The Public Relations Blog

Public relations, like anything else, has its own vocabulary. When you’re working with your PR team to plan a successful campaign, it helps to know the meaning of terms that PR professionals use. The terms outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impacts are important elements of a PR campaign that you should know.

When designing a public relations plan for your company, Axia Public Relations starts with your goals and objectives. Then, we break them down further into inputs and activities. This is the first part of creating an effective PR program for you. We’ve created a scenario around Twidget, a fictional company, to illustrate how this process works and to help you understand what we mean by inputs and activities.

As public relations experts, we regularly secure earned media coverage for our clients at major news outlets. If you’re struggling to earn coverage for your company, use these insider tips to help you improve your media relationships and increase your earned coverage.

You don’t need a press release to get earned media coverage. 

Did you know 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.

Ever since Reginald Heber Smith invented hourly billing, many professional services firms – including some great law, accounting, engineering, architecture, and public relations firms – have billed hourly. Our firm is somewhat of an anomaly, as we don’t.

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.