Mike Pascarella: Greetings. My name is Mike Pascarella, President of Pascarella Multimedia. Welcome to our featured guest series, consisting of short casual conversations with compelling personalities. Our guest today is Steve Schuster. Steve has been in the field of technology since the early 1980s, first as an engineer and then as a marketing professional. In 1993, he launched Rainier Communications, one of the world's leading PR agencies for technology companies, at which he currently serves as CEO and chief strategist. And in the spirit of a true Renaissance man, Steve is also a published singer/songwriter and recording artist. He is also a photographer and sits on boards of directors for several nonprofit organizations. Hello, Steve. How goes it?
Steve Schuster: Good, Mike. Thanks for having me.
Mike: It's my pleasure. As one of the top public relations specialists in the industry, what do you see as some of the biggest challenges facing businesses today?
Steve: It really depends. There are kind of two classes of companies that I've observed over the last 10 months of the pandemic, those who really closed ranks, hunkered down with a bunker mentality of conserving cash at all costs, and one of those costs was marketing and exposure. The other class of companies either maintained their marketing and business development efforts, or even doubled down on them during the pandemic in order to emerge stronger. The challenges are different for those two classes. Obviously, the ones that have continued to market need to work to defend what they've accomplished during the last 10 months, while the companies that really hunkered down, they've got a hole to climb out of so they need to really now embrace the idea that we're back to needing to market and to talk to the market.
I have a saying that I tell my clients who might want to do things on a project basis that, "If you walk into a room and you turn a light on, a bright light, and then you turn it off again, the room is just as dark as it was before." Effectively, you've wasted the investment of turning the switch on and back off. Same thing goes for marketing. At the beginning of the pandemic, I encouraged everybody that I knew in tech to keep going with marketing, not because I was interested in the billings but because I knew it was a good idea. I knew it would be a bad idea to turn out the lights.
Mike: How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected marketing strategies from your standpoint? How has that changed how you approach this for your clients?
Steve: Well, the biggest earthquake in the tech industry is the absence of trade shows. So many of these tech companies, especially startups who just don't have any exposure, really rely on trade shows like CES and Mobile World Congress and others to get the exposure that they need to customers, to partners, to investors, and that all went away. Basically, what's had to happen is the budgets have had to be repurposed and new ways of communicating with those audiences needed to be implemented. And so, we recommended right from the beginning, just really amping up content generation, including self-publishing like blogs and LinkedIn campaigns, with a lot of content, content-rich LinkedIn campaigns and video production. Companies that had not done video at all before, we encouraged them to do that because it's a very effective means of communication.
We kind of ate our own dog food and we went from about two blog posts a month to about two to three a week and started a video series and created a nice library on our YouTube channel, and it's really paid off. I mean, my vision back in March was, "Well, this is going to end in some form some day and it's probably not going to be years. We'll probably get to a point where we'll figure out a new way to do business together and I want to be in the strongest position possible. I want to have kept myself top of mind, kept my company top of mind." And I think this is the same thing for other companies that you've got to catapult yourself to the front of the line and really be top of mind, and the only way to do that is to invest and to create a lot of content.
Mike: Indeed. I have seen that you have amped up your content quite a bit and I think it is very effective. And what's important about companies like Rainier getting the message out, especially about marketing, is that you're essentially helping businesses to take the next step to see it. Not only it's something that you're talking about in the video but it's also something that they're seeing firsthand and I think that's very effective.
Steve: Thank you.
Mike: I'm hearing business owners and executives talk a lot about the need to increase top of funnel activity. Of course, that's first and foremost, but they're also concerned with incurring additional expense. Is there an effective way right now to strike a reasonable balance between those two needs?
Steve: Well, I think the first question any company has to ask itself is, "What will happen if we slow or stop top -of-funnel activities? What will the results be?" And people can pretty quickly say, "Well, nobody will contact us anymore." No company that wants to continue doing business is going to want to do that. Again, that's the concept of going dark. Now, budgets are a reality, so that's why I go back to the self-publishing, the user-written content, which can be done in-house if you have the capabilities or can be contracted out to solo practitioners or agencies. But you've got to do... In my opinion, I would recommend that any company do as much top-of-funnel activities as possible because that's where your business is going to come from.
And as an example, again, Rainier, we amped up our top-of-funnel activities starting in March, and it was very slow through much of 2020 until about after Labor Day when all of the fruits of our labor really came to, and it's been remarkable. All of a sudden, I feel the businesses coming back. People are saying, "We can't just do nothing anymore. That's not working." And so, our funnel is remarkably full at this point because of the activities that we did.
Mike: Interesting. Now, Steve, according to your crystal ball, what do the next few months look like? Can you see a light at the end of the tunnel?
Steve: I think we're in the light at the end of the tunnel, actually. And I think it's partly bullishness around the vaccine and it's partly just, as I said before, people being tired of doing nothing. And I think that there has been so much pent up anticipation about 2021 being a better year than 2020, and I think people are taking action. They're allocating budgets and I think we are in that light at the end of the tunnel, and I think we're going to figure out all the ways that we need to do business differently and some of those are going to stick. Even when we can get together at trade shows, it's not clear whether there will be trade shows. Face-to-face demos, people might not get on a plane any longer, and I think this is all progress. It's actually very good. We've been thrust into learning how to communicate virtually. We've all gotten pretty good at it, even my 82 year old mom knows how to use Zoom. And I'm really excited what 2021 is bringing.
Mike: I've been in the business world for many years and I've seen many examples of how creativity and keeping on top of the client's needs have seen businesses through, even in the most difficult times. It's good to know people like you and companies like Rainier are guiding the way for them. How can clients get in touch with you?
Steve: They can go to our website, which is www.rainierco.com. That's R-A-I-N-I-E-R-C-O.com. There's a ton of information there. We've got a very content-rich website. You can go to our YouTube channel, Rainierco on Twitter and my personal cell phone number is on my LinkedIn profile, so anybody should feel free to call that if they're interested in finding out what we might be able to do together.
Mike: There you go, everybody. Steve Schuster is available. His insight and his experience is available for you. Just look him up or give him a call right on his personal cell phone. Well, thanks again, Steve. This is Mike Pascarella, from Pascarella Multimedia, thanking you all for joining me and Steve. Stay well, everyone!
