Digital Vision’s Cahill Camden on turning weaknesses to strengths, building a PR product for his agency — and his clients | The UnNoticed Entrepreneur — step into the spotlight.
Digital Vision’s Cahill Camden on turning weaknesses to strengths, building a PR product for his agency — and his clients
Cahill Camden is a part-time Fractional Chief Marketing Officer and the Founder of Digital Vision , and he’s just launched a new product called Press Jockey .
What Does Digital Vision Do?
Digital Vision is a company that Cahill created about six years ago. They specifically do digital marketing for Web3 and technology companies. He does Fractional CMO work as part of that.
When they say “digital marketing,” they focus only on what they’re really good at: public relations (PR), storytelling, and content creation. Think newsletters, blogs, and paid media (Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter).
As a Fractional CMO, he’s helped create marketing strategies for growth for a number of companies in the space that have gone on to get acquired as recently as last year. For example, and Blockchain Foundry .
It’s been an exciting time as they see their clients’ growth from a company that had near-zero users when they started working with Digital Vision to getting acquired with a quarter million users.
From Weaknesses to Strengths
When helping companies to get noticed, they start by understanding how clients differentiate themselves from the rest of the market.
Everyone will always say they’re faster, cheaper, and better. But what a lot of people don’t talk about is the why . Why are they doing what they’re doing? Simon Sinek , who has one of the top TED Talks in the world, has talked about for around a decade.
Cahill and his team look at how any brand can own their “weakness” in the market.
For example, one of Digital Vision’s clients was slower than everyone else, and they said they were faster (which was clearly not true, looking at the reviews). Cahill helped and spun it around, saying they were slower because they were doing more security checks. It’s not speed that his client was competing on — it’s security. And no one else does the security checks that they got.
So they focused on how the client was more secure than their competitors. If customers are looking for something fast but less secure, their brand is not right for them. But if they want security, then they’re definitely the right brand.
That shift in position and story helped amplify the exposure they would get.
This is basically about what may be a strength of the company but has been perceived as a weakness in the market. It’s about having some confidence in why the client is doing it that way. It’s a great thing that, sometimes, only an external consultant can help a company face.
Entrepreneurs think that their brands and companies are perfect and hit all the right marks, but they’ve all focused on slightly different aspects of their market. And for Cahill, it’s important to own those aspects.
For instance, one may have better security than another company. Or they might take more time with their initial assessment of a client. Or they might have more capacity. Entrepreneurs must own these differences and highlight them. Because if everyone is their customer, then no one is their customer.
Outbound and Inbound Public Relations
One of the problems many entrepreneurs have in getting noticed is on the media relations side.
There are two types of PR that entrepreneurs can do. One is outbound PR, which is the typical media or communications room in a large company. It’s the typical PR agency that will understand the brand and story and then cold outreach to the media. They pitch their client’s brand, story, and work to the media and their network. They shop around their client’s expertise and ability to speak on something or a story they might have.
Outbound PR is typically quite expensive, but it can be very powerful. They at Digital Vision do that as an agency, helping people get on national newspapers and top blogs. However, many companies can’t afford the price points that go along with it.
The other type is inbound PR.
Today, there are literally thousands of press requests or media requests from top blogs, top publications, podcasts, TV stations, radio, and news published every day around the web and the world.
This is inbound. People are asking for your help and expertise. The challenge is that those jewels are littered all around the world and the internet, and entrepreneurs got to go out and find and filter them. Does this really make sense for my brand, company, and story?
Where Press Jockey Comes In
Press Jockey , the product and software Digital Vision has just launched, is a tool that does that automatically for entrepreneurs.
It finds and filters thousands of requests daily so that users only get the relevant ones delivered to their inbox; they can respond with a couple of clicks using a template they’ve pre-written or one of the software’s templates.
This will soon be enhanced dramatically by their AI integrations and AI matching.
Cahill built Press Jockey for their agency to handle the inbound press. He’s a customer of his own software.
Previously, he had staff who were paid and who spent dozens and dozens of hours every month searching around the web for the right press requests for the agency’s clients and responding to them. He thought there must be a better way to do it.
Getting Press Jockey Noticed
Cahill has the Digital Vision agency, and now he’s building a product within a service company and building it as a separate brand. To get Press Jockey noticed, they’re doing things that don’t scale. He’s a big believer in that for a number of reasons.
One is that entrepreneurs can get fantastic feedback from early customers. These customers will tell them things they don’t want to hear, directly to their face. They’ll give great feedback. They’ll provide suggestions. They’ll also share it with their friends and other communities if it’s a great product.
For them to do that, Cahill and a couple of people on their team are in communities (Facebook, Discord), and they answer questions about PR in those communities. They give people the opportunity to join small group calls where he or someone else explains insights about PR or demonstrates the product.
Even if someone doesn’t want to use Press Jockey, it will be fine because that person can still get a ton of value from the insights they’re providing.
In doing this, he can see people’s understanding of how to build their story — and where they are getting a bit lost. Based on that, he thinks about how to adjust his presentation and demo. He also gets to know if there’s a specific portion when he’s showing the software and they don’t understand it or want to see it repeated.
He can get fantastic insights into anything related to advertising, copy improvements, onboarding flow, and even the product’s design.
One of the things they do is they’re rapidly iterating on their products: They’re releasing updates almost every single day. And when they see people having a challenge (for example, why is that button there or what does a certain link mean), it gives them the insight that they might need to redesign this so that people really understand it.
Why Target the Non-PR Savvy?
Press Jockey will be targeting the PR world but now, they’re targetting owners of small and medium-sized businesses that may be thinking about PR, have been burned out by a PR agency and weren’t able to get great results, or have been using one of the free platforms, pulling their hair out with how much time they’re spending on those.
Cahill and his team approach them first because they know they won’t understand the product the same way a PR pro or PR agency might.
A PR agency is going to get it, and they’re probably going to work around a lot of the early challenges that any company has. In contrast, a small business that doesn’t get it the same way will get stuck and complain, and they would want to see changes and updates.
In doing that, the folks behind Press Jockey can make the product better so that when they do start to approach the PR world, it will be brilliant.
The reason for their strategy of targeting the non-PR savvy is they want to make sure that their product creates a ton of value for anyone who’s using it. If they can tackle the hard things first, the easier clients or customers who understand the PR world will get it. And it’s going to be an even better experience for them.
This enables them to have that ability to make the product far more valuable for everybody.
They’re also in the process of integrating AI technology like ChatGPT (which is the hot subject of the day). So, in the long run, there will be this ability for any business, person, coach, podcast, e-commerce company, or direct-to-consumer entity to leverage Press Jockey. They will be able to create fantastic pitches with AI, have fantastic relevant matches based on AI, and get great keyword options with their AI and technology. Their product will enable users to do all this for any inbound press.
Despite that, Cahill thinks there’s still a lot of value in outbound press. It’s a very powerful tool. There’s a ton of value in working with an agency when entrepreneurs can afford it and when the time is right.
Acquiring Beta Users
For Press Jockey, he got about a hundred beta users to start with.
To get those users, he focused almost exclusively on content and the type of webinar or educational session that will explain to people and share with them insights on what they do as an agency for clients.
He’s been sharing information with early users, such as what only paying clients typically get. He’s been educating people in communities, and he’s also been having his team jump in and help people choose their keywords and write their pitches. They’re trying to hold people’s hands to guide them on that path to success.
It’s what they’ve been doing for early users, and they will continue doing it until they hit a point where it just becomes too much.
Making Press Jockey More Accessible
Cahill and company are constantly upgrading the app. Recently, they added the free pricing tier (The paid demo is $7 for seven days).
He knows that Press Jockey provides a ton of value. He has an agency, and he built it for his agency. He knows there’s a ton of inbound press and a lot of time savings that anyone can get with their tool.
And so they were contemplating how to get more people to understand the value of their product and see it so that they could potentially take their business to the next level with the press using Press Jockey.
They decided that $7 for a seven-day demo wouldn’t help them get there. Hence, they opened up a free tier, which allows users to put in up to four keywords to let them see if they get matches.
Many people Cahill has talked to was asking him about how his agency is going to find requests from their keyword when they’re special — they’ve got a very specific keyword that they want, or they’ve got a very specific industry or client.
He would then explain that they have an admin account and they’re punching in keywords on people’s behalf. A few days later, he would reach out to those people and say that he found their keyword and presented the results.
At some point, he came to a realisation: Why don’t they just give people the ability to do that for free?
They cannot respond and see all the details, but they can test it out. They can see what the platform looks like, and they can get an understanding that it’s a tool that will help them save a lot of time and get more press exposure at the same time.
This is why they added the free tier.
As they’re constantly doing all these updates, there are times when they will break something. And it’s why they’ve discounted the price by 50% for early adopters. They also state that they’re making upgrades, and this is not a mature product yet; they’re rapidly advancing, and there may be a time when a link is broken.
On Getting Started
Cahill has been a Fractional CMO. He’s helped companies get sold. He’s building out his own product.
And for him, one of the most important things in terms of getting noticed is to get started. Entrepreneurs must start small and scale up from there. For example, he’s saying to clients that they should get version 1 out, then they’ll do version 2 and version 3 and start to get better as they go along.
If entrepreneurs don’t get started, then there’s no way for them to know if their story will resonate with their customers. There’s no way for them to know if they’re even targeting the right customers. There’s no way to know if the media wants to hear what they have to say.
They will likely not be very good in the beginning. They will likely mess up. But if they take that feedback and start to adjust, once they get to version 7 or 8 in 6 months, they will have a polished story and get a lot of media attention. People will say they’re a fantastic speaker and their story is interesting, and they’re going to ask how they got here — and at that point, entrepreneurs could say it’s because they got started.
Originally published at https://theunnoticed.cc on May 12, 2023.
