From Unnoticed to Unmissable: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Becoming an Industry Leader

Welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, your host, Jim James. Now, it's not enough to just stand out anymore. Social media is making it possible for, frankly, everybody to have a social media and publicity presence. You've got to be seen as a thought leader. You've got to be owning the space and leading the space. But that is not easy. It takes some guidance and some expertise. And you're thinking, how can you get that? Well, my guest today is Katie Zeppieri, and she is the founder and Chief Strategist at an agency called Mic Drop. She's joining us from Toronto with some answers. Katie, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Jim James James.

It's my pleasure because you are running an agency, relatively youthful agency actually, isn't it? So tell us a little bit about Mic Drop, and then I'd love for you to tell us how you help clients to not just get noticed, but to stand out from the crowd.

At the Mic Drop Agency, we're a full-service PR and marketing firm. We've been in business for 2 and a half years, and we have excitedly grown in the tech space. So we specialize in working with startups as well as high-profile people, which tend to be founders, um, can also be executives or authors, journalists, that sort of lane. Um, we really have built an agency around furthering thought leadership, and what we mean by this is we're passionate about helping our clients not only be participants in the industry that they're in, but to actually be a category creator, to actually be an industry leader. And we've seen that the clients who tend to want to work with Mic Drop, um, are creating a whole new category on into themselves. And our goal is to make sure that our clients are positioned front and center. They show up on all the right stages, they show up on all the right media. Everywhere where their target audience is going to be is where we position our clients.

So when you say category leader, isn't everybody a category leader? Because if you look at people's brochures, they've got a product that does, you know, faster or quicker or cheaper. So, you know, the Gartner's Magic Quadrant, everyone wants to be in top right-hand corner of that in the tech space especially. What's your definition of a category leader and how do you get an entrepreneur be a category leader rather than just a participant?

So I think there's a difference between being a category leader and a category creator. A category creator means someone is building a solution for, uh, a topic that people aren't searching for yet. It's almost like they don't even know that they need it. It's the whole idea of, you know, when people were riding horses, they weren't yet searching for a car because they didn't know that that existed. So some of our clients are building software to solve a problem that is a big need, but people didn't even know that there was a solution for this. And therefore, one of the challenges for that client is how do we get in front of the right people when, you know, the Google search results are quite low for this particular type of software because people don't know it exists yet. So that's, that's category creator. Um, but category leader is something that anybody can aspire to be. It's how do I stand out from my competitors? How do I stand out from my, my peers? And from our view, the best way to do that is to be forming an opinion and helping to shape the vision of the particular industry that you're in. And you need to be in the spotlight in order to be that type of category leader. You cannot be in the background. It doesn't always have to be the founder. It often is. It could be somebody else on the team, but it's got to be someone who can really speak to where the industry is now and where it's going and get recognition opportunities where they can share their opinion and share their expertise.

Katie, brilliant distinction between a category creator and a category leader. That's fantastic. Can we just come back to your category creator just for a moment? How many companies can successfully create a category? Because it's quite a risky strategy, isn't it? You know, you might find that you're creating a category that people aren't really that interested in because you are really at the front end of innovation, for example. So what, what do you advise your clients when they are embarking on being a category creator.

You're right, uh, it is challenging to be a category creator. It's, it's a huge opportunity if it's successful, but it's a big risk because there's not yet a lot of proven traction in this particular space. So one of the approaches that we take when we're working with category creators is an education-first marketing approach. We have to point to the pain consistently. We have to talk about the problem that our client is solving. And when you do that, what you start to do is you get people nodding their heads and saying, oh yeah, I've got that problem. I didn't even realize that there was a solution to that problem. So we really work to— and that's why education-based marketing and thought leadership go so well together, because it usually requires someone explaining the problem. What I also love is, um, most of the clients that we work with who are category creators worked in that category, worked in that industry previously before they created a tech solution. So what's exciting about that is you now have somebody who has firsthand real experience. They've felt the pain, they know the pain, and they have built a solution using tech to make that solution better. To me, that's a really exciting client to work with.

It is indeed. And as you say, category creators, one of the ones that I worked with back in the day was SMS, you know, predictive text messaging software that people didn't know they needed to do text messaging, but once they saw it, they couldn't live without it. So category creators become mainstream, don't they? And that's part of the reason for this show is helping those entrepreneurs to cross the chasm to mass adoption. For mass adoption, Katie, you've talked about education, but you also then talked about the need to be in the right places. What do you define as the right places?

One of the things that we really strive to create at Mic Drop is this feeling of our clients are everywhere. They are m— building momentum. They are constantly hitting new milestones. And that is often true, of course, but we need to create the sort of narrative and story that supports that. We need to create the kind of narrative that shows that our founder is gaining new traction and new experiences every week, every month. And so we look at where is the target audience going? What conferences are they going to? What publications are they reading? What podcasts do they listen to? What social media pages do they follow? Where are they? Where do they exist? And we need to appear everywhere in their world. So the conference that everybody in this, um, in this industry, the conference that everybody attends that has our target audience, we want to see if we can get our founder on a keynote on the main stage at that event. We want to see if we can get them on a panel on the main stage at that event. We want to get them to show up on the COVID of the publications that people are reading. We want to get them on a blog Q&A. We want to get them on the podcast. You start to create this sense that you are in fact everywhere, and you have a comment on all of the different changes happening in your particular industry. You're offering new ideas, you're offering new insights. And when you start to do that, One of the favorite, my favorite pieces of feedback that I'll hear from our clients when we know that something's working is they'll have people in their network saying, I am seeing you everywhere. I am seeing you all over my feed. I am seeing you at every event. You are killing it. You're on a roll.

Yeah, so that's fantastic, Katie. You're making the brand omniscient, really, and omnipresent, I suppose, probably is the better term. Um, you talk about, for example, getting your clients as a speaking gig. Can you give us an inside secret? How do you do that? Is that just about money? Is it about connections? How do you get that kind of placement?

At Mic Drop, we are organic first. And so what I mean by that is we do not like the idea of pay-to-play most of the time. There are some circumstances where I think it makes sense and we might make that recommendation to a client. But generally speaking, any good pitch is a value-based pitch. It's what value is your client offering to that event or offering to that media publication. And I think that that's such a good tip for anybody who's looking to pitch themselves, whether it's for media, whether it's for speaking opportunities. It should never be a pitch that's all about you. In fact, that's the worst kind of pitch is look how great I am. You need me on your stage. No, they don't. You need to convince that person, that event organizer, that producer, that what you're offering is going to add value to their audience. And so any good pitch and how we, we work with our clients, we're not just pitching them to do a 60-minute demo of their product, right? We're actually creating some topics that are of interest. What are the trending topics in this industry, in this space that people care about right now? And how can we craft a keynote, how can we craft a panel that our client can, can speak to, leveraging their years of expertise in the industry, so that people in the audience walk away having learned something. It's not just an outward promotion for the company, it's actually offering something of value to the audience.

Katie, and that resonates with what you said earlier about education, right, that it's being an educator and a thought leader in there. You mentioned about finding out trends of what people are speaking about. How you find that, that information? I'm gonna keep pressing because it's really useful information for anyone who's out there wondering, you know, okay, I found an event I want to talk at, but how do they know what is trending? Where do you go to find that information?

So there's a couple really simple websites. I mean, I could probably give a big list, but looking at Google Keywords looking at a site called Answer the Public, which is owned by, uh, Neil Patel's company, a really well-known, um, incredible marketer. Those are really good starting places to just start searching your topic, just to start searching your niche. And what you're able to see from those sites are what are people typing into Google, like what are they typing into the search bar, what are they asking for. And from that you can get some ideas about what good content might be. But that's just the starting place. I think to really do a good job, you need to be subscribing to some of the top industry newsletters. You need to be following the top industry thinkers. You need to be following those pages on social media. You need to be reading the relevant blogs and media, what topics are being covered and why. So it's a little bit of a research-based process. And you can also see, you know, what seems to be resonating, which types of posts are getting shared the most, which types of blogs are being shared the most, which is sparking the most debate. So you need to be on the pulse of what's happening in your industry in order to bring something new to the space.

Yeah, Katie, Katie Zieppieri, I can see why your clients are enjoying working with you at Mic Drop so much. You've talked about a lot of depth of content and getting to really know the subject matter and the industry and the players in the industry. That's something that big companies hire marketing managers for startups need what you're talking about, but on the whole they can't afford an agency. What's, what's your approach at Mic Drop to solving what is basically a financial and sometimes management issue for the entrepreneur who can't really afford a big agency? How do you handle that?

Absolutely. I think Look, at Mic Drop, we typically come in with our clients at around the seed stage once they've raised the money and they're ready to kind of scale and move to the next level. But there's a whole chapter that happens before that seed stage. It's, it's just getting your idea off the ground. It's just getting started. But the great thing, Jim, is that a lot of insights don't have to be that hard. You can automate some of these things, right? Like subscribing to certain newsletters. You do that once and it's automatically coming into your inbox each week. It's just a matter of like baking out the time in your calendar to actually spend a half an hour each week where you go through those newsletters and you pick out interesting topics and you pick out industry trends. So I think that there's some automation that can help when you're starting in this process. Um, but my view is if you're looking to create a solution and sell a product, sell a service in a given industry, it is incumbent upon you to know that industry inside and out. You cannot just build in the dark and sort of live in a bubble and just be like, I'm just focusing on my solution. I'm just focusing on my solution and not really lift your head up to see, okay, but what are people asking for? What are people talking about? How does what I'm building fit into this larger narrative of the industry? So, I would push and say, I know startups can be strapped for cash. I know they're strapped for time, but I think it's something you can even delegate amongst the handful of team members that you have. You know, certain people have certain newsletters that they're reading each week. You could have a session each week where the team has to come together and talk about the latest news in the industry, what they've learned, you know, have a little bit of a sharing session. So, you split the work a little bit. But fundamentally, if you're not keeping track of what's happening in the industry, the worry is, is that you're building a solution that is not quite gonna fit with the larger market.

Yeah, it's a really, a really good point, Katie. If you don't know what's happening in the market, then you probably shouldn't be there in the first place. But you are going into clients, Katie, you've mentioned, you know, a lot of companies in tech especially is where Microp is specializing. Tell us, when you're going into these clients, are you suggesting to them that they're working with you on retainers or projects. And what about if they use that, uh, now sort of the AI word to you and say, well, frankly, I don't need an agency, Katie, because I've, I've got an AI bot doing it?

Yes, AI has made many industries, uh, a little bit more interesting, I guess, is the word that I'd use. Yeah, marketing is certainly one of them. Um, but what's interesting is, uh, as AI develops, as generative AI develops in particular, um, the big players in this space, Google for instance, are aware of these changes. So as an example, a couple months ago, Google changed its search algorithm. It is now deprioritizing AI-generated content because it can clearly tell what is a straight AI-generated piece or block. So for a while there, when, you know, the gates of ChatGPT opened, you have companies being like, oh, perfect. I'm going to churn out 100 AI-generated blogs a month, and I'm going to drive a lot of interest and traffic to my website. But now you have players like Google recognizing that this is happening, changing their algorithm to mitigate for that, and ensuring that original content is being pushed to the top. So we need to take this into consideration, right? As, as business owners, as marketing agencies, um, I believe in leveraging the tools that we have. The tools that we have allow us to do more with less. And so, uh, at Mic Drop, I highly encourage our team to be using AI daily, like using generative AI. We can use it for ideation, we can use it for first drafts, We can use it to explain concepts to us that maybe we want a little bit more clarification on rather than having to do a Google search. But, you know, we can kind of have a little bit of a back and forth and get the answers that we need to know to, to write what we need to write or pitch what we need to pitch. So I think that there's absolutely a place for using AI and I see it as a tool. But fundamentally, the role of the strategist, the role of the person who puts all of the pieces together, who makes things make sense, who make larger connections between each of your marketing and PR efforts is going to be essential. You're not going to lose that. So in my view, a good agency is one that leverages AI to help produce more work, but they are not using generated materials, AI-generated materials as final products. They're using it as a tool and a stepping stone to help them achieve the greater goals.

That's a brilliant and sophisticated way of using the technology. It's going to augment us, isn't it, rather than replace us. I firmly believe, uh, that it's also going to help smaller and boutique agencies to compete with larger agencies because you'll be able to get a lot more work done for less budget actually, uh, than the big agencies that were— may maybe had a lot of headcount. Uh, you'll be able to replace that kind of low-level work Katie, when you're working with clients, is there a kind of a recurring— mistake's probably a harsh word, but a common failing that you find with clients that we could maybe on this show help someone to understand and to get right? With all the years that you've got with working with clients, what would be one sort of recurring issue that you find with people that are engaging you as an agency?

Something that I see with startups in particular is sort of this fear of sharing too much, this fear of, you know, giving away too much in terms of what you share and post online, in terms of what the team talks about. It's this fear that if I share this much content, if I share this much insight, somebody else is gonna steal my idea. 'Oh my God, somebody else is going to take this and somebody else is going to run with this and I'm going to be left behind.' And that's, that's a challenging issue. Like, obviously, as an agency, we're not encouraging our clients to share anything that's proprietary. However, if you are not talking about your brand in the age that we are in, in, in, in a time where content marketing, content generation, is crucial to the growth of a brand, to the growth of a business. You have to be talking about what you're doing. You have to be talking about what you're building and why it matters. And so one of the things that, you know, we'll work with, with our clients is helping them see the value of that and helping them understand that the sooner that you get to the category leader position, the better this is going to be for you, because an idea is just an idea. And I've seen this even in like entrepreneurs starting out for the first time, they're so worried and protective about this, this great idea before they've even started the business, right? It's like someone's gonna take this from me, someone's gonna go build this. The idea is fundamentally worth just a little bit in my view. It's the execution that matters the most, and we want to be the team that helps execute to the highest quality, uh, and to the fastest speed.

Yeah, I think that's a really great point that, uh, clients sometimes think that they've got some some secrets that someone else can run and build into their business. But of course, the other businesses are structured differently, may have a different pricing model, may have a different technology, so that they may copy little bits, but they're not going to take it wholesale, really. And I guess the other thing is, as companies have to continue to innovate, don't they, as well? Katie, what do you think is now the role of traditional media relations in PR? Because you've talked about events, we've talked a little bit about AI and social. Do you think there's still a role for traditional media relations, or has that really dropped away now in terms of importance?

It's interesting, Jim, because I came at PR and marketing from an entrepreneurship background. I was in social entrepreneurship for nearly a decade. I was running, um, programs for youth and, um, you know, big conferences and an international school chapter, and I was building resources and media. And one of the things that I learned during that time was in order to get people to care about what we were doing, I needed to be the face of this, and I needed to speak about what we were building. So that's when I started pitching myself to media. That's when I started using speaking as a tool to get in front of the right audience and really build from there. So I learned a lot through doing. Uh, in my view, media has always— it's the reason why I studied radio and, and television, um, you know, when I was in school. The reason why I studied, which is more like the traditional media now, the reason why I studied it is because with media you have the opportunity to, to shape opinion and you have the opportunity to really point to, um, the topic or cause that you want to speak to. And I've always loved that. So yes, traditional media has changed. You know, uh, people are not subscribing to cable, uh, in the same numbers anymore. They're switching to things like streaming services. Um, there's an argument that, you know, radio in some ways is fading away as people will just listen to Spotify or podcasts. Um, there's still a place for both of those mediums, I would say, and there's still certain shows like live shows, events like that kind of thing that people want want to tune in for in a live way. But in my view, getting on a radio show, getting on a TV show, or any other digital media, all of that is exposure. And part of it is the audience that you're reaching. But sometimes, you know, you might be on a local television show that's for your particular city, but really you're selling globally. That's okay, because we can take that clip and we can now turn it into some social, social content. And help expand the reach of what would have been previously a very localized opportunity. So that's sort of how I approach it. I think any press almost can be viewed as good press.

I think, Katie, I love the way that you're now taking content that comes from with the third-party credibility of traditional media houses and then inducting it within the content management system that you've got for your clients with their own social channels. Then they're getting a nice blend, aren't they, of what other people are saying about them and what they're saying about themselves, which is why your clients seem to be everywhere, Katie.

You hit the nail on the head, Jim. Sorry to interrupt. You hit the nail on the head. It's the third-party credibility that really stands out. That's the difference, right? That's the difference between me just creating content for a brand and saying, look how great my brand is. That's the difference between that and a radio station or a TV station or a blog or a podcast featuring you and saying, look how great what you're doing is.

Yeah, and I think that third-party endorsement, whether it's from the media or a customer, for example, giving you a review in this day and age of declining trust, is an amazingly valuable currency, isn't it? Absolutely. Katie, you're a busy woman running a growing agency with Mic Drop in Toronto, but you do presumably have a little bit of time to listen to podcasts or read books. What would be your go-to for listening or reading? Can you give us a recommendation?

Yeah, my go-to book recommendation, because I believe we are, especially in marketing and PR, in the business of relationships, but that, that holds true to any business. One of my favorite books about building, nurturing, and building meaningful relationships is called Never Eat Alone. It's by a gentleman named Keith Ferrazzi. He was the youngest CMO of Deloitte in the US, and he has an entire system for how he approaches relationship management. What he does and how he— he calls it pinging. Interacts with people on a regular basis. He keeps lists, Jim. Like, I'm talking 20 years ago, he had spreadsheets of every contact that he'd ever met, where they lived, some notes about them. And when he comes across an article that reminds him of someone that he spoke to, he sends that article to them. Um, he follows up with people when he's in a city visiting for a meeting. He'll reach out to the people in that city and see if anybody's interested in coffee. I really believe that in the age of, you know, we're so separated behind our screens and we're just kind of blasting out content to the masses. It really means a lot when you have a personal connection, when you have somebody who you meet and they remember you, they remember something about you, and they look to build a relationship beyond just the surface level. I think it's a fantastic skill, and I think it's something that's underrated, really, in today's world.

Never eat alone. We'll put that in the show notes. Katie, thank you very much indeed. And Blainely, I'm sure your clients never want you to eat alone. I'm sure they're always asking for you to come and join them. I'm there if you want to come in. I, I'm sure that you're there for them all the time, Katie. But if people would like to have a little bit of your time, uh, how could they find you?

Uh, the best way to reach us is themikedropagency.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Katie Zeppieri, Z-E-P-P-I-E-R-I is my last name.

Katie, thanks for spelling that out. That saves me spelling it out because people may have a hard time. So it's Z-E-P-P-I-E-R-I. And of course, I'll put Katie's details in the show notes as always. Katie, thanks for joining us and sharing some of the energy and the insights that you've got and that you're bringing through the Mic Drop Agency to your clients, especially those in tech startups. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jim James. I really appreciate your time.

Well, time is what we all have, but it's a most precious commodity. So that's why I keep these shows under 30 minutes, because I know that for those listening, this will be something you're doing while you're driving or picking someone up, or maybe having a quick break in between sessions. So thanks for listening to Katie and I talking about agencies. And a couple of key takeaways really today. One is that try and be a category leader— a category creator, in fact, is even more important in Katie's terms. And that's about leading conversations and taking markets to places they may not even know they need to go, but you can help them to get there. And also by making sure that you are everywhere. Katie's got an amazing program for her clients. Speaking, presenting, publishing third-party content, being everywhere with your thoughts is really, really a powerful place to be. And finally, using AI, because AI can help you but it won't replace you. So don't be afraid of it, embrace it, and play with it. You've been listening to me, Jim James, your host on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Thank you so much for joining us. If you have a chance, do please review the show, and do forward it to a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur, because we don't want to let anyone get left behind. Until we meet again, just keep on communicating.