Influence & Co. builds brands through content, thought leadership

Influence & Co. doesn’t write press releases, create advertising or manage social media accounts. The brand-building company …

Influence & Co. doesn’t write press releases, create advertising or manage social media accounts.

The brand-building company is hardly your traditional public relations firm, but its unique approach to advertising is increasingly relevant to customers.

In 2010, Kelsey Meyer, co-founder and president of Influence & Co., was a business student at the University of Missouri interning for Columbia entrepreneur Brent Beshore. He was struggling to get press attention for his business, adventur.es, and Meyer began considering solutions.

Meyer (right) helped Beshore get his own articles published in Young Entrepreneur and Under30CEO, and soon realized the potential for a new company, formerly called Digital Talent Agents. 

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Meyer’s initial experience helped Influence & Co. develop its content marketing and thought leadership approach to brand building. 

“There’s so much information from so many different sources that anything that looks like an advertisement or anything that is an advertisement is going to get glazed over,” she said. “So if you’re really looking to reach customers and engage them, you’re going to have to keep going in the direction of truly valuable content that is helping them accomplish a goal.”

Today the Columbia, Mo.-based company has the equivalent of 50 full-time employees, clients from around the world and relationships with more than 500 publications as well-known as the Washington Post and as niche-focused as SteamFeed.

When a client approaches them for content marketing, Influence and Co. first helps the client set business goals and objectives, then asks about their expertise. The company finally works with the client to write and edit articles focused on their area of expertise.

“We’re really moving in the direction of trying to be more of a painkiller than a vitamin,” Meyer said. “So by that I mean, when you’re in pain, that’s something you go for. A vitamin is preventative so if you don’t have your vitamins, it’s no big deal. We want to be something that our clients really see as an extension of their company.”

The result is publication of articles that help build credibility and influence for the client, and the published material can be further integrated into the client’s brand. The exposure has helped clients with everything from gaining customers to scoring book deals. 

In the future, Meyer expects to see advertising continue to shift toward a content-focused approach. 

“With traditional PR companies, I think that if they’re going to maintain relevance in the future, they’re going to have to start doing more of what we’re doing because I think people are really looking for content coming from a specific expert,” she said. “I think that content marketing in the future is just going to keep going in this direction of education and entertainment and not just advertorial to a client.” 

 

Credits: Meyer photo courtesy of Meyer.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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