PR Pros: David Martin of Heed PR On The 5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A…

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PR Pros: David Martin of Heed PR On The 5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A Public Relations Pro

A commitment to strategy. Long-term success in the PR world is tied largely to a commitment to strategy, building them out and sticking to them. You might be able to earn some one-off successes without a strategy in place, but to keep winning takes a well-designed framework.

Have you seen the show Flack? Ever think of pursuing a real-life career in PR? What does it take to succeed in PR? What are the different forms of Public Relations? Do you have to have a college degree in PR? How can you create a highly lucrative career in PR? In this interview series, called “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A Public Relations Pro” we are talking to successful publicists and Public Relations pros, who can share stories and insights from their experiences.

As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing David Martin.

David Martin is a co-founder and partner at Heed PR. Over the course of his career, he’s worked with businesses from numerous industries, helping each organization create and nurture a favorable public-facing image that contributes to its overarching business success.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-martin-29256210/

HeedPR: https://www.heedpr.com/

Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I can honestly say that I never really meant to be a PR pro. Seriously. But, I don’t think that’s a rarity in this field, to be honest. Some of the most successful PR folks I know ended up in the practice by one professional twist of fate or another.

My route to PR started when I took a job as a copywriter at a marketing firm that worked primarily with healthcare entities and financial institutions. After working at that agency, I completed successive stints as an in-house “communications” specialist, and in many smaller organizations, that means you’re a marketing/PR hybrid.

Then, about 8 years ago, I took one such “hybrid” job at a VC-backed startup in the moving industry, and realized quickly after starting that I could rack up lots of wins for the fledgling business by focusing specifically on public relations. My managers let me go all in on PR, gave me the resources I needed to succeed, and we had an absolute field day earning all kinds of favorable media across the country.

From there, I was recruited to do the same thing, helping launch a cannabis startup on the West Coast. That ended up being another wild success, but when leadership wanted everyone to relocate, I founded Heed PR along with my wife, Natalie Roy Martin in 2018.

I truly love public relations. We work very closely with our clients, and it’s a real thrill to help each of them achieve their overarching business objectives by cultivating favorable public-facing personas for their organizations.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

As a PR pro, the most interesting things we encounter actually happen to our clients, and we live those moments vicariously through them. We’re always just off stage, shining the spotlights on them, feeding them their lines, and clapping when they do something great. We’re always in the background…which is where I prefer to be.

When it comes to something of interest about my own business, I am still routinely floored that in the nearly four years since we launched Heed PR, we have yet to have to make a single sales call or go to some sort of lead-generation networking event. 100 percent of our business is inbound. It’s amazing.

Actually, when we started our agency, I jumped in full-time first while Natalie remained at her job and then came home to help me on the nights and weekends. We hoped, at the time, that within a year of launching I might have attracted enough business that we could, at that point, begin the conversations of transitioning Natalie in at a full-time capacity. However, the deluge of new business that came flooding in as soon as we opened forced us to expedite that discussion. So instead of her joining full-time a year(ish) after launch, she quit her job and jumped in within three months.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Since I had to learn the PR craft by myself with no formal training or guidance, there have been many mistakes along the way. Most have been painful, not funny.

One lesson I learned very quickly is that our friends in the media hate being subjected to mass outreach, especially if the pitch or press release hitting their inbox has nothing to do with their beat. When I took that job with the moving company I referenced above, I inherited — though I’m not sure from whom exactly — a massive media list.

The first time I indiscriminately blasted out a press release to the full list, I got a load of responses from reporters asking why they were receiving the release. When I realized that I had been pestering meteorologists and sports reporters with a release about a moving company, I was mortified.

Since then, I’ve been wholeheartedly committed to refining lists, and only connecting with people who have a demonstrated interest in what I’m reaching out to them about. I’ll take, all day long, a media list of 15 well-qualified names over a list of 1,000 maybe-sorta-we’ll-see names.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

I am a huge fan of our client roster. It is chock full of successful organizations that are growing and doing innovative things. As a testament to that, we seem to have entered a never-ending award season — and our clients are picking up hardware left and right. In 2021, our clients won honors on the Inc. 5000 list, the Inc. “Best in Business” list, and the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list, in addition to all kinds of local distinctions like Small Business Awards and being named “Best Places to Work.”

Our clients do exciting, meaningful work, and it is our job to draw attention to them for the wonderful things they are doing. Heed PR doesn’t have any awards to its name (the cobbler’s children have no shoes, after all), but when our clients win, we win. It’s a pretty fun situation, one that we aim to keep up.

You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Empathy — It’s tough to get far in life without considering what the people you come in contact with are going through. In the world of PR, I am constantly thinking about what my clients are dealing with as well as what their needs and objectives are. Every strategy we craft is one-of-a-kind, taking into account the very unique needs of a particular client. We also have to be very mindful of the circumstances surrounding our peers in the media. We’ve got to remember what their daily work lives are like, what kind of stories they’re covering, and how we can help them.

Teachable spirit — I’m a lifelong learner by nature, and I think that instinctiveness is very helpful, especially considering I’ve had no formal training in public relations. To get to where I am with a successful business to my name, I’ve had to be willing to routinely learn new things. If I wasn’t interested in how I can consistently push myself to be a better PR practitioner, chances are pretty strong I would have flamed out by now. As an example, I’ve sent out a kazillion pitch emails over the years, but just before I sat down to this interview, I registered for a webinar on best pitching practices. I’ve got to keep on learning.

Tenacity — I often liken life as a PR pro to being in sales, especially the pitching process. You’ve got to know your target audience. You’ve got to have a good pitch. And you’ve got to steel yourself against rejection. Even if you pitch the most appropriate media member with a Gold Standard pitch, the odds of it being successful are slim. You have to be able to take a “no,” or being ignored, in stride and keep going. At some point pitching becomes a numbers game, and you have to just keep throwing your line in the water. If you’ve got good bait, and you’re fishing in the right spot, eventually you’ll get a bite (and no, I don’t fish and I have no clue how this response turned into a fishing analogy. Ha!).

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. For the benefit of our readers, can you help articulate what the different forms of PR are?

I feel like this answer, if asked to 10 PR pros, could go in 10 different directions. In my experience, PR looks very different based on the objectives of a particular organization. For instance, an up-and-coming startup is likely to need their PR program to yield different results — and will therefore require different deliverables — than a 100-year-old legacy organization.

We always coach our clients to consider first what they need PR to do for them, and then together, we craft a set of deliverables that will enable us to get there with them. For one client, this could mean focusing on C-suite thought leadership, some well-placed op-eds, and maybe some cause marketing endeavors. While for another, it could mean finding opportunities for contributed content, strategically going after a collection of awards, and investing in podcast appearances.

There should never be any one-size-fits all PR prescriptions. Just because one particular strategy worked for Business A, it can’t be guaranteed that it will work as well for Business B. The successful PR pro knows this, and is committed to creating and executing the right game plan for a specific organization.

Where should a young person considering a career in PR start their education? Should they get a degree in communications? A degree in journalism? Can you explain what you mean?

This is a tough question because I don’t want to deter someone from pursuing a degree in journalism or communications if they want to get into public relations. Instead, I’ll just speak from my own experience as proof that if you’re interested in PR and you don’t have a degree in a field traditionally associated with public relations, you can still make it work.

My undergraduate degree is in Education and I have an M.A. in American History. Originally, I was going to be Dr. Martin, PhD, but I quickly realized in graduate school that life in academia was not a temperamental match for me. However, while in graduate school, I learned how to write well. It was that skill that I used to land my first marketing gig, and to this day, I will tell anyone listening that being able to write has opened more professional doors for me than any other learned skill that I have acquired.

In addition to writing, I believe that my time working in fast-growing startups gave me a laundry list of experiences that help me get on the same level with the business owners I work with today. I know first-hand the battles they’re fighting. I can empathetically understand what they’re trying to achieve. And I know exactly how my work can help them realize their goals. This level of business acumen, coupled with my ability to write, have been the bedrock that I’ve built my PR career on.

You are known as a master networker. Can you share some tips on great networking?

I love this question because I have a hot take ready to go!

We would not have enjoyed the successes that we have to date at Heed PR if it were not for the years of networking we put in before we launched the business. I cannot tell you how many people starting new businesses have asked me for networking advice, and I tell them (here’s the hot take) to get a time machine, go back a decade, and start networking then.

Of course, I don’t leave them hanging like that, but the point is true. When we launched our agency, all the inbounds came from people we’d worked with in the past, met through mutual connections, served on boards with, and/or had general interactions with during time spent being very active in our communities and industries over time.

Personal relationships and word-of-mouth recommendations are the currency of the realm in public relations (and business in general), so you can never start networking soon enough. Even if you don’t have a specific end-goal in mind, get out there. You’ll be fighting an uphill battle if you wait to start networking until you have an acute need that networking can fill.

Lead generation is one of the most important aspects of any business. Can you share some of the strategies you use to generate good, qualified leads?

Since I’ve already given the spoiler that all our leads are inbound, I’ll focus on the importance of prioritizing “good, qualified leads.”

One of our clients is an accounting firm called Market Street Partners. They’re a young, fast-growing organization that will eventually become the heavy-hitter CPA firm in their area. Early in our partnership, they began producing a blog/social media series called “Why They Succeed” in which they detail the very unique ways a collection of their clients have become successful.

One of the clients they featured early on was a photography business called Lanewood Studio. I conducted the interview with the Lanewood team, and I committed their success nugget to heart immediately since it spoke to me as a small business owner: You have to say no to opportunities that don’t make sense, so you can say yes to the right ones. I think that’s something everyone trying to get a business off the ground should have in the back of their minds at all times.

Simply chasing revenue for revenue’s sake can get an agency in trouble really fast. If you take on accounts that don’t make sense for your business, or that stretch you too thin, or take you away from your core competencies, you won’t be able to take on the opportunities that are good for you. Or worse, when you do bring on those good ones, you won’t be able to give them the attention they deserve and they won’t be as successful as they could be.

Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. Based on your opinion and experience, what are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A Public Relations Pro” and why. (Please share a story or example for each.)

  1. A hunger for information. The best PR pros I know consume copious amounts of information. Sure, it’s generally important to be well-informed, but this is particularly the case in public relations because a well-read PR pro will be more aware of emerging opportunities that will benefit their clients or the business where they work.
  2. An understanding of your media peers. This is closely related to what I mentioned previously about empathy. A good PR professional has to have a solid command of the work realities facing their partners in the media. If you want to be good at pitching, you have to know what happens on the other side of your pitch.
  3. A sense of awe and excitement. Excitement is contagious. A job in PR can be a grind just like any other job can be, but since we’re often tasked with helping generate a buzz on behalf of our clients, we have to demonstrate excitement ourselves. I am naturally full of awe at the world around me, and I think this helps me excitedly advocate for my clients.
  4. A point guard’s mentality. Many moons ago, I was a fairly decent high school basketball point guard and loved dishing out assists to my teammates. PR is much the same. We don’t get to have highlight reels of ourselves dunking. Rather, it’s our job to throw those alley-oops and find open shots for our partners. We’re not the stars, but we get to help the stars we work with shine their brightest.
  5. A commitment to strategy. Long-term success in the PR world is tied largely to a commitment to strategy, building them out and sticking to them. You might be able to earn some one-off successes without a strategy in place, but to keep winning takes a well-designed framework.

Because of the role you play, you are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

My wife, Natalie, and I have a commitment to being a source of joy to the people we encounter on a daily basis. We don’t have a mega-network, but we do run into a significant amount of folks daily and weekly, and we believe that if in those moments of interaction, we can provide some sort of joy, there will be a downstream ripple effect felt by other individuals we might not even know. If we all did that, the collective impact could be massive. There is nothing wrong or misguided about trying to solve the biggest problems facing the world today, but I know I can take complete ownership of being nice to the next person I speak with, and that in itself can set off a chain reaction of positivity.

This was really meaningful! Thank you so much for your time.


PR Pros: David Martin of Heed PR On The 5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.