The Hidden Costs of Cutting Corners in PR and Marketing

Doug Downs (00:04):

Dear sir or Madam, I am a prince from Nigeria. Your help would be very appreciated. I want to transfer all my fortune outside of Nigeria due to a frozen account. If you could be so kind and transfer a small sum of $3,500 to my account, I'd be able to unfreeze my account and transfer my money outside of Nigeria to repay your kindness. I will send you $1 million to your account. It's a scam, right? You know, I know it. This year, that scam will still rake in more than $700,000 in the United States alone. That's according to a 2019 report by a DT Security Services. That's ridiculous. Who are these? Most gullible of? Gullible. But in a recent newsletter, Jeremy ends notes. It may well be the absurdity of the scam that makes it successful. It may be designed to look fishy to weed out all except the most gullible.

(01:14):

Well, what if unintentionally you were running a version of the Nigerian print scam, huh? We cut corners a lot, right? We post the same social media content to four or five different platforms. We throw in as many hashtags as allowable. We stuff the headers with keywords, and we think we're being strategic. We cut corners. I do it too. And you know it when you see someone else doing it, mailing in the effort. So why do we do it today on stories and strategies, how cutting corners might be leaving us with an audience meet up. Only of those not savvy enough to spot the scam. My name is Doug Downs, and that entire intro story, by the way, was directly from the July 30th, 2024 newsletter by my guest Jeremy nz. Hey Jeremy.

Jeremy Enns (02:21):

Hey Doug. Thanks so much for having me on and for proposing this wonderful kind of topic here that we're going to dig into today.

Doug Downs (02:27):

I can't write stories any better than what you do off the top of your newsletter. So I saw it and I asked for permission. I didn't just take it. I asked for permission. And you're actually back home in Edmondson, Canada for a bit here, right?

Jeremy Enns (02:38):

That is right. Yeah. I was born and raised here, moved to Saskatchewan in middle school and then to Vancouver for audio engineering school and then now live in Europe, but am back visiting family for a couple of weeks in Edmonton.

Doug Downs (02:51):

And Spain is home.

Jeremy Enns (02:54):

That is right, absolutely. As we're recording this, we're coming up on just the one year anniversary of being in Barcelona. So yeah, still somewhat new, although it has been a while, I guess at this point as

Doug Downs (03:03):

Well. And Jeremy, you are a podcast marketer, currently based in Spain. Your company is the podcast marketing academy where you help with podcast strategy, marketing and promotion, launch planning, coaching and consulting. And I suppose full disclosure, I am not a client of yours, but constantly thinking about it, always following your stuff. So big, big fan of your stuff.

Jeremy Enns (03:26):

Yeah, thank you so much.

Doug Downs (03:27):

Cutting corners. And I'm comfortable saying that everybody does it because there's this thing called heuristics, which is the scientific way of saying your brain is going to take shortcuts. So I know we all do it, but what kind of corners do we cut in public relations and marketing and how do these shortcuts ultimately impact the brand?

Jeremy Enns (03:47):

Yeah, I mean I think there are probably any, you just think about anybody in any situation, you're going to take the easiest possible path to, I mean, what you think is success unless there is some

Doug Downs (04:00):

Meaningful

Jeremy Enns (04:01):

Reason not to. And so of course, we're all the time looking to optimize how we're spending our time. And I think all of us who work in media and marketing and creative work, all these things, there is just too much. There literally is too much to be able to get all of it done probably period, let alone all of it done well. And so I think you could name almost any aspect of marketing or podcast creation or anything else that we do. And I think that cutting corners applies at some time or another two to all of those. So I think it's a deep well that we could dig into probably any one of these things and explore some of the ideas on maybe how we can either mitigate maybe cutting some of the corners or which corners should we be cutting. But yeah, I think there's lots to talk about there.

Doug Downs (04:42):

We do. And I suppose with generative ai, there's so many corners we can cut now, we just did an episode last week with Michael Smart saying that studies have shown 37% average increased output, at least whether you call that productivity, I think is a whole discussion because I think we're making content and not necessarily contact, but what are some of the ways that we do cut quarters?

Jeremy Enns (05:07):

Yeah, I mean I think that they're at the heart of all of this is we're kind of awash in so much information, and as you just mentioned, there's more output now, so there's going to only be more of it. And so I think that most of us, we know we need to market a podcast and create a podcast or whatever it is, whatever kind of piece of marketing material that we're using to grow our businesses and even podcasts themselves or any content channel. I think we get into that and we think that this is a quick fix for getting more clients, more customers growing, our brand awareness, whatever that might be, that the goals are just

Doug Downs (05:41):

More stuff, just more stuff, more stuff.

Jeremy Enns (05:43):

And I think that what we're lacking that is the root cause of the cutting corners, is any kind of discernment or clarity on what actually matters. And it's kind of like you could take any one of these things can be done well and be effective, but they're not going to work equally for everyone. And a lot of that comes back to what are your specific goals around whatever the work that you're doing is, and what are your unique talents and skills and all of these things. What is your audience receptive to? And so I think where we need to start is looking at this kind of like what can I do better than other people if I bring my full self to this task? Let's say that I have an innate skill for storytelling, which is something that personally I think I do, it's something that is innate but also has been developed.

(06:26):

And I think, okay, for me, this is something that a lot of people are going to try to cut corners on storytelling. So that's something where, okay, I have this unique skill. I probably actually want to do way more work on this than other people because this is already some fertile ground where I know I can compete. And so if I do more than is reasonable, a lot of people might say, I spend more time writing, I spend more time thinking about storytelling and how do I integrate that into my marketing? That's probably something that I can ignore almost everything else. And I can say, okay, I'm going to choose either to cut corners in other places or just not do those things whatsoever and really focus on this one more narrow skillset and one more application by marketing. And I'm going to do this so much better than everybody else who is cutting corners here and they're going to be other people who are there going to be on YouTube and they're going to be doing an amazing job.

(07:10):

And I'm going to be like, well, okay, if I want to get results from YouTube, I'll also have to do an unreasonable kind of job at putting in the work. Or I can say, okay, YouTube is not really that important to me. I'm going to do the bare minimum here and I'm also going to have the bare minimum expectations around it. I'm not going to expect that it's going to work for me. This is a kind of like, okay, my wheelhouse is over here. Anything else? Like, sure, let's try some stuff. Let's use some ai. Let's do some content repurposing. But this is a lottery ticket and maybe something takes off there, probably it won't. And so then I have to just align my expectations with the work that I'm willing to put into it.

Doug Downs (07:42):

That's perfect because that's audience research. It's having key performance indicators. I can understand how is my success or lack of success possibly impacting my goals and the strategies that I'm trying to impact in reality cutting corners. Sometimes it's laziness for sure, and I'm guilty of it just as much as anybody else, but to take that deep breath, to slow down, it's hard because I mean, I'm overworked. I had six meetings today and from each meeting I had some work, and now I go back to my desk and I barely have, I've got an onslaught of email in the two hours, three hours I've got left at work. How am I supposed to not cut corners? I'm just trying to find a sharper knife.

Jeremy Enns (08:27):

Yeah, there's this quote, I can't remember who the original person who said it is, but I heard it from Morgan Housel who's a writer that I really like, and I think it was on the podcast how I write with David Perel. And he had this quote that was something like that he has learned or heard from working in many multimillion and billion dollar businesses as a kind of observer and consultant was that every successful business is a loosely functioning disaster. And so I think this is something that I have experienced for myself as well. And I think that this is a lot of the people that I work with haven't made this turning point, which it's not really a turning point of getting things under control. It's this turning point of realizing that you will never get everything under control and actually a lot of fires you just need to let burn in the background.

(09:10):

And this is something like if I look back at, and this is something that it's tough because I don't necessarily feel great about this, but my level of email that is unresponded in my inbox is huge months, and it's probably a year now that there's, it's not like everybody, but there are emails that I'm like, I'd like to get back to that. It's not urgent, but it just is not at the top of the priority list. And you can drive yourself crazy trying to keep up with all of this, and it crowds out all of the more important work. And so I think that this is something that startups talk a lot about in that space, in the tech space where it's like you reach this point where you realize you have to deal with stuff that is broken and just let it be broken and work on the most important thing to keep moving forward.

(09:52):

And I think that I work with so many people who you start out and you're on top of everything and you can do everything pretty well. And I think a lot of times with a side hustle, you can do this because there's low pressure on it and it's like, okay, I can craft a great video or a great podcast and I have no pressure to release it whenever, and so I can make it perfect and then I can ship it and then I can start the next thing. And then once you get into all this other admin that comes with success, it kind of crowds out a lot of this other stuff. And so you can't do that as well anymore. And so I think the turning point is realizing like, okay, I am at a point where I probably can't hire everybody. I don't have the budget to do everything perfectly.

(10:28):

And so we just have to accept a lower standard of quality on a lot of things. But a lot of us don't give ourselves time to think and develop ideas and think about, okay, there's something here. What would make this really original and really unique that nobody has heard about on the podcast before? And so that's something where I think we can say, yeah, we're going to cut some corners elsewhere. We're going to do badly a lot of things in our business, but we still have to keep these small number of things where we say, okay, these are the things that are really going to matter most for my business. And so I'm going to do twice the work or three times the work that everybody else is doing on those things.

Doug Downs (11:00):

Let me confess some of my sins. Bless me, Jeremy, for I have sinned. I'm going to outline some of the ways that I know I have and still do cut corners more than half the time. Outline for me, if you can just in some bullet ideas, how that particular corner that I've cut might be causing damage to my brand. For example, sin number one is I do tend to post the same content to three or four different social media platforms from this discussion. I'll probably create a reel and I'll post it to Instagram and I'll post it to TikTok and I will post it to Facebook stories. How have I sinned?

Jeremy Enns (11:40):

The interesting thing is sometimes crossposting really works. There was a time where posting screenshots from Twitter before it converted to X on LinkedIn and Instagram worked really well. And it's like it kind of shouldn't, but somehow it does. And there's other interesting things with podcasting where people will do fake podcasts, they won't even be having an interview, but TikTok and Instagram reels these in the past

Doug Downs (12:01):

Years off screen to answer nobody's question. Yes,

Jeremy Enns (12:05):

Which is interesting. It's not actually technically repurposing. It was made for that platform, which is maybe one of the reasons why I think those actually do better than actual repurposing, which kind of sucks if you are a podcaster. But I think for me, I often think about, okay, if I'm going to do this, what is my primary platform? I'm going to craft the content that is specifically for let's say LinkedIn. And so I'm going to follow all the LinkedIn conventions, whatever works well on LinkedIn, I'm going to make the post for that. And then can I repurpose this elsewhere? Okay, let's do that and maybe I won't put that much work into it, but I'm not going to expect it to do anything. And then you have to balance out the brand perception of, okay, if I post this to Facebook and somebody comes across this and it's using different languaging, different kind of culture than every platform has its own kind of unique culture, it has its own unique way of speaking about a topic and engaging and is this damaging to my brand?

(12:59):

If this is their first impression of me and my brand, are they going to look at this and be like, this guy doesn't know where he's at or what he's doing here? And it's obvious that you lose kind of authority in that sense. And this is Twitter for a long time, I don't think I have anybody in my Twitter followers anymore who is like this, but you would get so many cross posts from other platforms that were just auto tweets and you just look at them and you're like, okay, this person is not an active contributor to this environment. They don't know what they're doing. They kind of look clueless. And if media or social media is part of your brand and what you offer, probably you don't want people thinking about you like that.

Doug Downs (13:35):

Okay, using chat GPT, not so much for headers and ideas. I actually, I don't know about you, but I kind of absolve all sin for that. I think that's okay, but I use it to write the majority of my blog post and then massage the blog post. I know you don't do this because I've read your newsletter. There's no way chat PT is turning that out. It's got to be coming from your brain. How have I sinned?

Jeremy Enns (13:59):

This I think has a lot to do with how you want your brand to be perceived. Again, I'm a big branding nerd, and so a lot of this ultimately does come back to that, whether you're a solo printer or you have a team working with you or you're a massive brand. But I think the way I think about this is let's assume that, I mean AI's here, it's going to be more here if it isn't already. And so there's going to be more AI generated content. And so if I think about what is my brand strategy here, and it ties into what your product offerings are too. And so I think about my products and really most of my brand is access to me and I think of myself, the differentiator not being a source of information, but a source of critical thinking and problem solving and unique idea generation. And so for me,

(14:49):

I would never do that because it's frustrating to see the output. And so I know that my ability as a writer is above chat GBTs. And I also know that it's not about articulation of ideas. It's like for me specifically, this is not going to be true for everyone. It's like artful articulation of ideas I want to throw in. So I have a background in poetry writing as well and things like that and songwriting. And so I really like a delightful turn of phrase, and I like throwing in little Easter eggs and stuff that are just for myself that I'm like, Ooh, that's a fun sentence. And so there's a personal fulfillment that comes from this, but there's also something that comes through to the readers where it's like there's this psychological phenomenon called costly signaling. And so it's essentially that people can interpret, they can sense when you have spent a lot of time on something.

(15:35):

And so a lot of times the easiest example of this is say you have a product or a newsletter and you say 40 hours of research goes into every newsletter I send out that now implies to the reader that like, wow, this person's done a lot of work. It must be good. And so that's a very obvious way to say that, but you can also demonstrate that in other ways that become, a lot of times people will say like, oh, did you get AI to write this? And I'm like, no, I spend three hours a day writing. And I don't say that in the marketing for the newsletter, but I think that it comes through in that, oh, more effort went into this than I get from other newsletters. And so I value this more highly.

Doug Downs (16:12):

Okay, and one other sin I can confess to is I am currently running a cold email campaign. Am I cutting a corner? Am I committing a sin?

Jeremy Enns (16:22):

I think that depends entirely on the content of the emails. So because I have at times, I've gone back and forth, I've done cold email in the past as well, and I've done good cold email and I've done bad cold email. And I also think that there's a lot, there's so much that it depends on, I think that you can, so one of the things I've been thinking about that I don't know, this doesn't feel unethical to me at all. I think sometimes a cold email can be unethical when you're adding people to a massive list and just blasting them and they have to unsubscribe, that is technically illegal. I don't think it's problematic necessarily to directly email somebody who you have their email address because publicly available and say, Hey, here's a great resource. I think you might. And so one of the things that I'm thinking about doing is I've got a big mega blog post on podcast growth that's slowly coming together, and I thought, actually it would be a really good strategy to just start sending this article to people.

(17:15):

No ask whatsoever. It's not book a call. It's not whatever. It's just like, Hey, here's the thing that you might find helpful since you're in podcasting, I know it's hard to find growth resources. Here's one I've been working on, good luck and that's it. And I've actually seen some results from other campaigns that people have run in cold email that actually not having a call to action works better. And it starts more conversations because it's the opposite of what most people get. And so it feels more generous. It feels like people still know what this is, but it's actually pleased that you didn't just get pitched to without any offer. And it's surprising, especially for people who are in marketing, you get a cold email, you're like, okay, what's the pitch going to be? I'm not going to jump on a call. And then you're like, wait, where's the ask?

(17:55):

What's going on here? It almost confounds you a little bit. That's something that I think is a great cold email campaign. I think there's many versions of it. Again, I think it depends how will people that a lot of times it comes back to me and thinking, if this is somebody's first impression with me, am I digging myself a hole with this that I'm then going to have to climb out of? Or is this at worst neutral that they can be like, ignore that email or check out the resource or whatever. Or they can be like, oh, this is great. Can we talk more and further the conversation

Doug Downs (18:26):

Break the pattern is another heuristic, so that's a great idea. Last question. If I'm leading a marketing team or a public relations team, how can I detect that my team has started to cut corners? One thing that burst to my dispelling mistakes that right away, I know the mentality of the team is they're pushing through too fast.

Jeremy Enns (18:45):

Yeah, I mean

(18:48):

This definitely depends on what the company culture or standard of quality is. And so I think that a lot of times, I mean, you'll certainly potentially hear from clients if you're cutting corners, especially long time clients, if the quality depths, then there's going to be an obvious indicator that you're getting angry emails. But I think internally, I think there is, depending on how you work together, I think that there can be monitoring the conversation, and a lot of times there'll be joking about chat GBT or whatever the cutting the corner that is being cut might be. And I think that with all these tools available, that's something where I would kind of step in and reinforce the like, Hey, yeah, we use these tools, but remember our center of gravity is up here. This is what we're aiming for, and if we're not delivering on that, we need to talk about that.

(19:39):

And so I think there is some internal chatter just how are people thinking about these things? What's the tone of the language? I think that's an indicator a lot of times. I think also just addressing when people come in, either when you start using a new tool or in the hiring and onboarding processes, the biggest point of leverage where you set that, okay, this is okay and we use these tools for these things, but we always need to make sure that we're hitting this benchmark. And so having some way to detect that is important as well. And I think a lot of times when people are coming onto a team, they don't have that intuitive sense, and so you might be able to look at a piece of content and be like, okay, this isn't meeting the bar. But to be able to explain why it isn't, I think that that is important when people first start working for you, but also then having occasional resets or I would even think about team, this is actually a really good one that would be useful for a team of content specialist is doing, I dunno, monthly or quarterly audits or tear downs.

(20:33):

And it's like at random every quarter, every month we sit down and we look at some of the content we produce for our clients, and we as a team say, okay, so what was going on in this one here? What's the thought process? And these could be good examples, bad examples, but that adds this level. Anything that I produce might get pulled up for that. And so I'm maybe going to put that in extra five or 10% and not cut that corner. Because if I get pulled up in the hot seat and say like, okay, so what's going on here? This was the goal here. This is what we ended up with and everybody else is maybe chiming in and like, okay, this is what was done. Well, maybe here's some things I could have done better. This feels like it was rushed or whatever that might be. I think everybody's going to raise their level

Doug Downs (21:12):

And putting that extra effort in, which I know you do for your newsletter because I can read it every single time. This conversation feels like when I've had a thousand times with you and yet you and I have talked maybe twice the whole time that I've known you. Do you see the benefit from it? Is it worth putting in the extra effort? That's basically what I'm asking.

Jeremy Enns (21:34):

So yes, but I think it's not necessarily a short-term thing. I think that it builds over months or you could think about it in terms of timescale or in terms of number of interactions that somebody has with you. And so I think we encounter so much content online, and I think that it's not that rare to find a great piece of content on any topic, but it is rare to find a consistently really good quality from one person who every time that you open up your email from them, you're like, wow, I never thought about it that way. And so that's where I am more optimizing for is that over the long term, I want to think about giving this experience that is above what people expect.

Doug Downs (22:14):

It feels like I get to spend time with you every morning when I read you newsletter, but thank you for your time again today.

Jeremy Enns (22:19):

Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Doug.

Doug Downs (22:22):

If you'd like to send a message to my guest, Jeremy Enns, we've got some contact information in the show notes, personal recommendation, absolutely subscribe to Jeremy's newsletter and have a listen to his podcast as well. Stories and Strategies is a co-production of JGR Communications and Stories and Strategies podcasts. If you like this episode, please leave a rating, possibly a review. Thanks as always, to Gold Star Producer Emily Page. And lastly, do us a favor forward this episode to one friend. Thanks for listening.