The Public Relations Blog

If you’re not familiar with HubSpot, you should be. HubSpot develops and markets software products for inbound marketing and sales. The company has several courses on its platform HubSpot Academy, and they are all free! Here are five key takeaways from the popular inbound course.

     1. Helping your customers = helping yourself.
Today, people are focused on climbing corporate ladders and trying to be the best, often at the expense of their customers. Inbound changes that dynamic by taking care of the customer. When you take care of your customers, you’re taking care of your company.

The inbound approach uses the knowledge that your teams already possess and shares it with others. It builds a trusting relationship with your customers while empowering and educating them.

     2. Attract. Engage. Delight. Rinse. Repeat.
Having all your teams follow the three stages of inbound will help create and foster relationships with the people who matter most: your prospects and clients. If you attract the right customers and consistently engage them, they’ll leave delighted and willing to come back in the future.

     3. Helpful content is contextual content.
Customers are coming to you, the experts, for insight and information that they need. Instead of providing information that doesn’t apply to them, make sure the content relates directly to what they’re asking or the outcome they’re seeking.

     4. Don’t lose sight of your purpose.
What is your company’s purpose? If you lose sight of your original purpose and begin focusing solely on profitability, it can send you down a slippery slope. On the other hand, if you keep your purpose at the forefront of everything you do, you’ll have dedicated employees serving a single purpose with customers that keep coming back. These delighted customers may also refer their friends to you!

     5. Purchasing personas: Everyone should have them.
Not every customer is a good fit for your company, and that’s OK. Who’s your ideal customer? What does this person look like to your marketing team? Sales? How about legal? Or billing? Have your customer-facing and backend teams work together to develop this ideal customer. Once everyone commits to solving the problems of your ideal customer, you’ll have a better understanding of your market and how you can provide the best services.

While these were the five biggest lessons I learned from the inbound course, there were many other great tools to include in your company’s toolbox to foster future growth and focus on those who matter most: your prospects and clients. The course takes between two and three hours to complete, and the value it will provide you is priceless.

Did you make a mistake typing in the phone number on your Facebook ad? Or, perhaps you listed the wrong company hours. Unfortunately, once Facebook reviews and approves your ad or boosted post, you can’t edit the text directly. However, there is a hack to edit the text without canceling the ad and losing all its data.

Revise your company’s “About us” summary each year

It’s a new year and time to update your company’s boilerplates to better communicate your brand’s mission and accomplishments. Look at your company’s end-of-year reports from each department, such as sales, HR, and operations. Take time to comb through the numbers and pull figures that show what’s behind your brand. 

Measuring your social media pages based on reach, reactions, and clicks is a must when evaluating your ROI. Building a company social media page isn’t something you do for fun; it’s to connect with your customers. Your ROI from social media comes from generating new customers based on your social pages. These measurements reveal the initial steps followers take as they interact with your brand. When you understand these metrics, you are able to understand your audience and what they do with the content you share on social media. For this reason, you’ll want to make sure your company has developed a successful social media strategy.

Podcasting continues to be one of the fastest-growing media platforms. Podcasts provide entertainment, education, and much more. They’re an efficient way to consume information (you can listen anytime and while you do other things), and they’re relatively easy to produce. By now, you’ve probably listened to a podcast or overheard someone describing one. You may even have several that you listen to regularly. 

Axia Public Relations promoted Clarissa Schearer to public relations associate. She works closely with regional and national construction, home services and professional services clients. Using news, social and web media, she helps clients build awareness, trust and consideration with their target audiences. Prior to joining Axia in August 2019, she had years of retail, theme park and quick service restaurant experience. 

When analyzing a webpage for ranking, search engine algorithms look into what the page is about and how popular or authoritative its website and domain are. 

A website ranks for all the factors present on it, including content, keywords, meta title and description, videos, and images. Off-site factors, like backlinks, social signals, and outreach, determine how high it will rank on the search engine results pages (SERP).

Recently, I attended a PRSA chapter’s Media Roundtable event where 12 journalists from different outlets and backgrounds gathered to give insight and best practices to public relations professionals. While all journalists have their own preferred way for you to pitch them – and it depends if their outlet is print, online, or broadcast TV – there are some similarities that PR pros should know.

As Facebook removes gray badges, find out what urgent updates your marketing team must make

A feature that Facebook introduced almost five years ago is now gone from the social media platform. You could once identify verified business pages by their small gray check mark; however, as of October 29, 2019, that feature is no more. Why now? Don’t Facebook users want to know which companies are credible?

Here's how to approach a PR firm and create a long-lasting, beneficial partnership.

Many companies would benefit from a real-life example of how to properly engage a PR firm. 

Most companies try to approach hiring a PR agency (or any creative or professional services firm) the same way they buy office supplies: in bulk. This technique gets a company a commodity PR agency. And then the company wonders why the relationship is cold, the ideas aren't creative, and the results are flat.