The Public Relations Blog

Learn why you should put your PR efforts before advertising when building your brand with our guest, Laura Ries.

Guest: 

Our episode guest is Laura Ries, president at Ries & Ries. Laura is a branding guru and the bestselling author of “The Fall of Advertising & the Rise of PR.”

Topic: 

The one with Laura Ries on how brands are built with PR and maintained with advertising.

As marketers and public relations pros, we’ve likely all wanted to have an amazing April Fools’ Day prank as a fun way to bring attention to our brand.

In the right circumstances, April Fools’ Day pranks can make for great PR.

In the wrong circumstances, April Fools’ Day pranks can make for really bad PR.

Even the least experienced PR professionals know, as with any joke, there are many potential April Fools’ Day pitfalls to consider. Avoiding backlash should be a top priority.

When a company hires a PR agency, it will get consistent quality and measurable outcomes when our processes are followed. Having the processes is the first step. Getting buy-ins from the team and having the processes followed is the bigger challenge.

Know how to best share your company’s message

Earned media coverage is built awareness about your company through efforts like media relations (connecting with reporters), blogger relations, influencers, and word-of-mouth. It’s counterpart is paid media, which is advertisements that you or your company creates or pays for about itself. We have many clients ask us the difference between earned and paid media, and in the same breath, they also ask us to create a press release to earn media coverage.

Learn how the decay of civil public discourse is hurting our democracy with our guest, Anthony D’Angelo.

Topic: 

The one with Anthony D’Angelo on what you can be doing to combat incivility in public discourse.

From photography to sidebars, having multiple entry points only strengthens your story.

Telling an incredible story is only the first step to getting your audience interested. There are so many other factors that grab a reader’s attention and keep him or her engaged. These are called entry points because they are all elements that draw your audience in to learn more. Without these elements, your audience will leave the story just as quickly as they entered it, and your story will not have a lasting impact.

Target your ideal customers with inbound and outbound marketing strategies.

Marketing is imperative to boost the sales and market performance of a company. When done right, it can help you attract and retain loyal customers and build your brand name. 

Inbound marketing and outbound marketing are ideal tactics that marketers use to reach their audience. Knowing the core differences between these two will help you make informed marketing decisions and generate higher conversions. Let’s get started. 

Here are the smartest content curation hacks to supercharge your marketing efforts.

Creating fresh and valuable content is an organic way to increase engagement. And so to make your company relevant and approachable, you must discover trending industry topics and strategize a well-rounded marketing plan. 

Content curation is a continuous process and can become tedious without the right content curation strategies. To be impactful, you need to retrieve content in effective and well-aligned ways. Keeping that in mind, let’s learn some quick content curation hacks. 

Find out what lessons Firehouse Subs learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and how you can implement these solutions at your company with our guest Kristen Majdanics, vice president of marketing at Firehouse Subs.

Guest:

Our episode guest is Kristen Majdanics, vice president of marketing at Firehouse Subs. She leads a team of 17 marketing professionals and supports a system of more than 1,100 restaurants.

Topic: 

The one with Kristen Majdanics on what Firehouse Subs learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.

How Axia deep dives into clients’ brand, consumers, and competition

When creating a communications, PR, or marketing strategy for a company, it can be tricky to determine what the company needs help with and where and how it can improve.

Axia Public Relations’ strategic insights process is a tool we use for every client as a deep dive into the company’s brand, consumers (or buyers), and competitors. We start by asking the client three questions:

1. What are your top one to three business issues?

2. What are the one to three titles for your ideal target customers?

3. Who are your top three to five direct or largest competitors?

From there, we begin our initial research.