September 28th, 2025
Answering Questions About PR, Blogs and Content
On Ask a Stupid Question Day, September 28, we found ourselves answering questions about PR, blogs and content, just as you would do at a hair salon. Here’s the dialogue that resulted!
Hair stylist
Morning, what can we do for you today at AASQ salon?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Just a cut and blow, please.
Hair stylist
Sure. What brings you to the salon today?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
I just need my hair doing for a work ‘do’.
Hair stylist
Oh, I see. What is it you do?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
I’m a public relations consultant.
(Hairdresser looks highly confused).
Hair stylist
Sorry, I don’t know what that is.
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
It can also be called PR?
Hair stylist
OK, I’ve heard of that, but I’ve no idea what it is. What do you do exactly?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Well, I run a Lancashire-based PR agency called Catapult PR and I work with individual businesses or organisations, helping them to grow and maintain a strong reputation by … well, to put it quite simply, through storytelling, in one way or another. The storytelling has to have some key ingredients in it in today’s marketing world, so it’s a bit more complex than it sounds. It needs a good strategy behind it.
Hair stylist
Storytelling? What do you mean by that?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Well, every business or product has a story behind it. I bring that story to life, often through words but also through other mediums, such as audio and video, roadshows, research-backed initiatives and lots of creative ideas.
Hair stylist
Right. So who do you tell the story to?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
That’s part of the skill. I have to determine who my client needs to target, if they want to attract business or sales, and then decide how best to reach them. I then have to decide what to say to them and how. That’s what we call the messaging.
Hair stylist
Ah. So you send emails and text messages?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Not quite. We could, and I do write a lot of e-shots for clients, but the messaging relates to the key points we want to communicate to a client’s prospective customers. I often work through the media – through newspapers and magazines, digital news sites and magazines, trade publications, radio and TV, to get the key messages across. I get my clients featured in these things, fundamentally for free. By that, I mean that we don’t pay to appear. I just charge my professional fees to make it happen.
Hair stylist
Gosh that’s interesting? And have you ever got a client onto TV?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
For sure. Just about 10 days ago the last time. GB News was shooting for a day at a local visitor attraction. In November 2024, we had one client story appear on 31 TV stations and 18 TV programmes, including national BBC Breakfast News and national ITV lunchtime news.
Hair stylist
Wow, that’s amazing. I get that and its fab to be on TV, but surely there’s not much point being featured in a newspaper these days?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
You’d be surprised. And, of course, it all depends on the age group that you want to talk to. Some brands only want to talk to older people who prefer to get their information that way. And, for many businesses, trade magazines can be hugely important opinion formers and they are often well read by people in the industry. Those readers might well be prospective customers.
Hair stylist
But everything’s online these days.
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
A lot is, yes, but papers usually create an online version of a story, as well as a print version. Trade magazines often have both online and print versions too. And that can give clients another advantage. And that’s why I said that the storytelling is more complex these days, because it needs to still be compelling but also needs to communicate what’s called EEAT – experience, expertise, authority and trust.
Hair stylist
What. Did somebody say just EEAT! What’s all that about and what’s that advantage you mentioned?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Well, if the PR article, which then gets published by a media title, includes a website link back to the client’s website, that’s hugely valuable for their website. Google loves to see that and, the more influential the media title, the bigger the benefit. It can send visitors directly to their website but also show Google that the business has authority in its sector. Media hold a huge amount of sway with search engines.
Hair stylist
Yeah. Google’s changing a lot though, isn’t it. Everything’s now in that box at the top. You don’t need to click on websites now, a lot of the time.
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
True, which is why what I do is so important for businesses?
Hair stylist
What do you mean by that?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Basically, it’s all about getting a client included in that search box that now comes up in Google, or the answer that an AI platform like Chat GPT provides.
Hair stylist
Yeah, I’ve often wondered how that happens. How do you get included?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
You’ve got to build authority with Google or the AI bot. They basically look for facts and figures that can answer a user’s query and try to link that user with the best company to serve their needs. But all they have to go on is what they can find online. And then, if they want to judge which company to put forward, if they have found suitable user answers online, they look for evidence that the company can be trusted, is knowledgeable, has the right experience and expertise. So, it’s vital to communicate all of that through PR and to be recognised by the media, as that’s a big tick for these AI-driven models.
Hair stylist
Surely, though, only social media matters these days?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
It’s another place to do what we call ‘show up’ and it’s important to have a presence, but it’s not everything. Just think how many businesses just post on social media but don’t get engagement. So much time is wasted on that and so little benefit derived from it. It’s a hard ask for many companies to make what they do ‘popular’ on social media, so they need other avenues to reach customers. But, having some presence on social media does help with search, both on those platforms and in general. I just feel a lot of businesses are putting too much faith in it and not getting anything like the right balance of marketing activity to achieve their goals.
Hair stylist
So, instead of just posting on social, should I be doing other things in my marketing?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Really, nowadays, it’s essential to have a good mix and be ‘seen’ in various places, generating as much endorsement as possible for expertise and experience. Think of it like this. Traditionally, search engines just ranked your website according to what you said about yourself on your own website. Now, in the AI world, the search bots want to examine what other people are saying about you and that’s why PR is so valuable, because it creates situations where other people are talking about you, on other websites and in other places that are usually well-respected.
Hair stylist
It sounds pretty good. So do you do anything else in your job?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
As well as creating campaigns for media, which involves being a really good wordsmith and writer, as well as clever in finding what we call ‘angles’ to hook the interest of journalists, we handle some social media. However, another major part of my job involves creating all sorts of interesting content for clients to use online and offline too. Online, it’s things such as booklets, which help guide customers or prospective customer and add lots of value for them. These build authority and trust too. But it’s also a case of researching and writing really useful articles that you might know of as ‘blogs’, perhaps?
Offline, it could be anything that I write – a leaflet, brochure, guide, food trail … there’s so much that I’ve done.
Hair stylist
Oh, I see
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Do you have a blog or news area on your website?
Hair stylist
No, I don’t see the point. Is there a point?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Yes, definitely. Blogs are another way of communicating EEAT and bringing customers to your door, which is much better for you than having to try to chase them in unknown space. You absolutely do need a blog, if you want to be found, and I spend a lot of my time creating compelling blogs and articles for clients. I also have two podcasts, to create audio content, and have a YouTube channel too. All of these things matter.
So, we decide what will work best for an individual client and we put campaigns together that have a different combination of elements. The mix of activity is all down to what the strategy needs to be and who the target customer is. One minute, I can be writing e-newsletters or e-shots and the next minute writing words for a website or brochure. There’s a lot of variety.
Hair stylist
OK, it sounds useful, but is PR expensive?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
It depends whether you shop around and look for good value. In cities, PR fees are likely to be pretty high and it’s not always the case that you will get a better service. Catapult PR has never been based in a big city but we compete with big-city agencies and have had huge amounts of success, winning 69 top awards, to date, for our work. That demonstrates that we are on a par with those big city agencies, in terms of quality of work, but our fees are far lower. I’ve always kept our fees to the lowest level for clients, continually bearing in mind what the rate of return for them needs to be, to ensure they get great benefits.
Hair stylist
69 awards! Where do you keep them all?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
We’ve sort of got a trophy cabinet. But they do take a lot of dusting!
Hair stylist
So can any sort of business benefit from PR and blogging?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Pretty much. The issue is that many just don’t even think about it. There’s a big obsession with social media and some just stick to traditional paid advertising but that’s not got anywhere near the same credibility, because everyone knows it’s been paid for. When I get an article in the press about one of my clients, we haven’t paid for it. The coverage has been ‘earned’.
Hair stylist
Why don’t more businesses use PR and blogging?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Good question. Partly because, like you, they don’t really get to hear about it. If they did, I think many more would realise it could be their business’s best friend. Certainly, I’ve seen my clients flourish and grow phenomenally, with PR and content being the only marketing they’ve had.
Hair stylist
Are all PR agencies the same?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Unfortunately, PR looks easy from the outside looking in and a lot of people will set up a PR agency, sometimes with relatively little experience. The other problem with choosing a big agency is that you don’t actually know that the results achieved, or campaigns talked about, were actually carried out by the people still working there. That’s one big issue.
A lot of agencies will do PR but not do it in the way that Catapult PR does it, with lots of creativity and ideas alongside the hard work and core PR approaches. I know, hand on heart, that clients that run with our ideas, rather than those that won’t take a bit of a risk, fare far better, generating far more results and exposure. So if you only have an agency that doesn’t have creativity within its campaigns, you are probably not achieving as much as you could.
For all these reasons, some businesses may try PR for find they don’t’ get results and then blame PR, rather than the agency they used.
Hair stylist
How do you get through to businesses about PR then?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Things are changing fast. Thankfully, PR should be at the heart of all business thinking when it comes to marketing. This is all because of the AI search engine impact. With AI in our world, a lot of businesses need to start playing catch-up and getting some PR exposure in place in the media, as it really is a major cornerstone of being found in the new search engine world.
Hair stylist
So, you might be very busy then?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Who knows? Unless a business really gets to grips with what is going on, they could still completely overlook the need for PR, or still make the wrong PR agency choice. You’d be surprised at how poor the decision-making can be when it comes to PR and the very strange reasons that some clients choose an agency. It’s quite frustrating when I look back and see how many companies wasted a golden opportunity to benefit from PR. I could have catapulted so many more to success, if I’d had the chance.
Hair stylist
You said catapulting there. Is that why your PR agency is called Catapult?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Exactly. That’s my aim – getting clients the right exposure, in the right place, with expert targeting so that we can hit their objectives time after time. That’s what PR should do, building a business’s reputation, making a client a go-to expert or a thought leader and making sure that the messaging about the business is consistent, clear and compelling.
Hair stylist
It doesn’t sound that simple.
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Actually, once I’ve got under the skin of a business, I find it quite easy to construct exactly what they need.
Hair stylist
And what sorts of business does Catapult PR work with?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Lots of tourism, travel, leisure and hospitality businesses, on the one hand, including pet product firms, events and community projects, and, on the other, insurance companies, professional and financial services firms, vets, architects, transport-sector businesses and even construction companies. Although these two parts of my business couldn’t be more different, we’ve got an amazing award-winning track record in both.
Hair stylist
And who don’t you work with?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Basically, we want to be part of the team, so if we don’t have the right chemistry, or the initial rapport just isn’t there, we’ll probably decline the opportunity to work with a business. I do cherry-pick a lot these days, because we have a specialist PR ‘stable’, as I call it, not that many places within it and a desire to represent only those who really want to achieve great things through PR.
I like to get right under the skin of a client business and live and breathe it. If we can’t pour our passion into it and really have our expertise appreciated – with advice taken on board and embraced – there’s little point in taking things forward. The results will suffer tremendously and Catapult PR is a results-focused PR agency that cares about delivering a rate of return on the investment in PR. We don’t want to be in a position where a client’s approach is helping to undermine its own campaign, so we will walk away and find another business that understands that we have 69 awards for a reason and is happy to place their trust in us.
Hair stylist
Wow. I’ve learned something today. Now, how much shall we take off your hair length?
Catapult PR managing director, Jane Hunt
Cut a little off – but don’t cut your PR or online website content!
