The Public Relations Blog

Get help from PR to promote your great company culture for Employee Appreciation Day

Your employees are one of your company’s biggest assets, and March 6 has been designated as Employee Appreciation Day for you to acknowledge their hard work. As you take this time to recognize individual achievement, you can also use this day to show off your company’s value as a great place to work.

Use the Axia PR crisis communication e-book to prepare yourself

If your company experienced a major catastrophe and your phones were ringing off the hook with reporters demanding answers and information, would you know what to do? Your customers and other key stakeholders would also be waiting to see how you respond. What’s the best way to address their concerns, remain truthful  and still protect your brand?

When a crisis hits, you won’t have time to pontificate. You will need to know best practices and take decisive action. With the Axia PR e-book Managing Public Relations in a Crisis, you can better prepare yourself to hit the ground running.

In media relations, use a sharp shooter, not a shotgun

To benefit our amazing clients, we recently invested in professional development by sitting in on a webinar called “Mass Pitching - Smart Strategy or Massive Mistake” to sharpen our media-pitching skills. You might be surprised to know that some reporters call out public relations professionals on social media for connecting with them poorly.

One of the many added benefits of hiring a PR firm is its ongoing relationships with members of the media and the firm’s ability to earn news media coverage on your company’s behalf. As a public relations firm specializing in national PR campaigns, Axia Public Relations diligently works to establish relationships with reporters in our clients’various industries in order to avoid a common mistake in the profession: mass media-pitching.

Why a PR firm is a great inbound marketing partner

Traditionally, the sales, PR and marketing functions haven’t always gotten along. There are squabbles over budget dollars, arguments over territory and confusion about who can claim success for various initiatives. Now, with inbound marketing, all that can change.

Inbound marketing represents a new way of selling and conducting your business online. It involves engaging your target audiences, building relationships and making more conversions by using the right kind of value-added content. A PR firm can make this process much easier.

Use this Axia PR e-book for advice on how to fire your PR firm

Business mogul Donald Trump tells some unlucky individual, “You’re fired!” each week on his reality show Celebrity Apprentice. For the rest of us, firing someone isn’t always that easy. It can be even more difficult to fire your PR firm.

Fortunately, Axia PR can help with our e-bookHow to Fire Your PR Firm. If things just aren’t working out with your current PR firm, download it today to use as a guide.

With help from PR, you can use inbound marketing to turn strangers into satisfied customers faster

You may remember the days when businesses opened at 9 and closed at 5 (maybe a bit later on the weekends). If a business was closed, no sales were made and that was that. Additionally, all it took to get a customer’s attention was a huge holiday event or cheesy gimmick like Christmas in July.

Thanks to social media, smart devices and constantly connected consumers, the concept of what it takes to attract a customer and close a sale has significantly changed. Audiences now expect 24-hour access and real connections. It can all be very bewildering if you don’t know how to maximize the potential. With help from PR, inbound marketing can help you take advantage for increased profitability.

Create mutually beneficial relationships using social media

Already this month, our team has blogged about social media and its role within an overall marketing communications program. To that end, comments have come in inquiring about how businesses can establish stronger ties with the local media through social media.

If you use Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook regularly, you immediately gain access to a large and varied population of journalists and news media outlets. Even a quick review of local media websites highlights that most news professionals maintain social media presences – with Twitter handles (@name) stashed within team bios, beneath photos or in news blog posts. Of course, if you aren’t yet comfortable with Twitter as a social media platform, you’ll first want to brush up on basic functionality and terms including “retweet” (RT), “hashtag” (#), “favorite,” “newsfeed,” “tweet,” etc. before proceeding.

In our experience, if businesses or individuals truly want to establish relationships using Twitter, they’ll want to consider these best practice tips:

Use the Axia PR social media e-book to ensure you’re doing everything to reach consumers

Social media is not just for college students anymore; it is big business. Understanding best practices for this tool and how it can affect your bottom line may help you jump ahead of the competition.

Axia PR’s e-bookThe Essential Social Media Management Guide can show you how to best utilize social media for reputation management, search results rankings and customer engagement. Download it today to help with your social media efforts.

Embrace, understand and leverage this important tool

Everyone reading this post likely has a general understanding of social media. Regardless of the platform, social media is about one thing and one thing only: social engagement.

All businesses should seriously consider at least a minimal social media presence. Unlike traditional public relations, social media is focused on creating brilliant content, sharing it, then listening and responding in an effort to take traditional PR efforts to the next level. Using advanced reporting, monitoring and structuring tools, public relations teams can further build brands and create a loyal, active following of customers and fans – all of whom can further extend your reach.

Follow these tips to make your customers swoon

Contrary to popular opinion, delighted customers are not natural; they are created. With so much competition, it’s not enough to simply gratify your customers. You must find ways to enchant them and keep them coming back for more.

The sales cycle funnel includes the stages of attraction, conversion, closing the sale and delighting your customers. Many companies spend all their time on the first three stages and then stop, apparently believing that once a customer makes a purchase, he will always remain loyal. However, like any relationship, it has to be nurtured and cherished, and a PR firm can help you do that.