The Public Relations Blog

Many industry analysts agree that organic reach for company Facebook Pages is now as low as 2%, and some speculate it’s even lower (without sponsoring those posts). You must pay to play.

If you aren’t boosting your company’s social media posts, you’re just talking to yourself. You’re barely reaching your target audience and your social media engagement is low. It’s challenging to increase social reach and engagement, and ever-changing algorithms make it more so.

Companies today are investing more energy and time on content creation and delivery. The volume of information flung at people daily can be staggering, if not paralyzing. Social media platforms continue to hone algorithms to deliver desired content, while attempting to box out the noise. For some companies, this is an obstacle. For others, an opportunity.

Don’t impede your potential results by requiring a monthly quantity of press releases from your PR firm

Did you know that you can earn great media coverage for your company without writing a press release? In fact, as a PR firm working with national clients, some of Axia Public Relations’ best earned media coverage came without ever writing a news release. Instead, we pitched existing contacts by phone – contacts with whom we’d established trusted relationships.

Apply these methods to your PR and marketing materials

When you hire a public relations firm, you trust its members to make ethical decisions and use best practices in all stages of communication with your audiences. Persuasive communication methods work to change your audience’s awareness, attitude, or behavior. When working to persuade someone, whether it’s to attend, purchase, visit, follow, or donate, apply the T.A.R.E.S. test or the duty-based method to ensure ethical best practices. Read our post “3 golden rules of PR in 2018” to dive deeper into which ethical standards are trending this year.

Our PR agency bills based on value and scope. We don’t recommend billing or paying by the word or by the hour.

Many professional services firms – including some great law firms, accounting firms, engineering firms, architecture firms, and public relations firms – bill hourly. Our firm is somewhat of an anomaly, as we don’t bill hourly.

In fact, with all due respect to our professional service colleagues who do, we have personal and corporate ethical issues with hourly billing. And we are not alone in this opinion. While you might not share our belief, we’ll explain in this blog post our ethical concerns, why brevity is key, and why results ultimately matter more.

How to write a news release that gains media coverage for your company

If your company has an announcement it wants to make, then a news release may be a great option for you to share that news. A news release is an official announcement that a company or nonprofit issues to the news media. There’s a right way and a wrong way, though, to create a press release. The better it is, the easier it will be to secure earned media coverage. These seven tips will help you write an effective news release to gain earned media coverage for your company.

How you can properly vet a company before doing business with them

We were in the final in-person pitch with a prospective client. The client was a tech company that had developed a negative reputation online for its fast-paced growth because it had hurt some feelings along the way. While the company earned this reputation, the managers saw the errors of their ways and wanted to get a better handle on the company’s reputation after improving its operations and culture.

You do have the time, money, and data to measure public relations

The reasons for incorporating measurement and evaluation into your company’s public relations strategy are many:

• You know actual metrics behind reach, impressions, items, mentions, and engagement to understand the effectiveness of campaigns.
• You see which media channels certain audiences are most responsive to.
• You can predict future trends for better planning and agile response.

There aren’t many people who read the newspaper at breakfast anymore. Most of us get the news from our phones through social media. However, traditional media – like newspapers and major news outlets – still hold value in our fast-paced, 24-hour news cycle. Social media curates content from many sources, including traditional media outlets. Its platforms are a dynamic medium that your company should use to share news as well as engage with current and future customers.

As a public relations firm dedicated to helping companies manage crisis communications, improve their reputations, and manage online reviews, it often surprises us how many of our prospective clients don’t understand the differences between these things. We think it’s important to educate companies about these critical areas of PR. If you don’t know the difference between crisis communications, reputation management, and review management, you’re in luck, as we outline the three below.