Tête-à-Tête with Jenna Guarneri, JMG Public Relations Founder and CEO: ‘We’re Committed to Fostering Creative Relationships to Provide Quality Work that will Help Clients Reach a Multi-Platform Audience While Simultaneously Building and Establishing their Brands’

"One of the major reasons a startup fails is poor marketing, which is inclusive of public relations."

JMG Public Relations, an award winning public relations firm for innovators and their venture backed startup companies. The firm provides a unique blend of creative thinking, strategizing and execution with a strong focus on media relations, securing media placements within top-tier media outlets like Inc Magazine, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, the Wall Street Journal and on national television networks like CNBC’s ‘The Exchange,’ Fox & Friends and TODAY.

JMG PR is at the cusp of the ever-changing media world and delivers a fresh approach with key results.

The firm is headquartered in New York, NY.

Jenna Guarneri, JMG Public Relations Founder and CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Q. Explain your services in brief.

JMG Public Relations is a PR firm founded out of a desire to be different. We challenge the status quo and believe in developing new and innovative systems to produce top-tier results for our clients. We have a startup mentality that aligns with a company’s communication style, work ethic, innovative ideas, and motivation to be recognized as a disruptor of your industry. We work with our clients for media relations, as well as services like social media consulting, content creation, strategic partnerships, events, and much more.

Q. Marketing communications is more than just a method of promoting a brand. Do you help your clients develop a strategic vision about leveraging various marketing opportunities?

We create dynamic PR efforts meticulously crafted to meet each client’s needs while always maintaining honesty, integrity, clarity, and accountability. We constantly dig deeper, asking ourselves why so that we can address your pain points and uniquely explain why you do what you do.

Q. Considering the quality of today’s PR and communications services, they come with an expensive price tag. How can SMEs benefit from your services?

One of the major reasons a startup fails is poor marketing, which is inclusive of public relations. Having the right exposure is vital to securing new clients/customers, company growth, future funding, and overall, a company's success. But if you are an SME, you may not have the funds allocated towards hiring a PR company with a six-month to a one-year commitment consisting of a monthly retainer with an expensive price tag. Since our clientele is startup based, we created an introductory package geared towards the pre-seed and seed round startup companies. Our goal is to grow with these companies so that they can garner a few media hits that will help them with their own goals, and eventually, they will be ready for our standard PR package.

Q. There are other reputed players in the market, providing the same services. What makes you a better service provider?

We were developed as a solution to some of the common problems we’ve heard from clients based on their interaction with their past firms. They felt like they were a small fish in a big sea, they didn’t hear from their account leads often, responses were delayed, they were passed to a junior team member once the CEO sold them on their service, and they didn’t see results. How we resolve these issues is that we treat all clients with a white-glove service. Clients receive responses from their PR team within an hour; they never feel like a small fish in a big sea here and aren’t passed along to junior team members as account leads.

Importantly, we know SMEs. Clients also come to us because they have a new round of funding they will be pitching. The press helps add another level of credibility; they want to increase backlinks back to the website or user signups, and because they are the first of their kind, but their competitor has been doing press and is getting more of the market attention, even though their product or offering isn’t as good. Our PR strategies address these goals to ensure they are being met.

Q. Staying ahead of trends is something today’s PR firms must do. How do you manage to stay a step ahead of the competition?

As a PR firm, it’s important to stay ahead of the news cycles and to adapt our strategy based on what’s happening either locally or nationally in the news. It is the responsibility of every team member to keep up to speed with the news cycles and keep both colleagues and clients informed, so we can best adapt or react within a given window of time. If you wait too long, your competition will take the story first.

Q. It is quite challenging to achieve success in every PR campaign you run. How do you overcome failures?

You won’t know what will work until you try it. Sometimes the biggest, most exciting ideas we have, fall flat. It is better to try a concept out on a few reporters and be nimble enough to adjust your strategy should it not work out the way you initially predicted.

Q. How do you understand the culture of the company before devising a PR campaign?

To help us understand a company's culture, we go through a ramp-up process during the onboarding of a new client, consisting of interviews of key personnel. This helps us to understand better who they are as a brand and what they envision for their PR goals.

Q. Trust is a difficult attribute to measure and a delicate dynamic to maintain. How do you maintain this with your clients?

Trust is an important attribute to have with your PR firm. It’s an intimate relationship that needs continuous nourishment to ensure it lasts over the long-term. What that means for JMG PR is open communication with our clients daily. Keeping them informed is a great asset because PR is a lot behind the scenes work, so if a client doesn’t hear from you, they naturally think the work isn’t being done. Whether it’s good or bad feedback from an editor, our job is to tell the client how the press perceives them and advice how best to engage with them.

The Leader at the Helm of JMG Public Relations

Jenna Guarneri is the CEO and Founder of JMG Public Relations. Jenna counsels innovators changing the world with their B2B and B2C venture-backed startup companies. She is known for delivering quality work while fostering meaningful relationships with her clients, team, and media contacts. Jenna is an authority with a proven track record in reputation management, media relations, and brand communication.

"We create dynamic PR efforts that are meticulously crafted to meet each client’s needs while always maintaining honesty, integrity, clarity, and accountability."