Let’s dive into 2026 PR and marketing studies to discuss perspectives to help inform our work as we head into the last five months of the year.
We’ll look at findings including:
• Despite the hype, AI has shown lackluster results
• How business reputation drives growth
• Marketers are seeking human connection through events
• Thought leadership is more trustworthy than many types of content
• And more
My guest is Frank Strong, founder and president of Sword and the Script Media, LLC, a veteran-owned business focused on PR, content marketing and social media for the B2B market space.
Frank is a trusted resource who researches the B2B PR and marketing industries and writes in-depth columns on a range of topics. I often read and cite his work in my newsletter, blog posts, and talks, as he’s a wealth of knowledge.
Show summary:
In this episode of PR Explored, host Michelle Garrett, a PR consultant, author, and writer interviews her guest Sword and Script founder Frank Strong about trends and 2026 research.
They discuss pricing reputation via balance-sheet “goodwill,” the limits of click-based optimization versus long-term brand value, and why in-person trade shows are resurging, with PR pros better used networking, creating content, and meeting media than sitting in booths.
A study finding 62 touches and about 192 days to close B2B deals underscores sustained visibility and differentiation amid a “sea of sameness.”
They cover AI’s mixed impact—82% of B2B marketers say AI skills haven’t boosted pay, AI content tends to average out and underperform, and many AI customer-service replacements are being rolled back—while emphasizing AI for research, brainstorming, and critique.
Strong argues thought leadership is highly trusted and requires access to real experts, notes declining B2B marketing budget share versus four years ago, highlights hidden buyer influence from finance/legal/procurement, and explains why selling to existing customers is rising but warns against overusing in-app upsell prompts.
00:00 Welcome and Introductions
01:00 Frank Strong Background
01:55 Military Service and Pets
02:58 Data Driven PR Mindset
04:25 2026 Stats Overview
05:06 Pricing Reputation Value
08:08 Measuring Beyond Clicks
10:53 Events Comeback Strategy
13:17 Trade Show PR Hustle
17:35 Human Connection Craving
18:57 62 Touches to Close
23:20 Sea of Sameness
24:39 Budget for Experiments
26:04 AI Skills and Reality
29:19 AI Content Pitfalls
30:46 Using AI the Right Way
32:21 Dotcom Parallels
34:20 Thought Leadership Trust
35:05 Why Thought Leadership Works
36:50 Ghostwriting and Long Game
38:10 Access Makes It Real
41:08 Interviews Beat Email
43:52 Journalism vs Click Culture
46:08 Budgets and Compounding Returns
52:10 Educating Executives
55:30 Authority and Failing Fast
56:43 Hidden Buyers in Deals
59:46 Marketing to Existing Customers
01:03:49 Newsletter and Staying Sharp
01:07:13 AI Monitoring and Humility
01:09:30 Wrap Up and Goodbye
Show notes:
The Sword and the Script blog post this episode is based on: https://www.swordandthescript.com/2026/07/pr-and-b2b-marketing-statistics-2026/
Learn more about Frank’s agency, the Sword and the Script: https://www.swordandthescript.com/
Frank’s newsletter on Substack: https://monthlymarcom.substack.com/
Read Frank’s blog or contact Frank: https://www.swordandthescript.com/contact/
Follow Frank Strong on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankstrong/
Full transcript:
B2B PR and Marketing Studies, Surveys and Stats
Michelle Garrett: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of PR Explored. PR Explored is the video podcast where we delve into trends and topics related to public relations. I’m your host, Michelle Garrett, a public relations consultant and writer. And today my guest is Frank Strong. Welcome, Frank. Yay.
Frank Strong: Hey, how’s it going, Michelle?
Thanks for having me.
Michelle Garrett: I’m so happy you’re here. You’re back.
Frank Strong: I’m
Michelle Garrett: back. And of course, we have known each other forever, and, I know that you have your own firm, Sword and Script, and you have a blog that you’ve been writing, I think you said for 20 years maybe or, how many?
Frank Strong: 17.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. 17 years. Oh, man. I’m gonna try
Frank Strong: to make it to 20.
Michelle Garrett: And you do, so much for the industry, and then we ran into each other ’cause we both work with B2B clients. We run in that similar circles and, I just always have had so much respect for the care and thought that you put into everything that you produce and, we [00:01:00] really appreciate that.
So I’m glad you’re back, and I would love for you to just tell us, about your background, tell us what you’ve been up to, anything that you’d like to share, and I’ll put some links in the comments as, as you’re talking.
Frank Strong: Yeah. the, the boilerplate is, classically trained public relations professional.
Grew up in an agency environment for about the first 10 years of my career. Worked for small and a medium size, and then a global firm. Went in-house at a startup, went to a mid-market publicly traded company, and then finished up at a truly global organization in LexisNexis, which is, 10,000 employees around the world, or at least was at the time.
And it was owned by Reed Elsevier, which is a big holding company with 30,000. So that was a good experience and I took a, I took a good bonus check and decided to go hang a shingle about 10 years ago. So I’ve had my own solo consulting firm, for about 10 years. So yeah.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: That’s,
the cliff notes.
And then the, the, cross rifles up there, that’s because I, at the same [00:02:00] time, was a, a member, a uniform s- of the uniformed services in the reserve component. So initially I was enlisted Marine, later became an Army officer. And, that’s, the, a company that I commanded years ago and they give that to you as a gift as a going away, And no charge for the cat, in the background. That’s, Lily. She runs the house here. She’s the boss. Oh. I used to hide it, but after the pandemic and everybody got online, I just gave up and nobody cares. I don’t care.
Michelle Garrett: I
Frank Strong: think- She may chime in every now and then with a tidbit of advice.
Michelle Garrett: Hi, Lily. No, I love cats. I have my door closed right now or I might have a cat in here too. But yeah, no, people love to see your pets, so- … we, we welcome. We, are pet friendly here, yay. Welcome.
Frank Strong: You’re welcome.
Michelle Garrett: and I was gonna put the link up to subscribe to your, newsletter. so I’ll just stick that in there.
and [00:03:00] yeah, so anyway, I, know you have, y- you just are a trusted resource for me, ’cause I often look at your, posts in your newsletter, and I cite things in there when I give talks and in my own newsletter and my own writing. I really appreciate… A- and you must really love doing it. I know you do, so
Frank Strong: Yeah.
I like the data. I think the light bulb for me a few years ago was like, not taking whatever news article has been published about a study, but going and registering for the study, downloading it, and looking through it for myself to understand what it said and what the research methodology is, and that…
It is something that I enjoy. I think it also just makes you a better, like, marketer, ’cause you’re, like- Yeah … considering the questions that other people have. You’re seeing what the responses are. So when it comes time to do your own marketing, you you’ve… or your own PR, you’ve got some data behind it, like some consensus.
Yeah. You have a good grasp of it. So I do, enjoy [00:04:00] doing it.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. And you do reviews of software and tools and all kinds of things. So if anybody ever wants an unbiased look at, I don’t know, any tools that you might use in, PR and marketing, be sure and look at, check out Frank’s, blog, ’cause he can search in there, and he’s probably written about it,
Frank Strong: Chances
Michelle Garrett: are. So we are talking today, in fact, about one of your blog posts that inspired this conversation, was about some studies that have been conducted to date in 2026, and you compiled, 28, statistics from studies in 2026. And so we’re gonna go through some of those. We’re not gonna talk about all 28 of them, but I am gonna put the link to the blog post, in the comments as well so people can check that out.
And, we’ll just dive in, and if anyone has a question for Frank, please feel free to ask. I’m [00:05:00] sure he would be happy to answer. And, yeah. let’s jump in here. So one thing, and I actually, saw this study and wrote about it, was about reputation. So can a business put a price on its reputation?
That was… That’s the first question, and it has to do with one of the studies.
Frank Strong: I think they can. I think, finance types have done this for years. On, a balance sheet, there’s a line item called goodwill, and that comes out particularly in M&A transactions when, the acquiring company pays more than the book value of the company they’re buying.
So the company is worth X in tangible assets, and they pay above that. That difference is called goodwill, and it has a value. and, a- and I think it’s pretty safe to say that’s tied to reputation and brand and awareness, and all of the things that make a good company a good target for an acquisition.[00:06:00]
the, the stats itself reminds me of, the old Warren Buffet quote that gets passed around a lot. “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to lose it.” So it’s, very, tenuous. I think the study that they did was pretty comprehensive. they s- they didn’t give you a number of people surveyed, but it was tens of thousands.
They looked at, I think it was, like, 66 companies that were publicly traded. it tracked all their mentions, pored through all this. But if I had to nitpick one thing, it was that behavior didn’t show up in the analysis. And I, think, reputations aren’t made by what you say, they’re made by what you do, right?
So delivering a good service, right? That one that matches the expectations that you set for customers. Delivering on that financial performance and success, right? That’s the kind of behavior that gets people talking, and getting people talking is how reputations are made. and that’s, also why it works the other way.
if you have a weak product or service, good marketing will kill, or good [00:07:00] PR will kill that, that product or service a whole lot faster because you’re bringing people in the door and there’s a mismatch between what you’ve told people to expect and what you’re actually able to deliver. and that’s, the essence of third-party validation, getting people to talk.
nothing you can say about yourself is as powerful as having someone else say it for you, and that’s, the value we give PR. That’s what they’ve always done and that’s what we’re good at.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yeah, I just think it’s interesting ’cause I think a lot of times, it’s one of those soft, it, like they, yes, we want a good reputation.”
But putting a dollar value on it I think really makes it more, the C-suite’s gonna pay more attention to it, of course, because it’s not just “Oh yeah, we need that.” It’s like, “No, it actually moves the needle and makes a difference, in your, your financials.” So that’s what I found really, important- Well-
about that study, And actually there were a couple studies I think that I saw, about it. But I just, yeah, I thought it was, y- [00:08:00] we only trust the study to a degree, right? ‘Cause but yeah, I think it’s something that companies should be paying attention to.
Frank Strong: One of the foundational problems that we have as PR and marketing and comms types is that as the web has grown, we’ve realized there are certain things that we can measure, like clicks, like time on page, like downloads.
And so the whole industry has moved to optimize those, and that’s good because it gives us measurement in the short term. But what it does is it takes away from all of these other things like- the big picture, reputation, brand, awareness. Those things do matter, and they’re not always easy to measure.
And so I think that’s largely responsible, for the state of marketing today, is that we’re focused on optimizing for clicks and we forget about the bigger picture. I think that’s important. I’m not- dishing on measuring clicks or, SEO or, optimization. those things are important, but we can’t do it [00:09:00] at the expense of everything else.
We’ve gotta keep our eye on the big picture reputation, which is all-inclusive of the company. it’s sales, marketing, support, the, retention, all of that, right? the, ba- the, activity, the good citizenship that a company has in the community.
all of those things are a factor, and we’ve lost sight of that as people have gotten over- overly focused on click optimization.
Michelle Garrett: Yes. and, that’s the thing, and it’s, it builds up over time, it compounds. And so I feel you and I have had this conversation before, when companies pull back on their budget and then, at the time they probably should be investing even more. And it, monkeys with the whole, outcome because you can’t just swoop in and do it for a while and then, sit back.
And you have to do it consistently.
Frank Strong: the, the comparison is very different. If you are working in PR and you’re, I don’t know, you [00:10:00] measured, how many… let’s say you got 20 placements in a month, for a company. how do you put a dollar value on that? So they walk into the room with that, “We got 20 placements.”
Okay, but what did it do? What was the outcome? Did it change a behavior? really hard to measure that. And you’re walking in and competing for budget against a marketing team that ran a campaign, said, “We targeted this segment with this message. We got this many conversions, this many downloads, and this many sales, and here’s the dollar figure.”
It’s a really hard comparison to make. and so it puts kind of the brand and reputation people, I think, at a disadvantage. but the solution for that is, trying to educate executives. Most of them will tell you they know inherently that reputation is valuable. It’s bringing that to the surface and reminding them of that every time.
Michelle Garrett: I think that’s a great point. let’s talk about events, because I felt of course, when the [00:11:00] pandemic hit and, that everybody had to pull back, I thought, “Events are so expensive. We’re never gonna see the same level of investment in events that we saw before that.” And, boy, that was not right.
So they are actually getting hot. They are… I don’t know about you, but I know my clients are saying the events they go to are just, so well-attended, and, record attendance and so it’s interesting.
Frank Strong: Yeah, events, I think, th- those are coming, I don’t want to say coming back in fashion.
I don’t know that they went away. I think we hit, we hit a stutter step with the pandemic and then a slow rollout. But I think the, the larger driver behind that is the fact that many companies are over-automated, right? customer service is a good example. Executives tend to look at it as a cost center, and so they’re looking to replace people with tools.
They’re putting a machine in between you, them, and their customer, which is crazy, [00:12:00] but they’re not talking to customers face to face. add in things like remote work, hybrid work, which has become, you know- predominant now. A lot, of company, even I think probably 50% of companies today, even after all the, all return to office thing are like, “Yeah, maybe hybrid’s a good idea.
We can reduce our office space,” that sort of thing. But it’s removed all of the face-to-face interactions, and that’s what you get at a trade show. You’re meeting people face to face. There’s also a lot of upside. If you go to a show, you can have 25 meetings with a customer over three or four days, right?
As opposed to trying to set those 25 meetings up over, six months or a year- Yeah … whatever the case is. It’s also a branding event because when you get to that, those shows, it’s a concentration of prospective buyers, maybe even customers that you already have, but you have media, analysts, bankers, influencers.
Like all, it’s a, there’s a branding opportunity here, and a lot of these shows, trade [00:13:00] shows and events put things together to allow you to, engage. Maybe it’s having a press conference station. Maybe it’s, uploading a press release to the show website, right? Yeah. And then they send it out to reporters and analysts.
There’s just a lot of opportunity and things for you to take advantage of.
and then, to that end, I think PR people should go to trade shows, and this is one of my, quirky views of the world, but I don’t think PR people belong in a booth. Your place is not to sit in a booth with sales.
That’s sales jobs. They’re there to close deals, meet customers, bring in lead gen, convince them to buy the product. PR should be out and about meeting people, shaking hands, making contacts, making friends- Yeah … going to sessions, blogging, live tweeting it. That’s relationship building, right? Yeah.
Getting ideas, getting educated. That’s where PR belongs. I think it’s a really good investment, but I also think PR people that go to shows, they have to hustle. it’s getting up early- Yeah … avoiding the alcohol at dinner at night, a- and getting up early again the next day and [00:14:00] repeating it over.
And it takes a lot of discipline. Yeah. But the, benefit and upside, when you come back from a show, the contacts and content and just ideas that you have are amazing, right? you can really pack in a lot over two, three, four days, whatever a show might be.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, I know when I go as a PR person with a client, I am always interested in seeing, what editors are there, which, media outlets are there.
I go around and look at the booths and, see what they’re up to and have a conversation, just about, what changes might be going on there, and just to get an idea of what opportunities might be, available for clients and things. And then I also love to set up meetings in the booth with media for the clients.
So that doesn’t always work, for in every situation, but I do have clients for which it’s really effective and it’s, they’re happy to do it. It’s 20 minutes and they just swing by the booth, talk to the CEO or the spokesperson, and I think it’s a really, great way to build a relationship.
And you don’t have to do any extra traveling or extra [00:15:00] scheduling or, it’s everyone’s there, so it makes it easy,
Frank Strong: Yeah. One, one trip, you meet. I have found, I’ll tell you though, I think scheduling one-to-one meetings with reporters has gotten a lot harder at trade shows because there’s 100, 200, 1,000, 5,000 companies all there all trying to do the same thing, right?
But it’s still important to be there, ’cause those, those folks are traversing the floor, they’re looking around, seeing who’s present. Yeah. That’s where some of like the extra sponsorship I think has a benefit. make sure y- your company is seen- whatever announcement you have. Yeah. But I think it takes a little more careful planning.
It, it’s definitely gotten harder in my opinion in the last 10 years than it was initially. Yeah. But still an in- an incredible value. And, for PR, again, it comes down to that word hustle, and I don’t like the way hustle has been like hijacked and it’s associated with no sleep and work all the time.
That’s not what I mean. Yeah. It just means going and working hard. Yeah. Like old fashioned elbow grease. Yeah. You put in time and at an event, you, walk away with a lot of benefit. [00:16:00]
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, I agree. I just, yeah, I think, it’s… I just, I’m surprised, A, at how, yeah, they are really expensive, but B, they are, they do, have a return on investment in a lot of cases, and so I find it really fascinating.
And I also think there’s just a human connection element to it that people are just really craving, really wanting to- Yeah … see their people in person. And, I know one of my CEOs gets a big kick out of, walking around and, being seen and, then people say, “Yeah, we’ve been seeing you, stories about you everywhere,” blah, blah, blah.
So he really enjoys, the benefits of PR at the show, but he’s also a big personality and he just really, he likes to do that. but it’s, yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know if it works for everyone, but, I think it’s, it’s, a definitely something to factor in and, you can leverage it.
That’s the other thing. I hate to see a company’s investing and then not getting the most out of it. To your point about [00:17:00] hustle, it’s about really just thinking, what else can we be doing? ‘Cause I think a lot of times it’s like you just have a formula. okay, we signed up for this trade show.
Okay, we have a booth. Okay, we’re gonna send a couple people. Okay, it’s, ju- there’s no like real, it gets to be a grind for those people, so there’s no thought outside the box or, planning or strategy around what else can we do? If you do sponsor, maybe you can speak, as part of that.
And what could you do with your talk that you gave there? And just, there’s so many things you could do. So as far as content too, content creation.
Frank Strong: This, I, this goes off the rails a little bit, but I think there is a larger… your comment around people really crave that is a cultural phenomenon with the rise of technology.
So if you think, like when I was a kid growing up-
I knew all my neighbors. I’d go out the door, I knew everybody, wave. I knew the mailman. We had a milkman. We had somebody that delivered milk, like it was a little podunk [00:18:00] town. and there was a dairy farm down the road, so we’d have milk delivered, a couple times a week. But my point is, you had all of this interaction, and today we don’t get any of that.
you walk out… How many people walk out their neighborhood today and know who their neighbors are or wave or say hello? And so we’ve lost, And, then all of that energy has gone into let’s go online and get a bunch of likes and shares and things, validation from people that we don’t even know, we probably will never meet, and somehow that’s gratifying to us.
We’ve lost that interpersonal connection. And so I think there is some like deeply human level we’re like craving interaction. ‘Cause we’re social creatures, right? we- we need to be am- we have tribes. We, it’s, how we’ve evolved as a species, if you will. You had to be together to survive,
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, I think, that’s true. So let’s talk about [00:19:00] this stat blew my mind a little bit, okay? 62, according to one study, it takes 62 touches to close a deal. And I’m like, “What? That is a crazy amount,” right?
Frank Strong: Yeah. that’s insane. 62, that, that’s the highest that I’ve ever seen. There’s a… I forget who did this study before.
I covered one, it was a couple years ago, but it was PWC or it was one of the big four. It was a big, it was a big, reputable firm that did a study, and they had found 27 interactions. So 62 is a high touch. the one thing I like about this study is that it’s not an opinion. It- they didn’t do a survey and ask people, “How many touches do you think it takes?”
It’s a platform, so it’s based on data running through their system. So this is actual human behavior that they can see, track, and analyze. but it… and it’s a solid benchmark. I think the takeaway for PR [00:20:00] and marketing types is to think about what those touches mean in the span of a buyer’s journey, right?
That’s a, a buzzword that, maybe is a little bit tired, but the fact of the matter is customers do travel some sort of path, and I think it’s important to keep it simple. I think there’s really three things to think about. There’s attraction, there’s conversion, and there’s retention. PR is really good at the attraction stuff.
It’s all about awareness and building. We don’t always think about necessarily the conversion, and that may come up later when we talk about the, the hidden stakeholders in, in, in the, in- that influence deals. But, it’s like looking at where are the weak spots. Is it retention or is it conversion?
And then trying to develop stories around that. why did people make the choice that they did? Why are your customers choosing to stay with your company versus leave, go to a competitor? It’s very easy to switch vendors these days.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah …
Frank Strong: so it’s understanding the weak spots and working towards that.
And I, also wanna emphasize, [00:21:00] the buyer’s journey, keep it simple. years ago, I was working at a company that hired a consultant. it was a solo consultant like, like you and me now. At that time, I was in-house. And, we were talking about this exact thing, and I was like attract, convert, retain.
And they, she, got up there and drew this, infinity symbol, like a figure eight on the side, and it had all- … of these little tick marks and stuff. And I’m just like, “Oh my God, it would take you forever to get your head around that and try to identify it.” So I think that’s probably a super sophisticated model of a buyer’s journey, but my suggestion is keep it simple, keep it tight, get some progress.
And then if you choose to expand that and you wanna add steps, you wanna go down a level, do that later. But build some success first before you go down that path, and I think for most companies, it’s probably just not necessary. It’s just too much.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yeah, no, I just, I know, I- obviously I believe in staying out in [00:22:00] front of your audience.
it’s very important. But this to me was, like, a, just a hit over the head, a reminder that, we really cannot take our foot off the gas at any time because- if you’re not out there when they’re looking, you might be, in the back of their mind, but you want to be, like, front and center top of mind, when they’re ready to buy.
So I think this is, something.
Frank Strong: One, one of the other stats that stood out to me in that is that they said it takes about 192 days on average from first touch to deal closed. So that’s 12 days over 180, 12 days over six months. And that is the same figure that was in my head when I was a brand new account executive working for a PR firm with high tech clients out in McLean, Virginia.
it, it always took about six months for these, the types of clients I worked on, B2B technology companies with a complicated product and a long sales cycle, six months to close a deal, and [00:23:00] that hasn’t changed in 20, 25 years. It’s still the same number, but the number of touches that are involved in that timeframe has gone up.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. and the competition too, whatever the competition’s doing and, you need to be where, they are too. And it’s, very, it’s a lot.
Frank Strong: And this, may blend into, the, the next point that you have on the agenda, but- One of the things that, you know, the research firm Forrester has called is the sea of sameness, that all of the tech vendors sound the same.
Yeah. And y- I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve been in over my career where, an executive’s like, “Oh, look what the competition are saying. We need to say something like that.” And so you kinda end up copying what they’re saying. And what happens is your ability to tell the difference from one vendor to the next is diminished.
It’s really hard. What- what’s the competitive advantage of going with one vendor over the other? and long sales [00:24:00] cycle, lotta touch points, everybody sounds the same. I think that’s a pretty clear roadmap of what you need to do to stand out, right? It’s just be different. Go do your own thing.
St- f- find the differences. Don’t copy everyone else. That’s not thought leadership, that’s followership. You’re not a thought leader if you’re just doing what everybody else is doing.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: You’re repeating the same phrases,
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, absolutely. I agree. And, it’s, yeah, it’s, it, you have to get creative sometimes.
and I think sometimes they’re afraid, “Oh, what if we go too far? If we’re too far outside, the box, we’re gonna, no one’s g- gonna get it or care.” But I, think that you’re right ’cause,
Frank Strong: I think- a good institutional way to address that is to earmark 10% of your budget for experiments.
every CMO, every PR person, comms chief should have a small amount of budget that they dedicate to experiments, and that’s your chance to go try new things. Maybe it flops, maybe it succeeds. These [00:25:00] are, like, time-tested principles too. I remember years and years ago, the company 3M, the, the maker of Post-it Notes.
We don’t really use Post-it Notes anymore, but for a time it was a big deal. This idea of putting a little piece of glue or tape on the back of a note so you could just post it and leave it for someone, ingenious. That came out of an experiment like this. 3M used to have a program where they have their, product…
Yeah, there you go.
Michelle Garrett: I use them.
Frank Strong: Yeah. Your product people and engineers to experiment. They come up with these ideas. And I forget, they were trying, I forget what the story goes, but I think it was some- they were trying to do something else and kinda landed on Post-it Notes, discovered it by accident, and it turned out to be, like, one of the company’s best sellers.
And here we are, who knows how many decades after it was initially launched, we’re still talking about it.
Michelle Garrett: You don’t even wanna see my desk. No. let’s not even s- get into the Post-it Notes, ’cause yeah. As long
Frank Strong: as you know your passwords, Michelle. Don’t write passwords down.
Michelle Garrett: I would be lost without my Post-it Notes, and I have, different colors and sizes.
it’s… Yeah, [00:26:00] no, I, love Post-its. Yeah. Good example. So of course, we would, never get through this discussion without touching on AI. which is, I feel like talk about something that, we might be tired of talking about, like I don’t know about you, but I get tired of talking about it, hearing about it.
But nonetheless, there were some studies that there was, there were a few st- I’m gonna… There were at least two in there that you mentioned. One said, that 82% of B2B marketers say AI skills haven’t helped their, pay checks. So that was one, if you want to talk about that a little bit
Frank Strong: Yeah.
I the bottom line here is I, think this is probably early days and that will come around. I think at this current moment in time the companies that make AI tools have spent four years telling [00:27:00] executives, “You can buy our AI and, cut all your people.” But it’s viewed as a replacement.
and so companies have made cost-cutting, replacing humans with AI the priority. and it’s not going well. I’ve, I ha- I don’t have the study here, but, it was on, one of the, one of the, the marketing, trade publications. a study came out that found 75%, three-quarters of the companies that have replaced customer service with AI are rolling those programs back because they’re not working.
Yeah. ‘Cause the AI is just not there. The executives that behind these AI companies have set expectations so high just, it’s gonna be utopia and nobody’s gonna have to work, and everybody’s gonna have universal basic income. And it’s just complete hogwash. It- AI is really good at specific tasks.
I don’t- I’m not knocking AI. I think it is an incredible tool. The, the, the, the value you can get from it is amazing. We should be [00:28:00] spending time learning how to use these more effectively. But it’s good at tasks, it’s not good at a job.
It turns a subject matter expert in, one subject matter expert into 1.25 subject matter experts.
It improves productivity by, 25%. So if you have a team of four, maybe you only need a team of three. although I think a lot of that’s the, the, cost-cutting is coming at the expense of entry-level, candidates, right? That’s one of the things that we’re seeing in the market right now. but AI is also good at supporting decision-making, but it’s not good at making those decisions reliably.
So we’re coming around to the conclusion that we still need people involved in this. AI isn’t there yet. honestly, I don’t, s- see … Knowing what I know, and I do quite a bit of reading on this. I’ve got a lot of companies like s- I used to have a bunch of cybersecurity companies that were doing, most of it was mean to machine learning.
But the headlines we’ve seen today in [00:29:00] 2026, I saw in 2016, 10 years ago, in the cybersecurity trades. They’re just leaps and bounds ahead.
a- and, I just don’t think we’re gonna get to that utopian model on an LLM, which bleeds into the second point about- the content. Yeah. Because AI is probabilistic.
It’s statistics. So we talked earlier about the sea of sameness. this, is related to the content, AI generated content that underperforms because AI by definition is an average. It’s statistics. So if you take the whole set of text in, in an LLM model, it’s not giving you the best, it’s not giving you the least, it’s giving you the middle, it’s giving you the average, and that feeds the sea of sameness.
Yeah. And if you’re putting out average content, then by definition there’s a whole bunch of companies that are doing content a lot better, and people are naturally [00:30:00] gonna gravitate to the stuff that, serves them well, serves them better, is new, interesting, novel, helpful, useful, entertaining, whatever the case might be.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yeah, we were- have you ever tried to rewrite an article that a client generated using
Frank Strong: AI? That’s my response to people who are like, “Oh, AI makes a good d- first draft.” Does it really? Oh my gosh. you try to take a, a, a pile of poo and make it into a rose, it doesn’t… It’s really hard.
You’re better off
Michelle Garrett: starting from scratch. Oh, it’s so hard. I, almost… I just, I didn’t even know if I could do it. I just I, it was brutally hard. So yeah, I mean- Yeah … I’d rather just start and…
Frank Strong: I don’t want to dissuade PR people from getting into generative AI and using the tool and learning how to do it better.
It does amazing things. you put a search term into generative AI and you look for content, it’s running 20, 30, 40 searches for you that [00:31:00] you would have to do each one individually, go through all the 10 blue links on page one of Google, click to the next one, go through those, right? So it can synthesize a whole bunch of data way faster than we can.
I th- so in that respect, I think it’s great for brainstorming, right? Which is one of the big use cases. I love to use it to evaluate and give me feedback on content. So I’ll take an, a piece that I’ve written, put it in generative AI and say, “Where could I improve this? How can I make better sub-headlines?
Where am I falling short? What are the weak spots?” “If you had to summarize this, how would you summarize it?” let, “Let me see how this is gonna be reflected.” And it’s really valuable that way. You can make much better, content by doing that. But the risk is don’t become over-reliant on it, right?
Don’t let it write for you.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yeah, no. I’ve just seen a lot of stories too about just companies… It makes mistakes, and then they end up cutting the programs that they were gonna, run with AI. And then also just the stories about the expense now, that it’s, very expensive, [00:32:00] and they didn’t anticipate that.
And Yeah … I just feel like we have a little bit of a reckoning, a balancing out now. just like with anything that’s, AI is, wasn’t really new, but, it, was, there was a big, rush on the bandwagon there for a while, and now I feel like there might be a little bit of a- balancing out,
Frank Strong: And Michelle, we’ve seen this movie before. the parallels between .com and AI are so incredibly, close, it’s amazing. So if you remember, when the internet first came on board, you remember, Chris Anderson wrote that book Free. Chris Anderson, of course, I think, was the editor-in-chief of Wire- or managing editor, I forget now. It’s been a long time. but a, a major technology publication that’s everybody wants to be in. And he wrote this thing about it, Free. His… That was the title of his book, that information wants to be free and accessible. And, the big question was, like, “How do we make money on, the web?
How are you going to [00:33:00] make money then?” And then slowly but surely the business models got more refined. We saw subscriptions, right? We saw the rise of SaaS, right? Software as a service. And so the, the model’s gotten really refined, and I think that’s probably gonna happen with AI too. For most users, our experience with generative AI has been it’s free.
ChatGPT came on, anybody could use it.
And I think the companies in the early stages want you to do that, ’cause that’s how they learn, right? They can learn from the user interaction, iterate, improve, and create better models. But as we’ve now, what, four years into this, it’s not novel anymore, right?
There’s a lot of competition.
so I think companies are starting to look at how they’re gonna, make money on this. ‘Cause look, there are, there is some energy consumption, potentially water consumption. I know that’s in dispute. I’ve seen studies that say it uses up a lot of water.
I’ve seen a lot of pundits that say it doesn’t use a lot of water. who knows,
Michelle Garrett: Yeah …
Frank Strong: where the ri- And there’s probably, a whole bunch of degrees in between, but this is the, the mirror to the .com is just amazing. [00:34:00]
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Yeah. that’s the thing. I feel like anything that’s goes up is gonna either level ou- out or go down at some point.
yeah, certainly it’s not going away, but I do… I’m curious to see how things shake out here, thought leadership. This is something that, of course, I feel very strongly about and work with, every client and clients, come to me for this now because this is something they, need and don’t maybe understand how to get it going.
And, it’s a huge part of an effective PR program, in my opinion. so I, loved this, study and statistic
Frank Strong: Yeah. 70… What was the stat? It was like 75% of decision-makers say that thought leadership is more trustworthy than other types of content. Yeah. this is one study. There have been many, studies done about this.
I think there are probably a dozen or more that I’ve looked at [00:35:00] over the years-
Michelle Garrett: Yeah …
Frank Strong: on the site, o- on the blog. and I think thought leadership is so powerful because it hits all of the key points, right? First of all, if you do it right, you’re not selling anything, you’re just informing and educating.
So what does that do to a reader or to a buyer? Takes the defenses down, right? The minute they’re talking to sales, the defenses go up. “Okay, I gotta question everything. What, what- what is, the line that they’re giving me to convince me to buy this thing that isn’t true?” But if you do thought leadership right, it’s informative.
It’s really editorial, right? And, it takes those defenses down. And then it does something else. It demonstrates that you know the market That you understand the, your customer’s perspective problems, and most importantly, that you have a different way of thinking about how to solve these problems.
And if you can do those three things, then maybe you’ve got somebody that’s interested to take a closer look, start following your company, m- d- attend a webinar, take a demo, download a white pa- whatever [00:36:00] the case might be. But I think that’s the real value of thought leadership. And it’s, honestly, it’s not a surprise.
I don’t know why this is so har- like, why do we need a study to convince executives that this stuff is important, right? They buy software, they buy tools and stuff. How did they find it? They probably read a thought leadership-y type article, that kind of got them interested, and many of them can trace their own behavior.
So I don’t know why it’s such a, it’s such a hard case to make. like I, just think thought leadership is one of the best forms of, marketing and public relations, and I think it hits all three of those buckets we talked about earlier: attract, convert, retain. It hits them all. it will land with anyone, particularly if the topic is new.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: So that’s my take on thought leadership.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. I think, you’ve really, spelled it out there because it’s just, it’s… A- and you can, there’s so many things you can do with it, I think, obviously [00:37:00] once… And, I think part of it is, too, maybe they’re reluctant because obviously they don’t have time to sit down and write, which is where a ghostwriter or, somebody like us can help them, figure that out.
‘Cause they don’t have to necessarily, write the whole piece themselves. they can have the thoughts and share them in a, a 20-minute, call and then we can take it from there. But, I just think it’s something, too, I feel like companies dip in and out on. Again, it’s like, we wrote one thought leadership piece so that’s it for the year,” “We don’t have time.”
And it’s a slow burn on that, I think, too, sometimes, and they just, a lot of times companies don’t wanna hear that. They do- they want something that’s gonna, get them results right away, and I’m like, “Oh, all this stuff just takes time,” and you just have to- Stick in it for the long game,
Frank Strong: I think, too, like one of the challenges… So yes, I, look, I’ve worked in-house and have been in all these meetings where we talk about [00:38:00] all the stuff that I know I’m gonna have to go out and do afterwards, Right. When the meeting’s over. And so that’s where, hiring an agency becomes really valuable.
But the key for a client or a corporation or a business to get the most out of their agencies with thought leadership is to make sure they’re providing access, right? And getting people to respond. I can’t tell you how many times, I’ve sent an email, someone introduced me to a product manager or a subject matter expert that’s really fluent on a topic that I’m to interview, and I’ve got to follow up, and I’ve got to follow up, and I’ve got to follow up.
And then when I finally get the individual, they’ve got 20 minutes on a Friday at 3:00 PM for me. no, This has to be a priority.
My job is to help them articulate their ideas, but their job is to have the thoughts that provide the leadership. I, can’t just come up with everything on my own.
And I’m pretty smart. I’ve done this stuff for a long time. I can [00:39:00] help out and bridge some gaps just because I’ve had so many conversations over 25 years. but to be thought leadership, you’ve actually got to have some thoughts, and you’ve got to actually have some leadership
Michelle Garrett: True.
Yes. That’s a, I,
Frank Strong: that’s why- Thought leadership requires thought and leadership. Who knew?
Michelle Garrett: that’s why it doesn’t work for every single company because, I, don’t work as much with startups as I used to, admittedly. When I was out in Silicon Valley and had, startup clients, the, it, but one of the things is it’s hard unless the, the founders have had experience going into the startup.
‘Cause a startup that’s brand new or even a few years old is not gonna be able to compete in certain categories. for example, I was mentioning, we were talking beforehand about manufacturing clients. Some of them have been around for 50 years, okay? So they definitely have, thoughts and leadership, and it’s, a different situation.
Yeah, it’s like what are [00:40:00] you bringing to the table? You’ve got to give me something to work with, right? I, don’t know.
Frank Strong: Let me k- kind of side note, but your comments made me think of this, is that one of the things I’ve learned, being a business owner for 10, the last 10 years is that I never want to be a startup’s first agency.
I always like them to go off and, let another agency train them.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: Let them see what their service is like, and then when they come to me, they can see the observable difference, right? Yeah … but I, it’s just, it just takes so much education and time that you can’t bill for or invoice for, just to get them understand what it is that you need, right?
Yeah. What is it you need to make good thought leadership? And it’s access.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Yeah.
Frank Strong: To, to-
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. Oh yeah … put that together. And they, and like you said, they have to make time. I’ve had clients that don’t want to give me any time with the, the thought leaders. And, then it’s like, “Okay, watch this video of a talk they did six months ago.”
I’m like, no, that, that’s not really, I can’t, I, this isn’t gonna work that way.” So it does [00:41:00] require a lot of commitment, of time and resources on the client’s end, and some just are not willing or able to give that. yes.
Frank Strong: And it happens with customers too. this just happened. I had, a client who has a customer that I incidentally met at a trade show about nine months ago, and I was in their booth for about 30 minutes, shook everybody’s hand, told them who I was, what I was trying to do.
they were very gracious and gave me kind of an education on this particular industry, which I didn’t know a lot about, so it was eye-opening. About six or eight months later, I go to my client contact and be like, if we wanna do something on that topic in that industry, I’d really like to talk to those people.”
And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, sure, they’d be happy to.” They made an email introduction, “Hey, we talked on the phone previously. I wanna introduce you to this guy. He’s gonna work on this piece. Are you interested?” And, send him a note, follow up on the warm introduction they gave me, and crickets. A week goes by, I [00:42:00] send a follow-up note, and crickets.
So I hit up the client and was like, what’s going on?” So the client hits up their customer-
who then responds and says, “Can we not do this by phone? Can we talk by email?” And I’m just like, “But that’s not an interview. I don’t have the exchange of information that I need to ask follow-up questions or to drill down on key points that would really make this thing sing and stand out, right?”
Yeah. To get the details. See, it’s absolutely critical. If you’re gonna do good content marketing, you wanna just answer some Q&A and throw that up on a blog? Hey, no problem, But is that really thought leadership? Maybe, it isn’t, you don’t know what you’re gonna get back.
Michelle Garrett: No. And to follow on to that point, reporters, I think, often will, allow or ask to- you to answer, clients to answer questions via email, but that’s becoming less and less because they know they can use AI to do it.
And I think, in general, you just get better quotes if you’re on a phone call. I just, I mean- Yeah … I’m always amazed that reporters don’t [00:43:00] really always ask for a, an interview, phone interview or Zoom or whatever. yeah.
Frank Strong: I find, what I’m seeing is that reporters, they’re okay with an email interview when they have something specific in mind.
When it’s, when they have a very narrow question and you can give them a specific answer. There’s only right, one right answer usually. and so you can get that by email, and that’s speedy and efficient. They can hit their deadlines.
Michelle Garrett: But
Frank Strong: when they’re investigating a story, when they’re figuring out what the angle is, when they’re trying- Right
to decide where is this story gonna go, that’s when they need to talk to people, right? ‘Cause that’s- it’s based on that- interaction that drives the angle of the story. Ideally, that’s what reporting is, right? They are reporting what they heard, right?
Michelle Garrett: I don’t know. There’s a lot of debate about what reporting is and is not now.
But we’re not- Oh, yeah … we’re not here to talk about that today. I believe, I went to journalism school, I believe in the, getting down and, digging around and, [00:44:00] finding out what’s really going on. But, some people will just stand up in front of a camera and read a story, and that makes them a reporter, I don’t know.
Frank Strong: that is tied back to also the click optimization, right? When we talked about, the, pitching for budget between brand and reputation and, a marketing campaign that has clear metrics around clicks and time on page and those sorts of things. That’s happened in publishing too, right?
Everybody wants a click. and I think I don’t know, there’s like this influencer envy. You see somebody with a big audience that wasn’t a journalist, and the journalist is why don’t I have that big audience?” And they, then they start kinda going out and doing those and-
Michelle Garrett: Yeah …
Frank Strong: I don’t necessarily, I don’t want to say I have an ethical issue with it.
But I want the reporters to be focused on reporting. that’s why I read your publication. I’m relying on you-
Michelle Garrett: Yeah …
Frank Strong: to find stuff that I don’t have time to go ferret out, and tell me about it. Yeah. And when I find things that are interesting, I can go do a deep dive or dig down or whatever the case is.
Yeah. That’s just me. Maybe that’s old [00:45:00] school, but, we’ve gotten away from that.
Michelle Garrett: I agree with you, and it’s a pet peeve of mine. I will only trust certain, outlets because I don’t believe that influencer or creator is a journalist. I don’t, I don’t believe that. some- sometimes, but it’s, just because you went out and read five stories and did a TikTok about it doesn’t make you an expert or, you know- Right
a journalist. So anyway, I’m sure there’s a lot of people that don’t agree with this, but that’s, that’s, I, think that’s true.
Frank Strong: Anyway. We should have a, a PR explored, episode one time that’s just like pet peeves. what are your p- Let’s- Let everybody just get on here and gripe, That’s a great- That would be fun
Michelle Garrett: I love that idea.
We’d
Frank Strong: have- Like a round table. You have five PR people griping about whatever.
Michelle Garrett: That’s pretty… Actually, I really, I’m gonna write it down. no, I do love that idea, ’cause we could, probably go on more than an hour for sure.
Frank Strong: Yeah, until they all lose their job when it’s over.
Michelle Garrett: that’s the beauty when we work for [00:46:00] ourselves.
Yeah, We can have opinions and we can s- talk about them, and that’s, it’s a, beautiful thing, so yeah. this statistic I didn’t love. B2B marketing budgets are down. okay, so let me pull up this little stat here. The stat is, I don’t know if this is all gonna fit. as a percentage of revenue, those surveyed saw a 10th percent increase in marketing budget from 7.7 in 2025 to 7.8 in 2026. That’s 18% lower than the mean budget allocation just four years ago.
Frank Strong: Yeah. Okay? so I think there’s a couple things going on here.
the first one is that during the pandemic W- when we did, when the, the remote work, implementation started, people started [00:47:00] working from home, working at co-working spaces, whatever, companies spent a gajillion dollars on technology, and they bought a lot of stuff. They probably bought more than they need.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: And so SaaS companies in particular, software as a service, the software companies, have really struggled for the last few years because people over-bought and they wound up with more technology than they could, and then the, the CFO is looking at that thing saying, “Who’s using this software? Who’s using this software?
Why do we have two software products that largely do the same? Can we consolidate that?” And so I think it’s really put, the startup community, the mid-market community, it’s really put a, a dam- had a… It’s had a dampening effect on their growth projections. And of course, that translates into marketing budgets because if marketing’s not helping us grow, then it’s a cost center, right?
what is the right percentage of revenue? I think it depends on the company that you’re in. [00:48:00] but a good way to begin to get some data to benchmark that is to go look at, your closest publicly traded competitors. Maybe they’re in your space. if you are a s- a startup CRM product, go look at what Salesforce, Oracle, their financials are public.
Go find out what they’re spending on sales and marketing. Try to narrow it down to marketing. And then what you can do is go to your CFO and say, “Here’s what we spend as a percentage of revenue on marketing or PR. Here’s what Salesforce and Oracle and all of these other companies are doing, are spending, and this is what we’ve gotta do to close the gap.
If you want us to have results like them, we need a budget like them.” I, I think along the lines of marketing, the, comment that marketing and PR are sometimes viewed as cost centers is wrong. It’s, really, it’s a growth engine. And so companies need to think about [00:49:00] investment in comms and marketing as an in- as an investment in growth, right?
Ideally one with compound returns, right? Just like a bank account or a 401has compound interest and compounding returns, you get the dividends, they go back into your portfolio, and the next year you’re making money on your principal plus whatever you earned the last year. Marketing works the same way.
Companies that get a lot of media coverage, guess what? They get more media coverage. Websites that get a lot of links, guess what? They get more links. Yeah. Users with a lot of subscribers, guess what? They get more subscribers. They get more likes, more shares, more forwards. So it grows. And this comes down to a fundamental philosophy about marketing comms programs that I believe- Organizations should look at these as programs, not as campaigns.
Marketers, classical marketing is trained to run campaigns. A campaign has a starting point and an ending point. It is finite. A program runs forever. It starts and it never ends. You just iterate and [00:50:00] improve, and that’s what you’ve gotta do if you’re gonna build those compounding returns, and that’s the way I think to look at marketing and PR-
to get the most- best bang out of your dollar. And, the iterate and improvement isn’t just with performance, but it also comes with interacting with the finance, interacting with the CFO, interacting with the, the CEO, and learning how to make that case for budget, and learning how to articulate the measurement, learning how to articulate some of the things we were talking about earlier in terms of brand versus clicks and downloads and that sort of thing, right?
Those are all important, and we know that they drive revenue. I think one other, one other risky experiment that you could do is, like- If you don’t think marketing or comms drives revenue, okay, turn it off. Turn it off for three months, six months. See what happens. If there’s no change in business, then you know it’s not working, right?
But if there’s a drastic change in business, now you have some very tangible [00:51:00] benefit of, how much value that this is adding. And you don’t need to necessarily turn it off for everything. If you’re a bigger company and you’ve got a, maybe one program or one product or one, division of a business, maybe just do it.
You do an experiment for that business, turn it off. But that’s an experiment that I would love to see. and if there’s any CMOs out there that want to work on a study like that, I’d be happy to do that. I think that would be absolutely fascinating. design that, run it academically, and publish the results, and I think it would be overwhelming,
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, I know. I, it’s, it, We just go round and round. that’s the other thing. When you’ve been doing this as long as we have, it’s just you, do repeat the same things ’cause it just, it’s just always an, an issue. It’s just always, And just like the measurement, it’s okay, you can’t measure everything down to a, a, a percentage.
You, it… Some things just make [00:52:00] sense, and you can tell when they’re working, and you don’t… I don’t know. I don’t know that we can always nail down exactly the value, but we know that it’s there.
Frank Strong: it reminds me of a story- … where years ago I had a client that was like, the CEO was bent out of shape because a competitor was in the top of Google.
Okay, let’s go have a look. Let’s, type in the search term together. We’ll look at the screen together. What is the search result? Oh, look. Mr. CEO, that link is at hi- is so high in the search results because it’s paid. That is an advertisement. That is not an organic search result. And so what that tells me is, and this is a, I’ve got a number of s- academically backed studies, that I’ve written about over the years- that shows the number of senior executives, C-suite, board of directors that have marketing experience is, under 5%.
Very [00:53:00] few of them have cracked open a marketing book since they went to college in… Look, if you’re 60 years old, you’re talking about ’80s, ’90s. It’s been 30, 40 years before they cracked a marketing book. And think about how much marketing has changed. And so you’re expected to have this strategic senior level conversation, and you have to tutor them on 101 level stuff.
Like, how do you get past that? Yeah. there’s a, I’m trying to remember her name, Kimberly, Whitler, I’m probably destroying her name. She did a study. She’s now, a, an adjunct professor or a, an associate professor at Darden University. Had been a CEO for some big CPG companies.
I can’t remember which names it was, but she did a very academic study that showed, companies with marketing experience on their boards tend to outperform their peers because you don’t have to do all that stuff. You don’t have to make all these cases. Yeah. You’re not arguing [00:54:00] with an executive on how to do your job every day.
You just get to do your job, right? Yeah. It’s not a justification exercise. I think that’s, really important, Yeah. Communication, marketing, and I, put marketing under the communication value. marketing is communication.
That is a function of leadership. That is a leadership priority, and they have an obligation to understand how messages are sent, what are the mediums, how are they received, how are they perceived, what are the cultural issues that are influencing the decisions that buyers make even in a business environment because they’re very real.
and I just- it’s, this is, one of the longstanding issues for marketing PR people, and it’s probably n- not gonna go away anytime soon, but I feel better I’ve been able to rant about it here, so thank you for that.
Michelle Garrett: No, it’s so funny because I just was in a Slack group with some content marketing people, and somebody was talking about how much of their [00:55:00] job is just education.
It’s like explaining, “Okay, w- we’re gonna do this. Here’s why we’re gonna do it,” and then you do it, and then you explain, what happened. Did it move the needle? How did it move? It’s just a lot of it… It’s, that, I think that’s what wears us out sometimes. If we were just left to run and do our thing, without having to explain, every single thing and justify it every time and, just kinda let us run a little bit, Yeah, right
maybe give us a little, like a little running room. I don’t know.
Frank Strong: you as a business leader cannot demand accountability from marketing PR if you don’t give them the authority to act. If they’ve got to run to you for every single decision, how are you holding them accountable? You should do the job.
You’re, you everything has got to be justified. You gotta do it. So you’ve gotta give them the authority and accountability. That’s it. And this comes back to, lessons learned and fail fast. I know that’s a big buzzy term in, Silicon Valley. let’s fail fast. Let’s break things and fail fast.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. [00:56:00]
Frank Strong: I think that’s more hype than real because I’ve never seen anybody in marketing that’s been allowed to fail fast. Let people go try things and fail because what they learn from that experiment, you gain returns from that. You’re gonna get a whole lot smarter the next time around.
you want people to do those things to find out what’s connecting, what’s motivating, what’s persuading people to come visit your site, look at your products, buy your product, ret- stay with your company, all of the things that we’ve discussed so far and that we do every day in our, day-to-day work.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, I, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree with that. I know we’re bumping up on our hour here. Do you want to talk about one more thing, or do you have time, or no?
Frank Strong: yeah. Yep.
Michelle Garrett: Okay.
Frank Strong: Yep, I’m all,
Michelle Garrett: yours. So, let’s talk about, hidden buyers because I think this is an interesting one.
so there’s obviously people involved in the decision to buy your product or service, beyond, maybe the, committee of people you’re talking to, [00:57:00] and so I found this really interesting because they do influence the deals. So those in finance, legal, and procurement, might not show up in the funnel, but they hold 50% of the total decision-making influence according to this study.
Frank Strong: That’s right Yeah, I think, when marketing PR people are making their buyer personas, they think about the target market, the end user, and they haven’t considered all of these factors. one of the reasons why, like that study earlier that, that requires 62 interactions is ’cause you’re not just talking to the prospect, the end user anymore.
You’ve got all of these other people that are involved in the sales function. W- and we talked about finance, legal, and procurement, and those departments’ influences. But another one, particularly for technology, security, right? There’s gonna be a security professional that’s examining the software, looking at your practices, making sure that it’s not filled w- filled with vulnerabilities that’s gonna, create some PR disaster for them down the road.
And so we’ve gotta [00:58:00] think about those personas, and yeah, maybe make content, message positioning for those personas. But I think the other aspect of that is like the Intel Inside campaign, right? I’m looking down at my laptop, there’s a little sticker. I’ve got a Intel Core 17. It tells you how old my laptop is.
but I don’t wanna buy a new one yet until AI gets smoothed out. But in any case, I bought a Dell, but Intel is on the inside. Intel is using Dell to convince them. That’s what marketing needs to do. We need to help our prospects convince finance, legal, procurement, and security. It means helping them make the case, help them help themselves, if you will.
And I think that’s the, path to go about. And I think really it’s just this is a newer phenomenon. It’s becoming more prominent. It’s not It certainly happened years ago. It’s just a whole lot more pervasive today than it has been in past. And so we just need to think about, we have some extra personas that we need to think about that influence deals, and significantly, right?
I mean- Yeah [00:59:00]
Michelle Garrett: yeah, I mean- you
Frank Strong: ever argue with corporate legal? It’s terrible.
Michelle Garrett: it can just take forever. like even if you’re, the, the marketing, the client has bought in on your services and is ready to go, it can take just forever to get through, Yeah.
the, legal, financial paperwork, all that stuff, yeah. do you, is there anything else you want to talk about? Should we cover the last one or do you, is there anything else or do you- Yeah.
Frank Strong: No, let’s do it. Let’s, Okay … you got all eight on here, you’ve gone through and looked at them all.
Let’s, knock it out and then we can wrap it up. I, don’t think this will take too long. I, I-
Michelle Garrett: Okay. So the last one that, I pulled out, not that they’re not all interesting, and I put the link to them all in the comments if anybody… I’ll put it on the screen in a second. But investing in marketing to existing customers, so that’s, on the rise.
According to this study, it says that 60% of businesses that took the survey are investing their budgets to sell more [01:00:00] to existing customers, and it is a consistent theme across 2026 findings.
Frank Strong: Yeah. Look, this is, th- this particular survey is new, but this idea has been around forever. There’s an old Harvard Business Review article, it’s probably 20 years old.
some, some consultant, did the math, did some research and found that your existing customers are between 5 and 25 perc- times more likely to make a m- a purchase than a new one. Now, just think about it. You don’t have, we, we talked about, marketing campaigns. one of the big metrics that you’re looking at is the cost of acquisition.
How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? That expense is substantially higher for net new than it is for existing customers.
And if you have an existing customer and they know, and trust you because you’ve, you have a good reputation, you actually deliver, what, on the expectations that you promised, then, yeah, they know you, of course they’ll buy something else from you.
[01:01:00] If they have another problem to solve and you’ve got a solution for that, why wouldn’t they purchase from you? You’re a safe bet. Why are they gonna go to someone new? I think the caveat is that, particularly in software, I don’t know that other industries have the same, im- problem, is that marketers have become overzealous with the in-app notifications.
and I’m gonna, I’m gonna name names on this one ’cause they absolutely drive me bonkers, but QuickBooks is made by Intuit. I use QuickBooks to manage my account. Intuit is probably the single most prominent software provider that put the term customer experience on the map. The very name Intuit comes from intuitive.
It’s easy to use, right? It used to be we would go to work and we’d get on this clunky software. Apple came out with an iPhone that was very easy to use. You didn’t need to read a technical manual to figure out how to run this. you could just turn on your [01:02:00] phone and figure out how to use it. And software companies started saying, “Oh, why isn’t our business software like that?
Why am I having this great experience on my phone? I drive to work and it takes me 20 clicks to upload an expense receipt in Concur,” right? That, that should not happen. So Intuit is one of the companies that made that happen, delivered a good customer experience. They have gone off the rails with in-app notifications.
Every time I log in, there has got to be a half dozen different pitches. Things slide in, pop over. Do you wanna buy this? Do you wanna buy that? Do you want to get a loan? Do you wanna do… I’m just… It’s insane, and it happens every single time, and there isn’t a way for me to turn it off. I’m picking on Intuit and QuickBooks, but I have observed, m- maybe not to the degree that they’re doing it, but this happens in other software products.
Everybody’s got another pitch. So m- my caveat here is, you’re gonna wear out your welcome, right? Don’t harass your customers. It’s Nobody minds an occasional pitch, particularly if you’ve been a good vendor and a good partner, and [01:03:00] you’re delivering a good solution that solves a problem that they have.
Absolutely people take a look at a… Don’t abuse the channel. That’s all I’m, that’s all I’m worried about.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. No, absolutely. I, yeah, it’s, it makes sense, and I see this with my clients, too. they trust them and, then and then they can, parlay that into other, sales and expanding their relationship.
And when we do customer case studies and success stories- we always talk about what’s the future look like, What, what do, you see happening, with this, supplier in the future? I think it’s something to obviously, keep track of, but I thought this statistic was, really interesting, so yeah.
with that, is there anything else that you wanna share before we go? You’ve been so generous with your time, and I’m gonna put the, the newsletter link up here ’cause everyone sub- so- should subscribe to your newsletter [01:04:00] if they do not already.
Frank Strong: That’s actually the blog. So those send- Oh … you blog posts by email.
Michelle Garrett: Okay.
Frank Strong: I do have a newsletter on Substack. It’s, I do it once a month.
Michelle Garrett: Okay.
Frank Strong: It’s, really, I s- I save s- I curate links, things, studies that I’ve read, and I organize it around, t- certain topics. So I’ll have CMO, advertising, marketing, B2B marketing, PR, content mark- and I’ll organize it that way.
That goes out once a month. So that’s, that right there is just the blog, and it just comes to you by email. Okay.
it’s an, it’s RS- it’s all automation, so if you subscribe every Tuesday- … once a week you get an email from one email. if I write more than one post it bundles them together so you’re never getting more than one, one email.
Yeah, and that’s the newsletter. Okay. I’ve had that for, I think I’ve been doing the newsletter now, I don’t know, maybe eight years now. Okay … and honestly, I do it, I have several thousand readers, but I, I really do [01:05:00] it for me ’cause it keeps me informed and educated and gives me all of the…
This is where I find all this stuff to write about. Yeah. The things that are interesting, right? I just, I spend a lot of time on my craft and trying to get better at my craft, and learning and reading, and taking classes and absorbing, references. I think that’s incredibly important for, everybody in marketing and PR to do.
you’ve gotta be better, particularly in PR where you’re a generalist and you’re expected to know- Yeah … it’s a mile wide and an inch deep really.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. I trust you, and I rely on you to do some of the legwork so that I don’t have to read through, I, see so much stuff, and it’s like, wow, I, don’t know how you keep up with it, but I know you enjoy it, and that is, part of the, the reason and, keeps you motivated to keep going.
So we really appreciate it, and we need it. So we need trusted sources, right? and we don’t really, I don’t think you call yourself a, a creator, do you?
Frank Strong: [01:06:00] no. I’ll say I’m a blogger. some people will be like, “Oh, you’re a journalist.” I’m like, “I’m not a journalist.” Maybe a- Well-
maybe n- or s- another one that gets tossed up, particularly when I write about, the technology and software, when I’m doing, reviews about PR software. They’ll be like, you’re like an analyst.” I’m like, “Eh, a pseudo analyst.” But it’s more that I’ve worked for a vendor and I have been on the in-house side of a PR software vendor, so I’ve seen under the hood.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: And I, just looking at a lot of different products, I’ve got an idea. but I’ve slowed down on that a little bit. I just, I don’t know. Like- The, The level of, and I just get so much junk. you start getting pitches and I’m just like, “Eh, I, this isn’t really that significant.”
“Eh,” Or, they’ll talk up some feature that’s real big and then I’ll, I’ll have a [01:07:00] client that has the product and so I’ll get to see it, of course they know it, and I’m kinda like, that’s not really what you told me.” So- Yeah, you get to see behind the scenes a little bit, So I’ve, I have tamped down on that a little bit. I may do one on, AI visibility, ’cause I know that’s a big interest. I’m interested in it too, like what tools. Yeah. Like you remember when social media got big, there was no real good social media monitoring tools until Radian6 came out, and Radian6 was very Google-esque.
It was easy to use. You could punch in some search terms and see everything on social. We’re at that same spot, I think, with generative AI, still trying to figure out how do you monitor and track this? What’s the difference between being cited and being mentioned, right? All-
all of those things are coming into play, but.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah, and everybody I follow and trust on that topic, it’s shifting. it’s just, it’s, the, it’s just as soon as you talk about it, it might be different, and that’s why I really… This is another thing we could get into, talk about pet peeves. People that are, [01:08:00] like, suggesting that they have the program, they have the answer.
Throw out your playbook. We have it. Buy it from us. Do… And that just drives me crazy, ’cause there’s no person, no one can claim that. No company, no consultant, no agency can claim that they have cracked the case entirely, ’cause it’s just evolving.
Frank Strong: That’s also pervasive in marketing and PR. if you look around your peers, everybody thinks they’re smarter than everybody else, and so nobody listens.
you get a new CMO, comes in. What, what’s the CMO playbook? You fire an agency, you initiate a restructuring, and you launch a rebranding. Because at your old company, you did it this way, right? And this new company, clearly the people that have worked there for five years don’t know anything.
That’s why you were hired to replace them all. I just, I just think we need a little less… maybe we need, the, the anti-thought leader. we need, like, more listeners, just be receptive. and in many ways, like, all the, the studying and reports [01:09:00] I’m, I, look at, it’s just, I’m just interested.
What are people saying? What are other people saying?
Michelle Garrett: Yeah.
Frank Strong: I’m trying to absorb that.
Michelle Garrett: Yeah. I think we share a curiosity and an interest- in continuing to learn and understand instead of just being like, “Okay, I need to know in 30 seconds, the, and the answer”, and you can’t possibly always know that.
I really appreciate, people that kind of take it seriously and think about it and dive in and are critical thinkers, right?
Frank Strong: Yeah. Awesome. Michelle, you gotta give me the boot ’cause you and I will chat forever.
Michelle Garrett: I know. I might take you up on your pet peeve idea, but I might come back to you on that one.
But I do really appreciate your time and everything you do. Thank you, Frank, so much, and please follow Frank, connect with Frank. And I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with another episode of PR Explored. Thanks, everybody.
Frank Strong: Awesome. Thanks for having me.
Michelle Garrett: Bye.
About the host: Michelle Garrett is a B2B PR consultant, media relations consultant, writer and author of B2B PR That Gets Results, an Amazon Best Seller. She helps companies create content, earn media coverage, and position themselves as thought leaders in their industry. Michelle’s articles have been featured by Entrepreneur, Content Marketing Institute, Muck Rack, and Ragan’s PR Daily, among others. She’s a frequent speaker on public relations, marketing and content. Michelle has been repeatedly ranked among the top ten most influential PR professionals.
Learn more about Michelle’s freelance PR consulting services here. Book a no-obligation call to talk about your needs here. Buy Michelle’s book here.
