Last year, I began working with an external PR consultant. It was a punt, but it genuinely excited me.
This was the first time I’d spent money on external assistance beyond help with the financial side of the business; Mark Ellis Reviews was finally spreading its wings and seeking help to grow, extend its influence, and strike up new brand partnerships.
It worked brilliantly. And then, it failed, big time - expensively so, in fact.
This episode has taught me one huge lesson about the creator industry and where you should spend your money if you’re looking for external help.
I want to make it clear at this juncture that the failure of this experiment doesn’t lie at the hands of the people I was paying to undertake external PR for me. They worked hard on a constant list of partnership prospects and, as noted above, landed some big wins for me in terms of brand connections. They were also a joy to work with.
No one is at fault for what happened, to be honest, and I don’t count the money I spent on that outsourced support as wasted money, because it has confirmed something about this industry which I have long suspected to be the case.
It really is all about who you know.
The big wins I had with my external PR team came largely from existing connections within their network. This was a major reason for engaging with them in the first place. They’d spent years building connections I wouldn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of striking up myself. It’s why I was able to review a car from a big-name manufacturer on the Mark Ellis Reviews channel. Trust me - that would never have happened if I hadn’t paid for access to their little black book.
The challenges began when that little black book’s pages ran out. When that happened, there was nothing left to do but slam it shut and hit the proactive outreach tactic - hard. This resulted in some success along the way, but those wins represented a tiny percentage of the effort being extolled and the money I was spending on said effort.
I’ve experienced this myself. I’ve reached out personally to countless brands in the hope that I might get access to embargoed products and event invites. I don’t have numbers to give you, but my success rate is woeful. And, trust me, I know how to do this stuff - I spent over ten years in sales where outreach was the main way to make prospects aware of your existence.
In this game that doesn’t work. The right brand contact is often hidden behind multiple layers of gatekeeping, management, and external PR agencies. Finding them is like looking for a needle in a haystack, and often just as painful if you’re somehow lucky enough to find it. There are exceptions, of course; I recently secured a review unit I’d been chasing for quite some time, but it’s a rare example of where persistence and the ability to lean on that big 100K subscriber number actually works.
In my experience, and as I’ve noted in previous newsletters, the brands you want to work with will come to you if and when they’re ready. You can’t force it.
There’s an answer to this, though.
It really is all about who you know.
I’ve made some amazing friends within the creator space over the last three years, and all of them have their own little black books. I’ve got one, too, and while I can’t share every contact within its pages, there are people within it who have no problem with me forwarding their details to fellow creators. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to do and, again, highlights the lack of competition in this space.
It also pays you back - big time. The more you get out there and meet fellow creators and spend time sharing stories, wins, and losses, the more connections you’ll build. I’ve recently secured some huge brand connections by doing this and made great friends in the process. Once again, I cannot think of another industry where this kind of thing is an accepted practice; such information is usually very closely guarded.
This episode has also revealed where I should be investing my money in external assistance, and it’s what any seasoned businessperson will tell you: invest in help from those who can remove tasks from your own desk. My job is to create content, extend my creator network, and plan for the future. Everything else can - and should - be done by others - and that’s how I’ll be running things from now on.