of fun. This wife, friends and families such a big deal when start up some businesses are raising money. Is that the people

**\[30:37\]** **Lyndon:** that you can go to that will trust you even if nobody else will? Exactly.

**\[30:46\]** **Sean:** So Lyndon we've known each other for a couple of years now. What's your question? Where do I rank on the relationship scale? I think we're slightly more than a zero.

**\[30:57\]** **Lyndon:** I assume I'm not a zero. I would say you kind of somewhere between a five and a seven so maybe a six.

**\[31:06\]** **Sean:** Yeah that's kind of what I was thinking. Yeah. It's your scale so I wasn't really sure I would I was thinking somewhere like six or seven but five or six also works because it's not like we're hanging out every day and it depends on what the all-star ones are.

**\[31:22\]** **Lyndon:** Yeah depending on what I'm asking you so the relationship strength is context you.

**\[31:27\]** **Sean:** If I'm asking you for $50,000 we had a little bit of technical issues and got disconnected and kind of lost the track of what we were talking about so we're going to just jump into the next question that I have. I'm moving on to the the next canvas and we're talking about lean public relations canvas. This canvas looks a little bit different. The last one kind of looked like this wedding seating plan. This one's got a number of boxes and kinds of goals or questions for us. Lyndon can you describe what we would be putting into this? Yeah the first thing is the top left

**\[32:10\]** **Lyndon:** which is design outcome you've got to know what it is you want to achieve before you can build a strategy to actually deliver it to achieve it. So putting you know what you want the outcome to be what does success look like for you. That goes in the top left it goes on all of the canvases and we use it to compile the canvases where we've got a series of the four together we can actually identify them by the desired outcome. In the boxes that are below there are four of them, they're the assumption boxes. The assumption boxes are for public relations key relationships you're talking to the right people. Again it's one of the big challenges that we see is that people are going out talking to everybody and only one percent of the people they talk to is actually interested or is willing to take the action or is interested in having a relationship with their business. So make sure you talk into the right people. The second part of that is mutual benefit what's in it for them and it's one of the things that we ask our customers a lot is look at the benefit not through your eyes but through the eyes of the person that you're trying to get to do something, your ideal customer. What do they see in your product or service because that's what you need to be talking about not what you think it is. The third one which is bottom left of the assumptions is timing, timing is a huge impact on the success of public relations and marketing trying to build a relationship with somebody. This user example in personal relationships, if you're single but the person that you want to build a relationship with is not single, then it's potentially limiting and I say potentially because I don't want to prejudge but in most cases it's a barrier. So knowing that it would be socially unexceptible. There we go, socially unexceptible. There we go. Well it depends, I guess it depends on the company. But it's a big deal and people don't take into account enough about that. The other thing is that using calendar is Christmas. Selling Christmas cars is relatively easy up until 25th of December. After that you can probably still sell them but you sell them for a fraction of the price you could do only a couple of days before. So timing plays a huge role. And then the fourth thing that we look at at the bottom right hand side of the assumptions is how you actually start a conversation. Do you do it in person? Do you need to walk into a room and shake somebody's hand? Do you need to pick up a telephone? Do you send them a text? Do you send them an email? How important is that conversation

**\[34:37\]** **Sean:** platform? I mean, obviously if I'm talking or wanting to have this relationship with somebody who doesn't live in my city, you know I can't walk in the room and shake their hand unless I go to conference or an event in their city or whatever. Is this platform an important aspect of it?

**\[34:57\]** **Lyndon:** Like how important is it? It's critical and it's just understanding that sometimes it's having that personal connection. I have a customer recently who actually flew to the West Coast from Toronto simply to shake somebody's hand and it was a 10 or 15 second interaction but it was high on linden. Good to meet you so that when they followed up whether it was by telephone or via email they could say, I don't know if you remember but we met at this event. You know we shook hands and you know this was this was what the conversation was about. Having that reference point makes the difference sometimes depending on the people depending on what it is you're asking them ultimately to do what the marketing action is. So it's really really important. Everyone these days thinks that email is kind of really important. Very few people pick up the phone and talk to people because it seems as being something that isn't done. The reality is that a telephone conversation can actually achieve an awful lot in a very short period of time and the one thing that you have that you don't have with a lot of the digital platforms is you actually know somebody was participating. You can tell tone of voice, you can tell whether they're paying attention,

**\[36:06\]** **Sean:** you can find out really quickly. Right there's a lot of there's a lot of non-verbal clues. Verbal clues. A lot more verbal clues that you can get with then with a text-based interaction. It's real-time versus back and forth from email and I guess you know a step up from phone calls would be a video conference where you're actually looking at the person and you can see their face and then of course there is in person where you can actually physically touch them and

**\[36:43\]** **Lyndon:** get the energy from the room. Yeah it's one of those things where if you have that physical connection in some way whether it's being located in the same building as them or shaking the hand or it's doing a video conference when you get into the digital communication methods you can imply a lot of meaning from words on a page that you can't if you don't know who they are. So we know each other but if I send you an email it's a difference between knowing whether it's a really or a really and the more you know about somebody again you can read stuff and you can see stuff that gives you information that if you don't have that personal connection we've all got friends that we can talk to on text or on Facebook Messenger or whatever and we can basically do one word conversations because all of the context is already in the relationship. You know when somebody says something why are they saying it? A good example of that from a marketing perspective was Volkswagen a few years ago, it's probably 20 years ago now. You're really like Volkswagen. They did some good marketing and I'm you know Apple's losing it so I tend to talk less about Apple now but VW because of it really knows who its customers are. It did a billboard ad and a print ad and a digital ad that just said had the VW badge and it just said drivers wanted. It's basically saying buy a car go and test it but you know it's basically saying become part of the club. You know we're actually accepting new members to the club. You know the cost of membership is purchasing the car but you know that that only becomes relevant if your customers, the people you're talking to understand what you mean. Maserati's another example there was a super volat that I wrote about and there's a link I can send you to a blog post I wrote about it.

**\[38:31\]** **Sean:** It's I think arguably please do send a link I'll include it in the show. One of the most successful

**\[38:38\]** **Lyndon:** marketing campaigns ever. Super volads are not cheap. We reckon on an estimate that I did from information that I have it probably costs them about 10 million dollars to create animals so buy the space being the Super Bowl but my calculations is actually delivered about a billion dollars worth of sales so 10 million dollars for a billion dollar out but it was Maserati.

**\[39:02\]** **Sean:** That's a serious return on it. But if you look at the ad it was I mean my listeners are probably not 10 billion dollar return. No no but the point about that is if

**\[39:15\]** **Lyndon:** you look at the ad it looks like a flashy car ad when you understand the context it was actually an apology and I explained in the blog post why but Maserati realized the only way they were going to get people to buy their new improved latest vehicle was actually put their hand up and say you know what you bought one of our cars in the 70s and 80s it was a bit of a mess and we we realized that we're sorry we've listened we know what you want we've made changes to the business so take another look at what we've created and it was that apology understanding that most people that bought a Maserati in the 70s 80s in the early 90s were probably not satisfied with you know what they got for their 70 80 90 thousand dollar investment and by acknowledging that by kind of you know putting that into the context of the ad if you didn't understand the context it didn't make any sense it was just a flashy car ad but if you were somebody that Maserati thought actually is interested in you know Italian luxury cars may have bought a Maserati in the 70s 80s not been that keen to revisit it they just need to kind of be reassured that actually we get it we got it wrong we messed up we broke the trust we've listened we think we have something that might interest you now it changes the way that people look at the company and you know 10 million dollars to a billion dollars in sales is not a bad return of an investment for anybody

**\[40:47\]** **Sean:** okay uh let let's go back to the canvas so we looked at the top half of the canvas the bottom half of the canvas there's four four sections each of them is called a relationship experiment and uh you're asking what are we testing what's the experiment what's the measure what are we measuring and outcome and what did we learn yes you have four of these is is it because you think that four experiments are required or is it just because there was space for four and what kind of experiments could I run as a small business trying to build up the sort of thing just talk about

**\[41:25\]** **Lyndon:** the top right hand side for a second because it's important it links to the the experiments on the bottom the top right is a hypothesis it's combination of the assumptions that you've made but if you do a certain thing so you talk to a certain group of people you explain the benefit to them you do it at the right time and you also start building the relationship in a certain way they'll want to build a relationship with your organization because you have something of value for them which obviously is beneficial to you growing the business and then the risk is assumption is the thing that you're least sure about so maybe you're not sure you're talking to the right people maybe you're not sure that you know former Maserati customers are going to be one around simply by saying you know what we got it wrong um it might be that you know the timing you're not sure of when somebody has budget when they have a need for it if they're replacing a car what you know the current lease cycle when that expires or how to communicate with them do you send to a website do you pick up the phone do you send them a text message all of those things are things that are potentially unknown and so the risk assumption is the one that you're least sure about and then the experiments along the bottom are experiments for each of those assumptions so you know if you're an experiment and make sure that you are talking to the right people they have a need for your product they see the value they like what you as being stands for you can test it now with the mutual benefit you talked earlier on about seeing so this is this is the kind of thing that might help me

**\[42:55\]** **Sean:** determine my niche or the experiments might be more of a concern yeah who the

**\[42:59\]** **Lyndon:** which there is oftentimes people assume that the problem owner is the person that makes the procurement decision in some cases that's not the case they might be different people so it's understanding if the person that actually says yes this will solve our problem actually has the capability to sign it off or pay the check and so it's understanding that you know maybe you go speak two different sets of people do you build relationships with them separately or do you build a relationship with the second one through the first one so understanding that you know make sure that you know who you're talking to and actually you're building relationships with all the people necessary to get ultimately the the marketing action that you want same thing you can test the mutual benefit to make sure that the way you're expressing it is through their eyes not yours and the words you're using the language you're using the context that you're using you understand to be theirs rather than being what you've assumed the other thing is that you can test timing to make sure that they're able to make the purchase when you need them to the the desired outcome at the top I should have said is always within another 30 to 90 day window and so timing can they actually do what you need them to do in that window if not they might be the right person with different context but with the timing it might not work and then how you communicate with them again do you actually build a relationship by picking up the phone do you actually need to go and shake their hand because they're somebody that's really important and you know they may be one of the circles in the middle of the relationship map that can open up possibilities for lots of other people like them and so you know you can test all of those things the most important the most important part of the experiment cards on the bottom is actually the what do we learn you can validate whether or not your assumption is accurate but one of the things that becomes the most important part of any experiment is the things that you learned you didn't expect so the things you find out as part of running the experiment that help you improve what you're doing right so what

**\[45:00\]** **Sean:** you can what you can take away so that things that you can apply to your processes and your approaches and how to improve or things to stop doing it could be just as much about not doing something as it is about doing something okay so this is there's a lot going on here it's a lot to digest do you have a case study where you take a look at this canvas and talk about something that you did with a client that we could look at and I don't know the client case studies in that

**\[45:33\]** **Lyndon:** what you brought to you and some case studies of campaigns of marketing programs that actually are broken down using the canvases so you can see the different components so one for example is to think different campaign that Apple ran back in the late 90s a hugely successful communications program often misunderstood and so we broke it down and looked at the different components and I use it as a way to kind of think okay well what else could we have done or what could we have done differently with the thing this is something that we can find on your website it is I'll send you a link to it it's a section on the website so I will definitely include that

**\[46:18\]** **Sean:** in the show notes okay we're kind of hitting up about the time that I want to run but I want to talk about one last thing on this article so the other canvases all look very similar there's some slight differences but I think they function the same and I have a question here I'm going to read a little bit and then I'm going to ask so having built key relationships to the point where they are actionable they will do what you ask them to do willingly getting people to take a commercially valuable action is one of the biggest challenges for starters some small businesses I think this is really really really important it's like you got to get them to convert to use your call to action whatever and then you go on much of the focus of marketing in recent years is about clicks likes or shares which for the most part have little commercial value could you explain that why does do clicks and likes and shares have little commercial value absolutely firstly because they're

**\[47:28\]** **Lyndon:** easy to do you can visit a facebook page or a twitter stream and just click a you know click one click of the mail saw the track pad and you can like it and then walk away so it's not in there because of you being willing or able to take actually a commercially valuable action if that was the case Ferrari and Porsche and Mazarrath are all expecting me to buy a car the reality is that that's not the case I like their products I like Italian cars I'm not able to buy one right now you know and you don't know anyone who is personally and that's the point you know but everybody like stuff and they like pages and you get friends and family get people saying like this like that like my business page it's like okay great but what does that actually mean I can like it but I'm going to buy something from you do I have a need for what the business offers if I don't have the need then I'm not likely to take an action that has commercial value I'm not likely to go from a facebook page and click through to a website and buy a product I have no need for simply because somebody asked and because you asked me to like your facebook page or your instagram feed so it's about understanding what the commercial value is and focusing on people that are actually willing to take a commercially valuable action because having a strong relationship with somebody to go back to what we talked about about asking you for $50,000 even if you wanted to do it you believe you know in the business you believe that the money would be well spent that you're likely to get a return on that investment the reality is if you don't have the $50,000 and what we're thinking about it I assume you don't have $50,000 if you don't have $50,000 just lying around to give you hey you know it was worth checking it was worth checking right and but it's a liking the page you know it is irrelevant it doesn't you can't do you can't do it so if I was asking you for $50,000 investment if you like the page it has no bearing on whether or not I actually get the money from it and this is the thing that people get caught up on it's like getting caught up on likes on Instagram feeds or Twitter feeds or Facebook pages it there's no correlation in most cases between the likes or the shares and the transaction the commercial valuable action and right lots of

**\[49:54\]** **Sean:** people will like your your page or your blog post but they're not necessarily buying your product or promoting your service they may not be as engaged with you personally it might just be a

**\[50:07\]** **Lyndon:** routine action just like click like yep well we've all done it I mean I've done it this morning looking at stuff on Facebook you click like and it's really I click like because I like it

**\[50:18\]** **Sean:** I'd like it but it doesn't mean I'm gonna go to your website and give you my email address into your your mailing list or buy your product or buy your service so yeah I see that it's a different it's a very low low level engagement but what we want is more about people who are finding people that are willing to purchase your products or buy your service and work with you that they get benefit from it and then they give you give your company business

**\[50:56\]** **Lyndon:** and I've got multiple customers right now that it's the same conversation where when they came to us it's about increasing traffic and it's like not increased conversion because if you get you know 10,000 people but only 0.001 of a percent actually converts or see if you get a thousand people and 50% of those people convert all of a sudden you're making more money. Exactly

**\[51:23\]** **Sean:** anyways linden this has been a really interesting conversation your canvases are interesting the articles every all listeners should give it a listen where can people find you online your

**\[51:39\]** **Lyndon:** website your social media any last thoughts that you have yeah so the website is comms.barscom for mother m for mother s for Sierra dot b-a-r everybody thinks I run a bar or a nightclub maybe one day but not right now so comms.bars where to go for the canvases for kind of anything that I write about the science of of PR and marketing and how to build strategy on Twitter I am at think underscore linden and my name is linden johnson it's spelled exactly the same way as the former US president so you can find me there I'm on if you search for linden johnson or think linden on facebook you'll find me comms.bars on facebook as well as a business page for that as well and i'm on linkedin if you look up linden johnson in toronto as far as i know i am the only one

**\[52:35\]** **Sean:** so that's that's that's an awesome thing to have be the only one with your name it is but it

**\[52:41\]** **Lyndon:** goes back to the problem of being named having the same name as a former US president makes it hard to rank on google this this this this guy's got libraries and space centers and you know oh kinds of stuff you know was involved in the civil rights spill or you know so it creates problems as much as it's it's an advantage to be the only one in Toronto. Thank you for listening

**\[53:06\]** **Sean:** be sure to subscribe and share website 101 podcast with friends and colleagues you can find me at website 101 podcast.com on twitter user name at website 101 pod do you have a question you want to ask a topic suggestion or a guest host recommendation send me an email shan sean at caffeine creations dot c a or visit website 101 podcast.com slash contact and fill in the form you can find me personally online at my company website caffeine creations dot c a c a f e i n e c r e a t i o n s dot c a on linden with username caffeine creations hope you enjoyed this episode see you next time

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Have a question for Sean, Mike, and Amanda? [Send us an email](/contact).

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- 1 [ Introduction to Website 101 Podcast](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-1/introduction-to-website-101-podcast/)
- 2 [ Planning, Structure, Goals](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-2/planning-structure-goals/)
- 3 [ Web Design Shortcuts You Should Never Take](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-3/web-design-shortcuts-you-should-never-take/)
- 4 [ Websites Benefit from Continual Development](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-4/websites-benefit-from-continual-development/)
- 5 [ SEO 101](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-5/seo-101/)
- 6 [ Unlocking the Secrets of PPC Advertising with Dan Wood](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-6/ppc-101-pay-per-click/)
- 7 [ PR &amp; Marketing](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-7/pr-marketing/)
- 8 [ Designing Effective Landing Pages for High Conversion Rates](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-8/what-is-a-landing-page/)
- 9 [ Accessibility: Why Your Website Should Be Easy to Use for All](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-9/accessibility-why-its-important/)
- 10 [ DIY Vs Bespoke](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-10/diy-vs-bespoke/)
- 11 [ Season 1 Wrap Up](https://website101podcast.com/episodes/season-01/episode-11/season-1-wrap-up/)

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