Restricted Category Marketing: Kathryn Byberg, Little Leaf | Ep: 008

Connor: Hello and welcome to Exit Ready, the podcast for agency owners who want to build a successful agency, because a successful agency and one that’s ready for sale are parallel journeys. I’m Connor McAuley and today I’m talking to Kathryn Byberg. Kathryn is one of my longest friends and an old classmate, and has since created an international agency in a very specific market. I’ll let Kathryn explain all of that in a second. Kathryn, welcome to the show.

Kathryn: Thank you very much for having me, Connor. It’s lovely to see you again.

Connor: Always. Tell me about Little Leaf. Who are you as an agency, what do you do, and who do you work with?

Kathryn: We have a very interesting agency. We are the world’s only specialists when it comes to sexual wellness PR and communications. We work with a lot of big brands, particularly on a direct-to-consumer marketing side. Sex toy brands, female sex toy brands, male sex tech brands, lubricant brands, retailers across the US and UK. On top of that we have a lot of different sex educators on our books, so we’re branching out into different areas. At the heart of it, I’m a PR person. I’m a storyteller. That’s our bread and butter. When we first started we were purely PR, but we’ve branched out. We run a lot of social media for our clients now. We do their influencer marketing. We do their affiliate marketing. We’ll write SEO blogs for them. We come in and help in any area on the direct-to-consumer side where they need support.

Connor: So you’ve niched down into a very specific category, but within it you’ve gone incredibly broad. That’s class. When I look at agency world, most go very broad and shallow. You’ve gone completely niche and a mile deep.

Kathryn: When I first started, it was very different. I wasn’t specifically looking at sexual wellness. I had a big interest in sustainability, so I wanted to work with a lot of brands focused on that. In the beginning, you take any client that resonates with you. Within the first year I realised my area of expertise, where I bring the most value, is sexual wellness. I had the privilege of working in-house at one of the biggest sexual wellness brands out there. I was able to take that knowledge and start to help other brands. We work with big established brands but also with new startups. It became very clear that while they were initially bringing us in for PR services, you start to notice little things they need support with. This industry is fabulous to be in. A lot of the industry relied heavily on brick-and-mortar retailers initially, and then COVID came. A lot of brands realised they really needed to sort out their website and focus heavily on direct-to-consumer. We were able to come in and support them. As we worked, we built massive networks and connections. We built a network of sex educators, who then wanted us to support them too. Even though they’re not direct-to-consumer brands, we could help them and they could help our clients. Here we are today.

Connor: You hit a massive nail on the head with COVID. A lot of brands were reviewing their supply channels because they had to, and DTC became a big thing. So it was the right time, right moment, right market for you.

Kathryn: Perfect market. COVID was a massive boom for sexual wellness. Everybody was confined to their houses. We were very lucky. I started the agency right at the start of COVID, and we very quickly became valuable within the industry. Word of mouth spread, people started reaching out, and it was a good way to start.

Connor: A lot of our agency friends get work from referrals. You do a great job, somebody tells somebody else, and you prompt that as much as you can. But the market is changing. It’s harder to get new business. Are you actively going after that with new channels, or, because of the nature of the trade, is it still highly dependent on referrals?

Kathryn: In our industry, we’re really, really tight knit. I’m very lucky that a lot of people from my previous company have since moved to different brands and recommended us. We’re at a stage now where people within the industry know who we are. When they think “we need a PR agency”, it’s “do we go after one of the big agencies that works across a whole array of clients, or do we come to somebody that actually understands the topic, the language, the problems and complications?” So it’s still heavily word of mouth. Over the past 18 months, much to my reluctance, we’ve started getting me out there a little more. I’ve been going to trade shows, speaking on panels, getting us out there. This year is the first where lots of other team members are doing it too. So we’re building the agency and getting awareness out that way. We don’t need to go heavily into advertising. Our industry is so small. That’s the reality of it, which also means we need to do a bloody good job. There’s no room for mistakes, because it’s a game of word of mouth. People will talk when you do something good, but they’ll also talk when you do something bad. Touch wood, so far so good.

Connor: So your goal is to become the key person of influence within the trade. I love that you’re getting your team out there too. You’ve not got a small team. When I look at your site and the people around you, I’ve dealt with a few of them, and they’re all really professional, all at the highest standard. You’re not a small agency by any stretch. Congratulations. But that’s hard to manage and scale. From your perspective, what’s been the best part of this journey, and what’s the hardest?

Kathryn: The best part is we are completely fully remote. I’m based in Germany. I have a big team based in the UK, four or five in the UK. I have two in the US, one in Canada, and people spread across Europe. Instead of having to hire from a pool of people based around an office area, I have cherry-picked people that I’ve worked with throughout the years. In my previous role, I was the head of PR and communications at LELO, a really big high-end luxury sex toy brand. I worked out in Shanghai at their global offices, and I’ve brought quite a lot of the team over with me now. I have some really strong PR people there. Throughout the years, maybe a social media manager I’ve noticed at a different brand has since left, and it’s like “okay, perfect timing, come and join us”. I’ve cherry-picked people that understand the industry, that have already proven themselves within it. A lot of people, when it comes to sexual wellness, tend to think it’s a bit of a joke, get a bit crude or lewd about it. For us, we are very professional. We are trying to make a difference. We value the work and the conversations we’re trying to open up and the taboos we’re trying to break. It’s a good, solid team.

Connor: You have challenges within your trade because sexual wellness is a restricted category on most platforms. In today’s digital world, how does that help or restrict what you do? What does marketing, PR and comms actually look like when the usual channels aren’t available?

Kathryn: Take your marketing playbook and just rip it up, because nothing that works for any other brand is going to work within sexual wellness. People can run Google Ads, but it’s highly competitive and whether or not your account stays active is another matter. You might get shut down. We’ve worked with clients who relied heavily on Google as a high revenue stream, and you lose that channel overnight, and all of a sudden you’ve got big problems. We work with clients to really diversify the channels they’re working on. On Instagram, for the vast majority everything is organic. You can’t be boosting posts. You can’t pay for something linking through to a sexual wellness site. It’s categorised the same way porn is, so we get blocked there. Traditional advertising, we’re really restricted. I’ve tried multiple times to run billboard ads. I wanted to do a billboard campaign in Times Square and we couldn’t get anybody to take the campaign. Or they pay a lot of attention to the messaging and you’re not allowed to say anything, which is irrelevant, it doesn’t help. Social media: a lot of our clients rely heavily on it for brand awareness. It’s more like a storefront in our industry. You can’t necessarily shop through it, but you can show your brand and build a connection. But overnight they’re shadow banning. All of a sudden your accounts have no reach, or you wake up one morning and the account’s gone. Last week, there’s a big brand called Bolesa. They had 700,000 followers on their Instagram account and overnight just disappeared. Gone, and they can’t get it back. We have clients with decent budgets that want celebrities or high-profile influencers, and a lot of people don’t necessarily want to touch it either. It’s challenging, but that’s where PR comes in. A lot of what I do is very organic. A lot of what I do is finding the right stories and the right people to tell these stories to. For me, even though there’s a lot of restrictions, it’s a fabulous area to be working in because you have to really think outside the box. It gives you real opportunity to get properly creative. A lot of what we do is guerrilla marketing. A lot of what we do is finding voices and the right platforms for them. Over Valentine’s Day we actually got a sex toy on This Morning, which was absolutely fantastic. PR becomes a really vital part of the marketing mix when it comes to sexual wellness. We’re well positioned, and we know the language. Even language on social media: you can’t say the word vulva, you can’t say the word sex. We’re trying to break down taboos and get really important conversations happening, particularly when it comes to female anatomy and female health and female pleasure. We’re not allowed to actually have those conversations, so it’s finding ways to get the information to the people that need to hear it.

Connor: It sounds like organic and old-school activity comes back to the forefront. You mentioned guerrilla marketing. I haven’t heard anybody talking about guerrilla marketing since the early days of Kaizen, when we were flyering and postering and doing all of those things to build a bit of awareness. Those campaigns were always great, you knew your messaging, you knew who you were targeting. Exactly the same here. You have to think a bit outside the box to achieve your goals.

Kathryn: For us, we’re actually starting to see a big shift back towards guerrilla marketing and grassroots activities, because everything has changed over the past 18 months. Everything I’ve been playing and doing for the past 10 years that has worked solidly, all of a sudden there’s a big massive shift in the market. As AI summaries came in… if you want to purchase a sexual wellness product, you can’t try it on to see if you like it. So a lot of what we do is getting reviews out, getting into listicles, building credibility for the products. A lot of our clients would have relied heavily on affiliate marketing because a lot of the other channels are blocked. But now, since AI summaries, AI is pulling the information and putting a little list of “here’s the products we recommend”. People are going directly through to those brands but they’re not necessarily clicking on the articles or product links. We’ve had to shift and change again. We’re also noticing so much fatigue when people are online. They don’t know what to trust. Reddit is really starting to take off. We’re seeing so many more people on Reddit, and we’re seeing so much incorrect, almost slightly dangerous information out there. That opens up a lot of doors for us. One of the campaigns we’re doing at the minute is with a big US retailer and they’re working with a charity that provides information when it comes to birth control. We’ve partnered them together and they’re doing a big campaign tackling the misinformation across Reddit when it comes to birth control. Every time one door closes, we pivot and find another way to get in there. It’s fun. I love it.

Connor: When you tell people you work in sexual wellness and sexual health, what is their reaction?

Kathryn: It really depends on what age they are. There’s a big shift in demographics. If it’s somebody younger, more Gen Z, they’re always like “that’s really cool”, do you work with this brand or that brand. They’ll actually know some of the products and they’re savvy and comfortable talking about it. I get quite a lot of people our age and older that don’t know what to say. They get really awkward. For me, that shows we still have a lot of work to do in opening those conversations up. When I tell people what I do, quite a lot of the time I’ll get people opening up to me. People want to tell their journey with their sexual experience or maybe their sexual identity. I’ll get people talking about that, and obviously I’m not going to lie, there are the fair share of people that make a bit of a joke out of it and ask, do we get a sample of the products?

Connor: Obviously the world has changed in the last 15 years. How has that conversation around sexual wellness actually changed? It isn’t the same as it would have been 20 years ago, and I hope that continues, because it does show maturity in the market and the good work you’re doing to educate people. Do you see that happening?

Kathryn: When I first started 15 years ago, there were very few journalists out there that would cover the topic. We relied heavily on sex toy reviewers. Social media was only really starting to kick off. We didn’t have the influencers out there. From a marketing and communications perspective, we always talked about moving sex from the shadows into the mainstream. We are well and truly mainstream now. There are products that are stocked in Target in the US and Walmart, and in the UK in some of the biggest retailers, and luxury high-end retailers as well. The conversation is well and truly mainstream, which is fabulous to see. Right now there are multiple publications that have editors purely dedicated to sex and relationships, which is fantastic. It shows that people want this information. But everything comes in cycles, and we are starting to notice, particularly in the US, that the opportunities for conversation are starting to constrict a bit again. It’s becoming a bit more conservative. We’re having to yet again find ways to keep those conversations going. Social media really did change a lot. There’s a lot of opportunity for people to have conversations, but you need to know where to find them, because a lot of the time they’re restricted and blocked, and they’re restricted in the language they can use. What we’re noticing now is Substack is a great place to find information. There are highly educated sex educators and sex writers really tackling interesting topics. YouTube is fabulous too. Lots of really good conversations there. And my god, podcasts. Every week there’s a new podcast coming out focused on sex. To me the conversation is well and alive. As I said, Gen Z will talk about sex quite comfortably. They haven’t grown up with the shame and stigma that we did. For me it’s fabulous, and we need to keep that going for younger generations. We’re also noticing a big shift, particularly in our generation now. A lot of females are entering perimenopause, and it’s a conversation that just never really existed before. Our mothers’ generation, nobody really talked about menopause. So we’re noticing there’s always new areas and new conversations to be had. And we’re really helping people.

Connor: I love it. You and the company have won awards, the Cannes Lion and the XBIZ Marketing Award for Executive of the Year. Congratulations. What has that recognition meant for the agency over the last 18 months and beyond?

Kathryn: In all honesty, it’s wonderful to know that people see and value our work, particularly within the industry. It shows we’re doing a good job. From a business perspective, it has really opened up the doors that allow us to get a lot more talent into the agency. We’re not this little tiny startup any longer. We are an agency that people want to come and work with. We have people coming straight out of university wanting to work with us, which is great. Our inbound means we don’t have to do too much outbound to get new clients. We’re now at the stage where we can be quite picky about who we work with. We want to work with brands that resonate with us. Awards are always wonderful, but for us they let us build an even better agency.

Connor: As a team of 14, international across Europe and the US, with your history around the world over the last 15 years, where does Little Leaf go from here? What does the next three years look like?

Kathryn: We have just branched into the Spanish market. Even though I live in Germany, a lot of our work up to date has been working with European clients and doing their US PR or their UK PR. We’re now starting to get US clients that want us to do their European PR as well. So this year we’ve entered the Spanish market. We’ve got somebody based in Barcelona working with us, and we’re gently dipping our toes into the German market. Over the next three years we’ll continue growing and experimenting within Europe to make sure we can actually deliver. The key thing here is I always need to make sure that if I say I can do something, that I can actually do it. We’ve got our sights set on expanding into other languages and other markets and providing similar services in even a bigger global way.

Connor: You mentioned AI summaries earlier, and AI is a big part of any agency today, because not only is it changing how we deliver the work, it’s changing how we’re found online. With AI summaries at the top of Google there’s zero clicks now going through to people’s websites. That’s a massive problem. But conversely, people are using ChatGPT, they’re using Claude, searching for the same queries but in an LLM. I imagine that means you have to focus on that GEO market as well, because the traffic is going over there. Are you seeing that within your space?

Kathryn: For us, the biggest challenge over the past while has been getting our heads around what’s been happening and trying to explain that to our clients. A lot of what we would have done previously was looking at SEO scores and domain authority from the publications we were getting into. But now we’re starting to look at AI scores as well, because consumer behaviour has changed. People don’t go to Google any longer, read an article, click on the article and purchase a product. This marketing funnel that used to exist isn’t a funnel anymore, it’s a web. What I do now is try to get conversations happening in all the different platforms where people are, but also that LLMs are pulling from. We’re working in Reddit, we’re working in Substack, we have different sex educators working with us in these different platforms. We are diversifying out. A big part of our job is just educating clients so they understand that while we might not be focusing as heavily on listicles as we used to, a Substack article or even an article on their own blog that is answering a question somebody’s typing into Claude, Gemini, whatever it may be, those LLMs are pulling directly from blogs and websites. So they should have an article saying “this is why we’re the best sex toy company”. We’re helping them, guiding them as they shift, and making sure that we are knowledgeable too.

Connor: You’ve pointed out something brilliant. I’m a real nerd about LLMs and how I pull data. The Reddits of this world, the Substacks of this world, LLMs are utilising this crowdsourced data, the posts on Reddit, the posts on Substack and all the comments in there to generate their answers. It’s so powerful to be on there and to be presenting the brand. Is that a massive strategy at the minute for you?

Kathryn: Right now we’re heavily focused. With Reddit you have to be very careful, because you can’t just come out and say “hey, we’re a brand and we’re going to market here, look at all of our products”. It’s a slightly roundabout way, but we are going in and providing answers. We have a network of educators providing correct answers, because there’s a lot of misinformation on Reddit. With Substack, we have a massive network out there now constantly writing, whether it’s journalists or even our own team. We’re natural copywriters as well. We’re going heavily into YouTube now. For a long time YouTube was interesting but it wasn’t quite as important as it is right now. Everything we would have worked on with our clients two years ago has changed. Two years ago affiliate marketing was where the money was. There’s still potential in affiliate marketing, but the affiliates themselves have changed. Cosmopolitan or Men’s Health isn’t going to be driving the clicks it used to. These publications are changing their strategies and even the types of content they’re putting out. They’re not as heavily focused on the listicles. We’re noticing that over on Substack there’s a lot more conversations happening. Our job now is to make sure people are ranking in that little tiny summary. It becomes a lot more challenging because you’re not going to have a list of 10 or 20 products recommended. You’re only going to have two or three. So our job is ensuring that we are increasing the share of voice across all of these different platforms strategically. I think that’s the best approach right now, especially in a market where we can’t really advertise and we’re heavily blocked in everything we do.

Connor: One thing my clients always question me on is competing clients in the same industry. How do you get around that? You’re the only agency that focuses on this solely in the world, so you will have people knocking on your door. You’re a direct competitor of some of your existing clients. Do you bring them on board, or do they become a future waiting list?

Kathryn: It’s a really good question. We struggled with this internally in the beginning. But at the end of the day, our industry is very small. We’re not going to have the budgets that a big car company has. For me to offer exclusivity to clients is really quite difficult and challenging. When it comes to the toy brands, they’re generally happy enough, they don’t mind, they understand. Sometimes when it comes more to a lube brand, for example, which straddles that health and sexual wellness side, they want things to be a bit more closed off. So what we do is we just build little pods, little teams. This team will work solely on the project, and a separate team works on the other. Only senior management has visibility over what both are doing. We don’t get involved in their creativity, so the campaigns they’re coming up with, there’s no competition between them. At the end of the day, in our industry everybody’s kind of friends. They’ve all moved from different brands. When one brand succeeds, everybody succeeds. We’ve all got each other’s backs anyway.

Connor: You’re all working together for the collective benefit of the industry, even though you’re in your own silos or your own pods. The more visibility, the more awareness, the more understanding of the industry, the better for the collective group. Brilliant. One more question, and it’s the one I ask everybody. If somebody came to you today thinking about building an agency in a taboo or restricted category, what would you tell them?

Kathryn: Do it. It’s not easy. It’s hard work, but it’s really, really rewarding. I have worked in beauty PR before. I have worked in other areas, and there is nothing more challenging than the feeling, the satisfaction you get when something actually works. I would say go for it. A hundred per cent. Especially because the more restricted the areas are, the less competition there is from other agencies. When it comes to CBD or betting and gambling, there are agencies that specialise. So far to date, sexual wellness is an area that didn’t, there’s not very much competition. 100% go for it. It keeps you on your toes.

Connor: Kathryn, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks to everybody who has tuned into the Exit Ready podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and leave a little review wherever you’re picking this up. If you want to build the best version of your agency, check out moveatpace.com where I share a heap of resources, articles and my own Agency Valuation assessment. Thanks very much again, and I will see you all next time.

Kathryn: Thank you for having me, Connor.