Breaking Through the Noise: Targeted Thought Leadership That Drives Results | Paige Velasquez Budde

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Strategies every CEO should embrace to maximize thought leadership ROI

Today, we explore why investing in your personal brand and strategically targeting micro-media can outperform broad-based PR and vanity metrics. Discover the importance of building trust and credibility long before a product launch or significant event. Learn how executives can effectively scale their thought leadership to drive consistent business growth and create authentic connections in a crowded marketplace.

Are you spending your resources wisely to amplify your thought leadership—or just making noise?

In today’s fast-paced marketplace, standing out from the crowd is tougher than ever. Peter Winick is joined by Paige Velasquez Budde, CEO at Zilker Media, one of Austin’s fastest-growing agencies specializing in building people-driven brands. Paige shares insights from her extensive experience working with top global thought leaders and brands.

Discover why your personal brand matters even more than your corporate identity. Paige explains how trust and connection are built person-to-person, especially in high-touch B2B environments. As the best-selling author of “Strategic Business Influencer: Building a Brand with a Small Budget” she emphasizes the importance of starting early—well before your next book or major event—to consistently showcase your expertise and build trust at scale.

We dive into actionable strategies like narrowing your social media presence to the most impactful platform and harnessing the true value of PR through intentional, targeted micro-media placements. Plus, Peter and Paige unpack why vanity metrics won’t help your business, and why an interview on the right niche podcast can sometimes be worth
far more than a big-name media hit.

Tune in to learn how to strategically build thought leadership that grows your revenue, enhances your credibility, and sustainably supports your long-term business objectives.

Three Key Takeaways

Start Early, Not Later: Building effective thought leadership isn’t about a one-time launch event; it’s a consistent, ongoing practice. Start cultivating your brand now—well ahead of your next big milestone—to build trust, visibility, and credibility at scale.

Micro-Media Outperforms Vanity Metrics: Don’t chase big audiences for the sake of numbers. A targeted podcast or niche publication with the right listeners can deliver far greater business impact than generic exposure.

Your Personal Brand Matters Most: Clients Google people, not logos. Invest in clearly showcasing your personal expertise online to accelerate trust, strengthen relationships, and differentiate yourself from competitors.

Looking to enhance your personal brand and build authentic relationships in the digital space? Our conversation with Paige Velasquez Budde emphasized the power of strategic PR  and personal branding. To further explore building high-profile relationships through authenticity and trust, listen to our episode with Clemence Sop—Cultivating High-Profile Relationships in a Digital World. Together, these episodes offer valuable insights into creating a strong personal brand and fostering meaningful connections.

Ready to implement these strategies? Contact Thought Leadership Leverage today to develop a personalized plan that amplifies your impact and accelerates your success.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, Welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you’re joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Paige Velasquez-Budde. She is the partner and a CEO at Zilker Media, which is an Austin, Texas-based agency building people-driven brands. During her tenure at CEO, she has been named one of the fastest growing companies, or Zilk, I should say, has been name one of the fastest-growing companies in Austin, and a best place to work two years in a row. She’s been featured as a speaker on people-driven marketing and led workshops for orgs such as Ernst & Young, Harvard Medical School, and she has led all sorts of marketing campaigns and strategies for some of the world’s most recognized authorities. So without further ado, welcome aboard, Paige.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Thank you so much, Peter, for having me. I’m really thrilled to be here with you today.

Peter Winick So Zilker is in essence a PR firm, right? With a specialty in thought leaders and the types of folks that we work with as well. So, you know, you’re a big piece of what folks are hiring you for is to get through the clutter, is to through the noises, to get though that. So I want to start with, often times, and you probably see something similar, someone will engage someone like you because there’s a book coming up, right. And they want the book to be successful because they put all the effort in. But answer that question in terms of what should they be doing six months a year, two, three years before they’re even thinking about writing a book to make your job easier.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Absolutely. And that’s so right. Typically, it’s some sort of event that sparks the need to start building their brand. But, you know, I’m really passionate about is shifting the mindset of leaders that it doesn’t have to be an event even that gets you to start thinking about building your thought leadership. This is really something that a new age CEO, entrepreneur, leader should be thinking about consistently in order to help accelerate their business. So thinking about these things way ahead of time, just getting really crystallized on how can you stand out alongside your company to help build kind of an on-ramp back to it, help drive lead generation, help accelerate trust throughout the business development part, you know, process. What we’re seeing a lot in the landscape today, I don’t know, you’ve seen this as well, Peter, is it is… extremely hard for consumers, for other businesses, especially if you’re a B2B business with high touch relationship building, to trust just a corporate brand and logo alone. People trust people, especially when you’re in a B2B business with that high touch relationship building that is absolutely the key to making sure that you’re one developing lead generation, but two, having the ability to. to bring through them throughout the business development process in an accelerated way.

Peter Winick I would just add to that, I think particularly in professional services, don’t tell me how great or smart or insightful you are. Just continue to show me that every day. If you put out ideas, anything that’s representative of your thinking, your framework, your models, your methodologies, et cetera, consistently, then you don’t even have to tell people how great you are, right? They’re going to follow your stuff and go, wow, I follow Paige because she’s smart.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Yes, that’s absolutely right. And what a lot of executives get wrong too is they pour all of their time and their energy and their resources in the building their corporate brand. As a lot us do, and that is important, but they completely forget that their brand oftentimes is the name that is Googled first when somebody refers them business. You know, it’s a, it a lot times, Hey, go talk to Peter. He’s the best. absolute best at building thought leadership. They’re not gonna, a lot of times, Google the firm’s name, they’re gonna Google you. So what is that impression? Are you talking about the things that show that you are the top thought leader in that industry? It’s so important, and the funny thing.

Peter Winick And not being there, so if you’re interfacing with someone and they Google you and nothing shows up, or you show up as number 97 or something like that, that says a lot as well.

Paige Velasquez-Budde It does. It’s even worse. You know, a lot of, a lot of executives that I talk to, especially from a PR perspective, has said, oh, I’ve intentionally been behind the scenes and I’ve intentionally not done this or been online. I’m, you know, I’m too, too whatever for, for social media. And a lot of times what we do is we do that Google search and they’re coming up either not at all or they’re coming up really low on the page or what they have coming up. is not what they want to be their first impression. It’s, you know, the old blog that they wrote 20 years ago or the old press hit that they did eight years ago and it does nothing to reflect the caliber that they’re at now.

Peter Winick So then your task is a difficult one, which is, Hey, I’m a thought leader. Let’s just use an example. I’ve got a book coming out in a couple of months, and I want you to help make me make this book successful. Right. And the reality is there are more books coming out every day, every week, every month than ever before. What are the things that you’re advising clients in terms of how they stand out from the others? Cause there’s X other books, just like yours, whether you want to believe that or not. coming out either right before, during, or after. How do you stand out from the pack? How do stand out form the noise? How do break through that clutter?

Paige Velasquez-Budde There’s three key things, one from a content perspective. So say for example, you know you need to build a following on social media, you have to have an audience to market the book to. We see a lot of leaders who get really excited and they jump onto all the platforms. They wanna be on TikTok, they wanna be on Instagram, they want to be on LinkedIn. But really the conversation that we have with them is where is your audience? to think about you know, from a business perspective, where are you having these conversations? For a lot of the leaders that we work with, LinkedIn is the place that they need to be. So instead of spreading yourself thin, it’s focusing in on where can we have the most impact and consistently do it really well in a sustainable way moving forward. So go focused versus spread thin. The second thing that I would say is really important is it gets exciting when you do content marketing, social media, when you start to do PR, but if you’re just doing a lot of activity without ever bringing those people that you’re getting visibility to back to an asset that you own, where you can start to own their data and own the interaction with them moving forward, you’re spinning your wheels in a sense and spending a lot time, money, resources, and never actually garnering results that are gonna last long term. So looking at how you can own your data is so important.

Peter Winick So stay there a minute and I want to sort of add a bit of a twist to it, right? So I’ve been doing this podcast for seven years, 600 something episodes, et cetera. And one thing that I find just really shocking is a vast, I would say probably majority, or at least 50-50, but it’s probably a majority of the guests that come to us come through a PR agency or a podcast guesting agency or something, which means that somebody’s paying the agency To get that person onto our show because people enjoy the show, they’ve had good, we’ve had, whatever, we’ve got a good rep, there’s lots of reasons, right? And what I find is this part of it, having an honest, open, insightful conversation, that’s easy, right, that’s really, really easy. What I find somewhere between shocking and appalling is that for me, I won’t just put anybody on the show. So you and I did a pre-podcast call a month or two ago, I wanna make sure it’s a good fit, you know what I’m looking for, I get to know you a little bit, I research on you. Then we do the show. And then when this gets posted, or it gets published, I will have my team share with you a bunch of assets for you to share on social media. And what I find is the etiquette of most guests, and I think it’s naivety, I don’t think they’re intentionally being rude, is they don’t do any of that. And I’m like, well, why the heck? Why the heck would you come on the show and spend the time and spend money if you’re not gonna do everything in your power to amplify that message? Because now we’re creating an asset, right? Right. So I’m going to give you this asset. I’m gonna give you some social stuff, assuming you like it. And you think this dish shows you well, which I hope it does. Why wouldn’t you want to share that to your followers? Why wouldn’t you want use that asset now, a month from now, six months from now or a year from now? Or you’re having a conversation with a prospect and say, you know what? Oh, that same issue came up on this podcast I did. Let me send you that link. And I think not enough people are getting enough juice out of the lemon, if you will, as it relates to things they do. Would you? Am I, am I? alone in that thinking because I know literally every month. I’m like, why are people not doing more?

Paige Velasquez-Budde Well, you’re absolutely right. And I love that you have that mindset just as, as the host as well, Peter, because what we, we share with a lot of our art thought leaders and our clients is the value of PR, the value, of appearances, like that’s conversations like this, it’s not only that it’s fun and you know, we have an opportunity to build a relationship, share some of our lessons, learn an experience is the volume of PR is not the moment. that it goes live. It’s all about the remarketing and how those leverage it moving forward. You know, you have a vast network. Your show is extremely successful. So you posting in is one side of that opportunity. The other side of it is exactly what you said. How do you include this in your business development process? How do include this to get visibility beyond those people that you’re already connected with? LinkedIn, especially when you’re posting on their outlet, A lot of times they actually favor posts that tag other people. So when this goes live and I tag you, Peter, or you tag me, we’re naturally gonna get a lot more visibility beyond our current networks.

Peter Winick And it also is a humble brag, if you will. I know that of the, forget the episodes I’ve hosted, I’ve also been a guest on the hundreds of things, and there are three or four things that I’ve guested on that I can attribute literally millions of dollars worth of revenue to those, you know? And it’s one thing for me to tell you, hey, hey, Paige, I’m really smart, I’m good at what I, like, you’re gonna eventually go, all right, this guy’s kind of full of himself, he’s a jerk, or I don’t wanna hear it. But when I send you links to a TEDx, when I sent you links to shows far better known than I’m, that I’m a guest on and I’m receiving accolades from a world renowned expert, like I can’t say I could, but like it’s better when you see that firsthand. Like, wow, look at what all these other people are thinking saying, look at how admired that person is in their space. How come I don’t know about them?

Paige Velasquez-Budde Absolutely, it validates that trust, accelerates the credibility that you’re able to garner. Again, you’re not having to talk about yourself. It’s all doing it for you.

Peter Winick Oh, I don’t mind talking about myself. I’m clearly narcissistic enough we could do that.

Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com forward slash L T L and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com, forward slash podcast.

Peter Winick I wanna go in a little bit of a different direction because I’m trying to get people some things to think about on both sides of the coin because I have a lot of friends in PR obviously and I have lot of clients that engage in it and there’s often time this gap. So are there things that you look for or look out for in terms of a red flag of. during a early on conversation with a potential client in terms of their expert expectations, just being, Hey, you’re going to make me a New York Times bestseller or I’m going to sell 30,000 copies, right? Like what are the things that you look out for? Because what you don’t want, or I would imagine you don’ want is 90, 120 days after bringing on that client, having to have some difficult conversations that could have been.

Paige Velasquez-Budde That’s right. You know, there’s a few things that the most important thing is just having a clear understanding between us and a client of one, what are those goals? But are you clear on where we’re starting? You know a lot of people come to us. If you come to, to us four months before a book launch had never done PR before the expectations that things are going to one be live by the time your book launches or two, you’re going to be in the New York Times during that launch. that’s not necessarily, you know, oftentimes the case that typically you need to start doing PR way ahead of that. And the first time that you’re launching the book shouldn’t be the first time you’re making a media appearance. You really start, you need, you really need to start building up that thought leadership, ideally a year or so out and giving expert commentary thought leadership. So by the time that your launching your book, We’re circling around to some of those media opportunities to promote the book, we are saying to media, hey, this person has been featured on X, Y, and Z previously, this is why you should pay attention to them. This is why we wanna feature in the book. That’s extremely important. You know, and another thing is a lot of people, you know, sometimes come to us and think they’re gonna get rich quick on their first book. And book sales, as you and I both know, aren’t the way to do that. But if you have a clear strategy of what a book can do for you as a tool, whether it’s helping accelerate lead generation, helping you up your fees and a speaking arena, whatever that might be, that’s where you’re gonna really see the value in terms of investing in PR to get the book out there. Book sales alone are not a clear enough goal.

Peter Winick Well, stay, stay there a minute because I think you’re a thousand percent right is oftentimes authors, particularly first time authors obsess over sales because they, they take sales as a proxy for success or validation or whatever the case may be, or they didn’t really understand the market and realize that having an expectation of selling X number of units is not realistic in the period of time that they thought they would. And I think at some level… For most, the number of units sold, you know, is really irrelevant. And this is where there’s a lot of tension in the marketplace between the author and the publisher, because the most inches is a publisher’s compensation is some function of number of unit sold times profit per book. Equal. Is that a good deal or not for an author? It could be, wow. At first blush. If you look at my numbers, that was awful. You only sold a thousand copies or whatever, and the author might be going, that is the greatest thing I ever did. because I picked up three clients that are spending a million dollars a year. And that has nothing to do with the publisher’s success. So your metrics for success are different than the publishers, which means we’re not in alignment. Right. So right. So I think having that clarity up front, having that strategy up front that says, as a result of writing this book, this is the follow. This is what I would like to be different. One year after this book is out.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Yes, and that’s oftentimes the first question we ask. It’s, why did you write the book? And what do you hope to achieve with a book? Visibility and book sales for us a lot of times is a red flag if there is nothing beyond that. The same instance with media these days, there’s a dated mindset sometimes of, I need to be on Good Morning America in order for my PR campaign to be successful. Reality is From what we have seen, you know, the past five to seven years of book PR, specifically, especially even just business PR in general, having those big TV hits, do not move sales units or lead gender for your company the same way the right micro media or the right targeted media strategy will, you know, if you are interviewing a PR firm. Ask them about their industry. Are they’re consistently placing both in top tier as well as micro media. If you have a PR company that is just throwing top tier in front of you. Top tier is great for eyeballs. It is great. For credibility. And I’m talking, you know, Harvard business review, Forbes, Fortune, those types of Bloomberg, but if you also don’t have a micro media strategy with the right podcast with the right trade publications in certain niche industries with right blogs, you aren’t going to see as much lead generation or even, you know, at times book sale movements.

Peter Winick Stay there for a minute because again, I’ve been on both sides of the coin. So when I’ve retained agencies to pitch me on a podcast, where I’ve gotten frustrated is they’ll show me who they’re going to pitch to after I’ve had the conversation and say, listen, this is, these are my avatars. These are my client profiles. This is why I want to get in front of period full stop. I don’t need to hear myself talk. Right. So then I look and I see like, oh, I’m looking at the audiences for half of these and they don’t align with my avatars. So I called them back and said, I have no interest in that. Oh, but we can get you on then. I’m like, okay, but the objective here isn’t how many times I can see my name on a podcast, you know, in iTunes or Spotify or whatever. I wanna get onto a medium to reach an audience to get the desired outcome, which is lead generation, build the brand, all those other things. And that might be a lovely population that that host speaks to. They’re just not like people. And that’s okay. And I think once you realize that 99% of the world doesn’t care about what you got, you can spend a lot of time saying, but that 1% or 1 10th of 1% is what I stay up late at night trying to sharpen my tools to be as good as I can in my game.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Absolutely. And two, you know, from a thought leader perspective, and executives, founders, your time is so finite that if you’re spending 30 minutes to an hour doing a podcast interview, it has to be connected back to an audience that is going to drive results for you and your business. But for example, even if you have a strong targeted strategy, I would even challenge, you now, listenership, readership. those numbers don’t matter as much if it’s the right audience. We worked with a sub-flooring manufacturer. This is one of my favorite stories. A very niche business. Not a lot of podcasts in this space. And of course, we could have done a lot of other podcasts that the entrepreneur had been great on. But we found this podcast that had, I think it was 1,500 to 2,500 listeners per month. So pretty small for an executive. of several multi-

Peter Winick That’s huge though, but it’s I’ve got you. It’s actually huge because it’s the right audience for that

Paige Velasquez-Budde Right. And that’s the thing about this case study is most, you know, from a vanity perspective, CEOs of a company that big, a manufacturing company, would come back to the firm and said, I’m not going to waste my time with that small of an audience. But he understood our strategy. He understood how targeted we were getting. And he got the biggest business development opportunity that his company had seen in terms of partnership from that interview and the right listeners listening to that interview. And so I love sharing that, especially in these industries, how important it is.

Peter Winick No, and I’m in, I’m an total agreement of that is, and you mentioned the term sort of these vanity metrics. Don’t fall for this laziness of vanity metrics of a number of listeners, number downloads, number of whatever. Cause for that CEO to get in front of 1300 people in that industry that actually would tune into a podcast on flooring, you’ve got to be in that business to have like, like, seriously, that’s not something you like, that’s, not something random switch of the dial. Like, Ooh, I think all of a sudden I’m interested in flooring. like. That’s not going to happen. So logic would tell you that anybody engaging in that is in the business of service to the business event, like, you know, that’s that world. Cool. As we start to wrap any final words of wisdom to folks in the process of thinking about, or currently working with a PR firm to launch their brand and their books and all the things that you do.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Yeah, I would say that the biggest thing is especially with a lot of leaders and thought leaders, what we see is oftentimes to take that first step to start building their brand even before they have a big event or if they launch their book, a lot times they’re going to, what do I have to say? Or, you know, if this is not highest and best use of my time, what I want to encourage them to think about is what do you do day to day to make your business grow? You were doing thought leadership all day, but it’s mostly one-on-one. These are, you know, PR, content marketing. It’s just taking what you’re doing day-to-day and building it to scale. It’s not putting on this new face, this new personality that you’re not. So that’s the kind of mindset hack that I encourage leaders to have is think about the day-today and what you are doing and… Once we start talking to leaders and they start realizing, oh, I’m already doing this, it’s just one-on-one meetings, they get really excited about being able to scale that. So don’t wait for three months ahead of your book launch or to get a book deal or start writing that manuscript. Start building that now because that’s going to only serve you if you have some of that foundation built for more success when you do get to that big milestone.

Peter Winick Awesome. Love it. Thank you so much for sharing the time and your wisdom with us, Deja.

Paige Velasquez-Budde Thank you for having me. This was so fun, Peter.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at Thought Leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.