By Kim Hanna
Welcome back to Let's Talk About Brand! Today we are talking with Ashley Graham, aka Your Brandista. Ashley is a publicist and empowerment coach who works with conscious brands to elevate their influence through aligned media strategies.
Ashley empowers brands to be able to get their message out there in the places and ways that they want. But not all exposure is equal. Today, Ashley is going to talk about aligned media strategies that make sense for yourself and your brand.
What does PR mean to you?
From a traditional standpoint, we’ll define PR as shaping the public's perception of a business, brand, or entity. However, there’s more to public relations than just that definition. Ashley emphasizes the differences between personal branding and business branding.
“A brand is more of building an emotional connection with your clientele or your audiences. And so when it comes to public relations or media relations, such as taking video, for instance, it's getting a person or two people who are very intertwined in the personal branding side and getting the audience to make an emotional connection with them. A personal brand is really making an emotional connection with the people who you are engaging with.”
When you consistently engage with your audiences and connections, you can start to build more of an emotional connection with them through personal branding.
What is the advantage of building an emotional connection?
There is an advantage to being a thought leader and being an expert. But the emotional connection element is really where the good stuff is! Why is it so important to generate that emotional element as a personal brand?
Ashley responds, “Emotion comes down to trust. When you have an emotional connection with somebody, there's already that trust factor where you know you trust and confide in them to be able to share your story or share messages that are wearing on your heart.”
In conjunction with trust, it comes down to familiarity. When you're emotionally connected to somebody you feel that you've known them forever. There's just more of that personal dynamic there.
How can that personal brand obtain that emotional element through media? Ashley says the possibilities are endless. “You can reach targets or audiences that you probably wouldn't normally meet. For example, going live on video allows you to influence and distribute your message to the masses.”
With traditional networking, or just going out and socializing, you're limited in the capacity to make that emotional connection. Media is global, so the reach is way more significant.
Is building relationships more important than trying to push your brand to people?
You also want to think about building better relationships with people, whether that's your clients, your influences, or your audiences.
Ashley says, “We have to treat our media influences—our bloggers, our influencers, our editors, our writers—with the same integrity that we would treat our clients because they're the ones that are using their brainpower and their creativity to take a story angle and pick it up and then leverage their influence with the outlets that they are found within.”
How can having a strong personal brand presence on social media help with getting media exposure (and the other way around)?
Ashley says that it's like the infinity symbol: one feels the other and then back again. “Social media is PR. And there's so much value that you can get out of just leveraging your personal brand on social media.”
Because anyone can share and retweets wherever content is being circulated, it can even be picked up on larger media platforms. “Recently a good friend of mine, Mariah, did a Tik Tok that ended up going viral, and it was picked up by BET.”
If you are consistent on social media and you keep showing up and producing good content, that has that impact factor of not just posting to post, and that's where the opportunity to go viral or the opportunity to get those pieces picked up on other platforms happens.
What's your advice to those trying to break into the PR industry?
Ashley says, “if you could just familiarize yourself with one element of media relations or PR, it's where social media comes into play as a huge factor to that.”
Familiarize yourself with the types of content that people are putting out there, the conversations that they're having, and find mentors that are either in the publicity space or just content creators.
Content creators and influencers are also publicists. They know how to pitch themselves to brand and how to work out various agreements. If you are on social media, you’re already doing your own PR, you may just not be thinking about it that way.
Find Ashley
Ashley can be found on all platforms as Your Brandista. She’s very active on Instagram, and she’s also growing her Facebook Group, The Conscious PR Community. This group focuses on what it means to live consciously when it comes down to the media's perception. This group is for anyone interested in PR, social media, marketing, and entrepreneurship!
Thank you so much to Ashley Graham of Your Brandista for talking to us today about personal branding and publicity! Make sure to tune in to our live show every single Friday at noon eastern as well as our Tuesdays Twitter chat at noon eastern!