Is your brand’s story building trust—or are you leaving credibility to chance? Our guest today is Karla Jo Helms, Founder and CEO of JOTO PR Disruptors™. Karla is an expert in transforming B2B brands through innovative public relations strategies. With a career dedicated to building trust, managing crises, and leveraging data-driven storytelling, she has helped countless businesses scale and thrive. She’s here to share her insights on harnessing the power of PR to elevate B2B brands, even in the most challenging environments.
Karla Jo Helms, Chief Evangelist and Anti-PR Strategist Karla Jo learned firsthand how unforgiving business can be when millions of dollars are on the line—and how the control of public opinion often determines whether one company is happily chosen, or another is brutally rejected. Being an alumni of crisis management, Karla Jo has worked with litigation attorneys, private investigators and the media to help restore companies of goodwill back into the good graces of public opinion—Karla Jo operates on the ethic of getting it right the first time, not relying on second chances and doing what it takes to excel. Karla Jo has patterned her agency on the perfect balance of crisis management, entrepreneurial insight and proven public relations experience. Helms speaks globally on public relations, how the PR industry itself has lost its way and how, in the right hands, corporations can harness the power of PR to drive markets and impact market perception.
Resources
Joto PR Disruptors™ website: https://jotopr.com/
The B2B Agility podcast website: https://www.b2bagility.com
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Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom:
Is your brand story building trust or are you leaving credibility to chance? Our guest today is Karla Jo Helms, founder and CEO of Jodoak PR Disruptors. Karla Jo is an expert in transforming B2B brands through innovative public relations strategies. With a career dedicated to building trust, managing crises, and leveraging data-driven storytelling, she’s helped countless businesses scale and thrive. She’s gonna share her insights on harnessing the power of PR to elevate B2B brands even in the most challenging environments. Welcome to the show, Karla Jo.
Karla Jo Helms: Hey, Greg. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Looking forward to talking about all of this with you. Before we dive in, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and what led you to found Johto PR Disruptors?
Karla Jo Helms: Yeah, sure, thanks. My background’s in crisis management, so I kind of got into that right out of school, a little bit of a fluke. But for the first half of my career, that’s all I knew. I worked with some of the best PRs in the world, litigation attorneys, private investigators. I worked on some of the most challenging B2B embezzlement, breaches, fraud. campaigns, you name it. And I learned early on, kind of disillusioned me about the business world, but PR is used as a weapon in my line of work in crisis management. And I learned that, you know, if you can’t take them out like the Wild West, you can print them out. And unfortunately, every campaign that I ever worked on, It was always a bigger competitor that was trying to take out a smaller competitor that had better technology, more agile technology, and were taking over market share. And they tried to take them out in the court of public opinion. And with that, I learned the playbook. I learned the black ops playbook. And I made a resolution. in my early career that I was gonna do everything I could to teach that playbook to the good guys so they could proactively guide and control public opinion to help them expand and never be in that situation again. And so that was the birth of Johto PR. We built a trademark process using all those techniques and the media’s algorithm, and we call that anti-PR today. So there you go.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in here. And we’re going to talk about a few things here, but want to start with building trust. And, you know, some of the some of the things that you just mentioned can kind of erode trust. If you know, if there’s if there’s this this kind of black ops process or whatever behind the scenes. So let’s talk about the cornerstones of credibility. You’ve emphasized that credibility and transparency are vital for successful B2B partnerships. Maybe touched on this a little bit, how bad is it out there? Is credibility and transparency a big issue with companies these days and is it getting better or worse? I know that was like five questions, but maybe just pick a couple.
Karla Jo Helms: It’s an issue. It will always be an issue. Gone are the days of the fluffy PR, super polished jargon. We’re so great. We’re so this, we’re that. You know, gone are those days, right? And let me just give you a little bit of data about the media. I mean, it is a 24-7 news cycle. The U.S. media controls the world and the rest of the media, right? We have the network media that pretty much took over like in 2016 where you don’t have this geographical centralized mainstream media in New York anymore that’s controlling things, right? It’s the network media all over the world. It exponentially increased in 2020. Today you have you know, not only mainstream media, but what you have under that, that’s the foundation for the mainstream media is all your podcasters, right? Your thought leaders, your bloggers, you know, your B2B trade and publications that are catering now to super targeted segments of the B2B population, right? There are so many channels today to get your message out on, like authentic message, that if you aren’t driving the conversation, right? I had a client tell me the other day, God, if you’re not in the news, you’re nothing, right? It’s like a, it’s a PR world today. If you’re not driving that conversation and driving it with authenticity, right? And continuously doing it, then it’s sort of like at your peril.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. What would you consider the cornerstones of building that credibility and why do you think these qualities would resonate so strongly in today’s business landscape?
Karla Jo Helms: Yeah. Well, with the advent of social media and now people being able to publish so many things and you have so many channels and also with technology, you can be quickly found out if you don’t tell the truth. So truth. Being truthful is the cornerstone. The other one is being consistent, filling that vacuum consistently, creating that familiarity. And the other one is always tying it back to your mission. Like people have a purpose for being in business. They have a purpose of why their technology or their services exist. People buy into the why before they buy into the what. If you tell that story and if you align everything you do with your purpose, then that will keep you authentic and it will build your brand. So those would be the three cornerstones.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, let’s say, you know, assuming that a brand knows its mission, because I think if it doesn’t, that’s a whole other, that’s a whole other conversation probably. But, you know, assuming they know their mission, you know, what, what are some practical steps, you know, those, those listening out there that. Yeah, they’ve got some of those things, but they’re still that there’s a lack of trust. There’s a lack of perceived credibility at the very least. You know, what are some practical steps they could take to start building that and working towards that with their customers and partners?
Karla Jo Helms: You know, 100% would be earned media, right? Listen, if you have a technology that’s like saving lives or making things more transparent, say in finance or healthcare or whatever, right? The types of stories and the communication that you really want to drive today is not how great you are, but it is really exploiting those issues and the controversies and the harm and the money wasted and the lack of transparency that your services and technology solves. People are looking for help today, they’re looking for answers. And if you can be the thought leader, right, and if you can give those tips and that advice, and you can really educate people, just like you would in sales, about what’s really happening and what people really need to do and be very forthcoming with your data and your advice, that is what companies can do to really drive their authenticity and truthfulness.
Greg Kihlstrom: How do you separate that from, because I think on the one end of that spectrum is like content marketing, right? And it’s marketing and it’s salesy, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. How do you differentiate what you just described from, okay, let’s get the content team on it and start marketing stuff?
Karla Jo Helms: Yeah, PR is marketing’s friend. It’s in an intelligent life cycle of PR marketing sales. PR is first. PR warms the markets up, it gets them to think newly, it gets people to change their minds, and then marketing starts the demand gen process, right, to a warmed up market, and then sales obviously closes. Whenever you’re thinking of let’s do the marketing and so forth, the practitioners in PR should be looking at How do I put that even more top of funnel? How do I find out, okay, we’re trying to sell this, but what’s the pain that we’re trying to solve? You know, what are those issues that really people are running into, right? What are the troubles? I mean, you never see a good news story, right? So, like, trace it back to the real harm, the real economic loss, the real transparency issues, the lack of democratization, you know, all of those stats, trace it all the way back. You know what your customers are experiencing, right? Tell those stories without making it promotional, right? As a news story, that’s what news does. It’s an automatic, well, what is the solution when people read about that? And that’s when you can start your marketing process after that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. And so, you know, in the context, I mean, I like how you characterize the, you know, PR marketing and sales relationship. Maybe the part of that, I guess, is using PR to scale. I mean, as marketing needs to scale, sales needs to scale, PR is part of that. How should brands, if they’re not thinking about PR as bottom of the funnel, sales acquisition per se, how should they be thinking about using PR to scale their business?
Karla Jo Helms: Yeah, that’s a really good question. PR is always top of funnel. I think about this, you have to look at your total addressable market. And I’m not talking about looking at it in terms of the revenues, look at in terms of numbers. Like, who are your target audiences? Who influences those target audiences? How big is that? You know, three to 7%, roughly, are people that are gonna buy from you now, 3% now, the other 4% of that 7% later, at any given time, right? But then you have the other, you know what, 90%, that’s 93%, that you have to continually educate and get them to change minds. When they change their minds or they think newly, then you have more people in that three to 7%. That’s a continuous process at the top of funnel, right? So companies today, especially companies that we work with, right, they’re looking at like 30% of their entire marketing funnel is like PR. And a lot of companies today are upwards of 50% because they know that in this highly iterative, fast, you know, technological, fast growth process that, you know, the differentiators are the guys that control public opinion. It’s not always the technology. Right. So they should really look at that. And if they aren’t, you know, if they don’t have that piece of the pie, you know, start off, you know, 5 percent, then work to 10 percent, then 15 percent. You don’t have to do that overnight. But I would seriously start working on that if you have.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, definitely. So I want to switch gears a little bit here and talk about the job market. You know, we’re in year seven of this show, and I feel like we’ve been on this like roller coaster, probably like seven different job markets in seven years or something. It feels like it at least. Whether times are good economically or bad, the job market is always a challenge. But approaching things in a strategic way can certainly help those brands that are looking for the best talent. How do you look at how a strong PR strategy can, in this case, help businesses attract and retain that top tier talent?
Karla Jo Helms: It’s such a great question. It has always been known, and I see this from my clients over and over again, good publicity, good PR, the byproduct is you get the better candidates. You get the better candidates when you’re hiring. Winners want to work for winners. And how do you know you’re a winner? You’re in the news, right? And one of the biggest brand ambassadors in PR is, and it’s the most overlooked, but it’s the most profitable, is when your employees Right. And your key executives, your stakeholders, they’re, they see you in the news and you have to do your own internal campaigns around this. Right. They’ll tell people and you know, high producers have high producer friends. Right. And you know, listen, PR has so many markers as far as like how it impacts revenues, marketing ROI, you know, shareholder price and so forth. People know this intrinsically, even if they don’t know the numbers. And people that are looking to, you know, make their career, they wanna stay with winners, right? So one of the biggest things you could do in a down market and an up market is not only proactively publicize your good works, but then have an internal campaign to make sure every one of your stakeholders, your employees know it, because they will share the love. It’s like this force multiplier.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Well, and back to the credibility and the authenticity conversation, this is certainly an area where A lot of employees, you know, it may not even be the primary consideration, but it’s definitely a top consideration is just the values and the culture of the company that they want to or do work for.
Karla Jo Helms: That’s big today.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s huge. And yet it’s also, it’s huge when those things don’t align as well. Right. So, you know, how do you, how do you advise a company to, you know, align the, I mean, obviously you always want to say the best thing. And even if it’s this tiny little program that does this one little thing, like you want to talk about it, but how do you, how do you recommend aligning that, you know, internal culture with external messaging?
Karla Jo Helms: Yeah, you get great questions. You know, I, I’ll go back to the mission of the company and, um, people can pass this off as such a, uh, tiny little thing. They don’t realize how, uh, incredibly impactful it is. You know, we put about us on our websites and it was almost just like this thing that we have to check off. Right. But the purpose of the campaign, the purpose of the company, those are very highly aligned. Right. And in order to achieve anything in business and even any administrative programs and so forth, it has to be aligned to the mission statement and the purpose of the company. Right. If you align that in your external messaging, right, no matter what, no external message is going to go out unless it conceptually, or even verbatim, aligns with the mission statement of the company. We’re not going to be in that publication unless that publication aligns with that statement. We’re not going to put out this statement unless it aligns with it. We’re not going to answer this unless it aligns with it. We’re not going to do this unless it aligns with it, right? The more you ding in that message, right, externally and internally, It does a couple of things, right? It breeds familiarity and then people start to buy into it, right? They don’t have to agree with it at first. I mean, most people that are a company do agree with it, right? But they start to buy into it, but it also does something else. It creates this culture and a life of its own where that’s what you want. You want people pushing the brand message and mission and the The people to do it is the PR marketing teams, right? It’s probably the biggest thing that we advocate for and push in our PR strategies, and I think that’s why we get so much press for our clients.
Greg Kihlstrom: So I wanna talk a little bit about looking ahead, but also, I have an unofficial rule that I have to bring up AI in every interview, so I’m gonna let’s go there. A lot of what we’ve been talking about is authenticity and mission, and to some those feel like nebulous, maybe soft things that are hard to define in some cases. Data, analytics, AI, these things are shaping everything that everybody’s doing really in business. How do you see AI and analytics reshaping your world of PR and communication strategies?
Karla Jo Helms: Well, I’m really glad you asked that question. I mean, in guiding and controlling public opinion, it’s based on three things. It’s based on physics, it’s based on math, and it’s based on emotion. So analytics and crisis management is something that we have always done. I see the way AI transforming agencies is that they will really be able to connect the dots with the top of the funnel statistics that have been so nebulous for brands. Why do we track impressions? What the hell is impressions? You know, it, uh, you know, things like that, right? How do we like connect to the conversions and like show increased brand awareness, right? How do we show customer acquisition costs, you know, improving sales velocity, right? Improving things like that. Like this age, we will, agencies will be able to do this better and better and better and be able to predict their comps plans, you know, like how much communication do we have to have, right? And how many times consistently to reach our target audience this many times to then get awareness that there is a problem and then move the person down the funnel to then get, you know, now conversions to then get sales and so forth. That is what AI and analytics will bring to the agencies.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I think it, it underscores, you know, what I was saying. It doesn’t mean that strategy and insights and research were not guiding it previously, but it’s, it’s true that like better access to data and more visibility on that is going to, I think I’m an optimist when it comes to this. I think it’s going to make it clearer and demonstrate value, not only for those doing the work, but for the brands benefiting from the work, right? So how does a company embrace that fully? How do they use data to enhance their PR strategies and strengthen these perception as well as the relationships?
Karla Jo Helms: Well, tech’s been doing that for quite a while now, right? And we work with all tech companies, but it’s been you know, benchmarked and known that long-term PR campaigns really increased like brand awareness, 20% for brands, right? But we’ve also seen numbers like reduced customer acquisition costs, 10 to 30%, right? Sales velocity increasing like 15%. you know, these are benchmarks that we’ve been able to track, like 2X in sustainable growth, right? Shareholder price, like multiples increasing. What I think is gonna happen now is that, you know, every industry and company is different, right? But they are benchmarks that each industry can look at and then be able to really like connect those, like all the top of funnel statistics to the middle of funnel, to the bottom of funnel, to the sales, and then they’ll be able to project out what they need to do, just like sales, right? What they need, how much they need in the pipeline. It’ll be like, how much communication do we need? They’ll be able to do that.
Greg Kihlstrom: That sounds amazing, by the way, to me.
Karla Jo Helms: It’s gonna take a little bit of while because you know, I’ll tell you this about PR, right? Is that PR’s job is to change minds and get people to think newly. It is not a sales lead conversion, right? So there are specific statistics that have seemed nebulous to others in the past because they didn’t know how they connected with middle and bottom of the funnel. That’s gonna be easier to show the board. like in the future. Right. And it’s also going to be like people are going to be very aware of what it takes to guide public opinion to really help people. And so I’m happy when that day’s coming and it’s not that far out.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. I mean I think we’re there’s already there’s already pieces, lots of, as you already mentioned, like there’s a lot of pieces of that in place already. And as I mean, even marketing has a long way to go to truly tell the full omni-channel story, even though, you know, perhaps got a headstart in some of these areas, but like, I, yeah, I can see the pieces coming together as you’re describing it. So that’s great. Now that we’ve talked about data, let’s maybe circle back to balancing that with, because again, as with anything, I mean, you know, I talk with a lot of people in the MarTech world and as well, and you have so much focus on data and AI and all of these things, and perhaps less of a focus on the creative and the brand side of things. So how do you look at, in the PR world, balancing this focus on this amazing opportunity to have access to better data with keeping the creative part and the, you know, telling that narrative, you know, how should brands be thinking?
Karla Jo Helms: Well, I mean, we’re already doing it, and this is what I see. It is a accelerator or an amplifier for the creativity. When you manage by statistics, right, which we do, or you manage by analytics, you can see what worked, what didn’t work, right? And then it’s the it’s no longer bright idea. Right. Let’s let’s pull out of our you know what and try to figure it out. It’s like this works. So creatively, how can we strengthen that? Right. What is the narrative that we can continue to have long legs? What are the variety of ways that we can, you know, ding in that message, right, to different audiences? Who else can we get on our side to influence our target audience? That’s all creative skill. And this is where AI and technology and analytics really facilitate the creators. Because there’s nothing more disheartening than having bright idea-itis and then doing something and it didn’t work. Right. But you can see that like the ebbs and flows when something works, you can creatively figure out how to continue that narrative. If it didn’t work, you know exactly how to figure out what changed and turn it around. So to me, I think it makes people way more excited and way more creative.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that. So looking ahead, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for businesses to leverage technology, whatever that, whether that’s AI or data or other technology, what do you see as the biggest opportunity to leverage that in their PR efforts?
Karla Jo Helms: Gosh, to really be able to mathematically figure out how many people you have to communicate to, who’s the low-hanging fruit, right? How to get those won over, how to get the influencers of those won over, and mathematically fill that vacuum until you are the influencer in your market. To me, I see that as the biggest opportunity. It’ll be a combination of math and emotion. It’ll be a combination of analytics and creativity. And I see the people that are really, really talented are going to be able to use technology to rise above and be even more talented than what they are, because they’re not going to be mired down in a lot of the mundane tasks or the things that take too long to figure it out. Technology and AI will be able to do that much faster for them. I think one of the things that you will see is that people will be able to respond faster to what’s happening in public opinion and really take control of their narrative and not just have it like really level the playing field between smaller competitors and enterprise and enterprise with other enterprise, right? Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: Love it. Well, thank you so much for all your insights. One last question. I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Karla Jo Helms: That’s a great question. I listen to podcasts. Seriously, I do. I listen to podcasts. I actually have a podcast myself. It’s called Disruption Interruption, where I interview disruptive innovators that are really using technology to change some of the biggest problems that we have in our world today, whether it’s in finance or agriculture or education or insurance or healthcare. you name it, and I find out from them what they’re doing, which, and then the podcast that they listen to or the media that they listen to or what they read, that keeps me pretty agile. So that’s what I do. Yeah.
