Hiring A PR Firm

PR for DTC Brands

Consumer Products PR, DTC, Hiring A PR Firm, Media Relations, Public Relations Services, Thoughts

PR for Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) Brands

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Direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are increasingly growing in popularity. While the industry itself is hardly an emerging industry, many DTC products represent a disruption in the status quo. Instead of buying from a third-party retailer, customers can purchase products or services directly from the company. Businesses with successful DTC brands typically have one thing in common: a strategic and effective way to reach their target market.

Using targeted public relations and social media campaigns for DTC brands can create brand awareness, reach your ideal audience, and engage with current and potential customers. However, it’s not merely about posting things on Twitter or Facebook, and suddenly your business makes more money and grows. Creating a successful digital marketing plan means knowing when and how to use PR and social media for DTC.

Why Brand Awareness Is Crucial for DTC Brands

If you have a DTC business, you need to implement a marketing strategy that focuses heavily on brand awareness. In the beginning, your main goal isn’t as much about making sales as it is about garnering attention from potential customers, so they know who you are and the types of services or products you offer. These are the people who might encounter your brand again down the road and decide they want to buy something.

Building brand awareness begins with online advertising. Your target audience should be served interesting and unforgettable ads. It’s about creating a lasting impression in the minds of potential consumers and building trust. The more ads they see from you, the more they will feel comfortable with your business. Online shoppers are more likely to trust a brand they’re familiar with than one that doesn’t seem legitimate.

Using Social Media to Engage With Customers

Once you’ve established yourself as a brand, you need to maintain that awareness throughout various digital marketing platforms. An effective way of doing that is by using social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube are excellent forms of marketing to target a specific demographic or communicate with current customers.

You can increase your followers, attract new viewers, and engage with the people who are actually purchasing your product. The share feature within many social media accounts also allows users to quickly and easily spread the word about your brand to others. It’s basically like word-of-mouth advertising but via the internet.

One of the best features of social media marketing is customers’ ability to buy things through links included in the posts. If you incorporate relevant links in each post connecting to your products and services, it creates a hassle-free experience for consumers to make a purchase directly from your Instagram page or YouTube video.

Don’t Forget About Your Public Relations Plan

The right public relations strategy can inform the public about a company’s brand, build and maintain reputations, and gain credibility with a target audience. It’s not just about letting people know you exist, but also about letting them know exactly who you are. You’re trying to create an image, and the way you go about doing it can have a positive or negative impact on consumers.

Some of the most common PR strategies include:

Brand identity – Choose a logo, determine how you want your website to look, pick the tone you want to convey when communicating with customers, and pick visuals to use for your social media campaigns.
Messaging – You should include a backstory about who you are and how you got started. You should also incorporate your company’s values and mission. It’s critical that your tone remains consistent throughout all PR and social media for DTC. If you regularly change the voice conveyed through your marketing, customers will have difficulty trusting you.
Events – You can host an event or sponsor one where you know your target audience will be. Potential customers will see that you’re a legitimate business and learn about the products or services you sell. You will also have the opportunity to speak with them face to face and build trust.
Media – Press releases are an excellent way of notifying the public about the launch of your new brand, releasing a new product, or a sale or giveaway.
Partnerships – Partnerships can be a significant part of promoting your business. You should stick with people and companies that are relevant to your brand. For example, if you sell hiking gear, it wouldn’t make sense to work with a restaurant. Instead, you might want to partner with a sporting goods store and stock their shelves with your product.

Combining Social Media and PR for DTC Brands

Your brand could benefit from integrating your social media marketing and public relations campaigns, since both can complement each other.

Common examples of integrating social media and PR campaigns are:

Influencer Outreach – Social media influences are an excellent source for promoting someone’s brand. They typically have hundreds of thousands or millions of loyal followers who trust them and purchase the products they promote.
Digital Press Releases – Traditionally, companies send press releases to journalists to convey information about their brand. However, in the digital age, you can publish your own press releases on your social media accounts, through email, or as a blog on your website.
Forging and Maintaining Relationships with Journalists – You can use social media to create relationships with journalists in your industry that benefit your company and achieve your marketing goals. It doesn’t take much effort to gain their trust and support – if you take a genuine approach by following them on social media and sharing their posts, they might be willing to do the same for you.

Contact Avaans Media

If you’re looking for the right marketing agency to expand your digital audience, increase your return on investment, and successfully grow your business, Avaans Media can help. We have over a decade of experience creating and implementing effective PR and social media campaigns for DTC brands.

Schedule a call or complete our online form if you want to discuss your goals and determine the most effective strategy for improving your online presence.

by Avaans PR

Using Earned Media, Social Media, and PR to Maximize Brand Awareness

Consumer Products PR, Hiring A PR Firm, PR Branding, Public Relations Services, Social Media, Thoughts

PR and Social Media for Maximum Brand Awareness

Nothing beats when PR and social media for brand awareness. Used together strategically, they give your brand a competitive edge. With more avenues available to companies to reach their audiences, we are more inundated with brand messaging than ever before. Despite the myriad ways that brands have to reach their customers, though, the proliferation of media channels means it’s getting even harder for brands to break through all of the noise to reach their targets.

One study from Ragan found that 86 percent of TV viewers ignore or skip commercials, 44 percent of direct mail goes unopened, and 91 percent of email users had unsubscribed from an email newsletter they had previously signed up for.

Faced with these challenges, what are companies supposed to do? They can keep throwing resources at the challenge and following the same old formulas, to what will likely be diminishing returns. Alternatively, they could try a new approach by combining the strengths of two seemingly opposed marketing tools: Public relations and social media.

Below, our media experts at Avaans PR take a closer look at the benefits of incorporating PR and social media into your campaign strategy. Contact us today to learn more.

Harnessing Consumer and Media Synergy

Before diving into the gains companies can see from combining their public relations efforts with their social media campaigns, it’s worth taking a brief moment to compare and contrast how PR and social media work (or at least, how they’re supposed to work).

Social media allows companies to share their own messages by combining words, photos, video, and audio on various platforms. By contrast, public relations is the art of getting third-party organizations to say nice things about you on their platform (i.e., their newspaper, magazine, website, TV show, podcast, etc. Put simply, social media is what you say about yourself, while public relations what other people say about you.

While it’s tempting to dismiss PR as a relic from the pre-Internet era, nobody should forget the importance of public relations by focusing exclusively on social media. Some people are understandably skeptical of the messages they receive from social media, at first, until they learn to trust the brand. But public relations can win over cautious consumers by providing positive coverage from a third party. A study from the Content Marketing Institute found 70 percent of consumers said they prefer to learn about a business from articles as opposed to ads.

It’s a mistake to view social media and PR as unrelated or separate efforts for your company. Rather, social media and PR both serve the same function in different ways: To spread your brand’s messages, ideas, and values to your customers, stakeholders, and the other communities you serve.

When you take a holistic approach to your communications efforts, it’s easy to see how PR and social media can use each other’s strengths to bolster their individual effectiveness, as well as the overall effectiveness of your communications campaign.

The Benefits of Combining PR and Social Media

Here are a few examples of how leveraging both PR and social media can benefit your company:

Separate but unified messages across channels

A key element of any successful media campaign is a coherent, unified message across platforms. Combining PR with social media allows you to use multiple assets in different ways while still spreading the same general idea.

An example of how this might work is with a new product launch. You might have a blog post and a dedicated landing page with a short video about the new product on your website. Your social media team can use this content in their posts, while your PR team can use the blog post and other content to craft a press release and reach out to potentially interested third parties for additional coverage. Across platforms, though, the message is the same, which helps you better connect with your audience.

Efficient cross-promotion

Similarly, utilizing social media and PR harmoniously helps you make more efficient use of your resources. Your PR team can include easy links to your brand’s social media accounts in their materials and extend the reach of your social media content by reaching out to journalists, influencers, and others who might share that content. Likewise, your social media team can share positive stories about your company from third parties in your social media accounts, which helps lend authenticity to your content.

Increasing the size of your audience

Social media has massively expanded the potential reach of a PR campaign, and you should take advantage of this opportunity. PR campaigns are generally aimed at the audience for a particular publication or outlet, but social media can amplify positive press coverage by making sure that message goes out to thousands, perhaps even millions of people. By working together, both your social media team and your PR team can extend their reach.

Using PR strategies to improve your social media presence

As social media has grown and become intertwined with public relations, brands have had to learn a few lessons about proper social media strategy. A careless or insensitive post can generate a massive backlash in minutes or hours. Savvy brands will have a skilled PR team monitoring or running their social media feeds to watch out for distasteful or improper content, and they can respond quickly if anything goes wrong.

A Successful Brand Campaign Using PR and Social Media

At Avaans PR, we already have extensive experience handling both PR and social media campaigns for purpose-driven brands. One of our biggest successes was a campaign for a hemp-based consumer packaged goods brand. With many people being skeptical of hemp products, finding a way to engage potential customers was a challenge.

However, by generating positive press coverage through live events, celebrity endorsements, personalized review opportunities for journalists, and customized social media content, we were able to generate more than three billion earned media impressions over three years, at an estimated earned media value of $5 million. The company also saw a 300 percent increase in its share price ahead of its IPO.

Talk to Avaans Media About Your Social Media Today

We’re proud to be innovators in PR and social media strategies at Avaans Media PR and Social Media. If you’re interested in seeing how we can help your purpose-driven brand meet its goals, please get in touch with us.

You can set up a call by visiting our contact page or by finding one of our team members across the United States. We have team members in New York, Los Angeles, Denver, Phoenix, Honolulu, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. We look forward to hearing from you.

Other articles you might enjoy:

Why your Social Media & PR Must Work Together

Should Your PR Agency Be Your Social Media Agency?

by Avaans PR

Post-COVID: 10 Marketing Statistics & Strategies to Thrive in 2020 Recession

Hiring A PR Firm, PR Branding, Social Media, Thoughts, Trust

There are TWO keywords for your post-COVID marketing strategy: Trust and Retention

2020 won’t be a year any of us forgets anytime soon. Social distancing brought us personal and economic uncertainty that’s sure to last through the remainder of the year. We won’t fully appreciate the full impact on this global pandemic for a very long time. Now IS the time to think about your post-COVID marketing strategies though.

Right now, businesses are having to make decisions that will determine whether they’re company survives or even thrives in a post-COVID-19 world.

Let’s face it, post-COVID marketing and PR will be very needed. It’s not a question of “if,” it’s a question of “what” and “how.”

From past recessions, we know customers steer towards familiarity during times of uncertainty. With this in mind, it’s important for brands to cherish their customers, keep in touch with their customers and tap into and enhance brand loyalty.

Even in a recession, consumers will still splurge, they will STILL treat themselves, but emotional triggers take on outsized importance because consumers actually DO want to feel good about their purchases and when consumers are watching their expenses closely, they have more to lose from a lousy brand (product, customer service, communication) experience. When consumers are watching their pennies, they aren’t taking as many risks with their money.

Get Emotional With Your Customer Retention

Now is a great time to reinforce the brand relationship with existing customers. Think about customer loyalty programs and branding & PR initiatives that strike right to the heart of your existing customers. Discounts and sales are easy, but do nothing for loyalty, so look at reinforcing customer loyalty right now. Now, understand, no consumer says “I want a relationship with a brand,” instead the relationship resides in their subconscious. Our work with Captivation Motivations means we deeply understand how consumers act, even when they don’t understand why they act.

Not only does post-COVID marketing to existing customers cost less than acquiring new customers, but it also pads the bottom line for years to come:

1) Customers with an emotional relationship with a brand have a 306% higher lifetime value and will recommend the company at a rate of 71%, rather than the average rate of 45%. (Motista)

2) Emotionally connected customers stay with a brand an average of 5.1 years vs. 3.4 years (Motista)

3) Emotionally connected customers recommend brands at much higher rates: 30.2% vs. 7.6% (Motista)

Grab Share of Voice While It’s Available

Brands who maintain or even increase ad spends are able to thrive in the years after recessions, the same will be true for post-COVID marketing. There are several reasons for this, first is branding confidence.

While the Edelman Trust Barometer of 2020 addresses the lack of trust in advertising, the strategy behind advertising isn’t trust itself, it’s exposure which leads to familiarity, which leads to increased trust. Also, the ROI will improve because fewer competitors will be advertising so your message will come across more strongly.

Plus, consumers know that marketing decreases during recessions, so by advertising you’re sending a message of your own confidence and strength to both customers and competition.

That said, expect PR, specifically earned media, to take an outsized influence as earned media leads in trust. Brands using PR to refine and focus their commitment to their existing customers will score extra bonus points in customer retention.

4) Companies who maintained or increase ad spend during a recession saw a 256% increase in sales over those who cut back (Innovating Through a Recession: Professor Andrew J. Razeghi Kellogg School of Management)

5) 92% of consumers say they trust earned media over purely promotional content. (PR Daily)

6) 70% of consumers prefer getting to know a company via articles rather than ads (Content Marketing Institute)

Maximize Happy Customers

Celebrate your existing customers, because customer retention is the name of the game. But go the extra mile too, ask for and encourage your customers to give you reviews and feedback AND show that you appreciate their willingness to do so. The reason for this is simple, the more engaged a customer, the more likely they are to be in the habit of referring you to others.

For the last decade, we’ve witnessed one of the most incredible consumer shifts in marketing: the traceability of consumer referrals. We now know that for certain that when a friend recommends a product or service, that product or service immediately benefits from a trust boost. This trend will be on supercharge throughout 2020.

During the boom economy, you probably spent the majority of your marketing budget on the acquisition of new customers. In the post-COVID marketing world, now it’s time to turn your funding away from acquisition funnels and into emotional connections and reinforcing trust with your existing customers, pivoting your marketing budget towards this strategy will increase revenues (yes, even during a recession).

7) Happy American customers will share their positive experiences with and refer about 11 people. (American Express)

8) It’s 5-25X more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing customer. (HBR)

9) A 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%. (HBR)

10) 80% of an organization’s future revenue will come from just 20 percent of your existing customers (InsightSquared)

by Tara Coomans

Why Do PR: Should You Hire In-House or Agency for Marketing and PR?

cmo, Hiring A PR Firm, PR Insights, Public Relations Services

Why do PR? Emerging or growing brands often ask should I hire in-house or use a PR agency?

They’re asking themselves this question against a wild backdrop and volatile marketplace. But even during corrections, thousands of businesses are finding their footing and growing. It truly is the wild, wild, west in right now. The reason executives are asking themselves this question is because regardless of lay-offs and investment size, what both these businesses also have in common are some enormous plans that require PR and marketing.

Many companies have concerns about hiring agencies, they worry about finding the right PR agency, they worry about disclosure to people outside the company; they worry about failure. Those are legitimate concerns, many of those same concerns can be an issue with employees, but with an agency, they can be addressed with strategic questions and planning, and taking a little time to get to know your potential pr agency. And the good news is that the best agencies seem to know one another. If you find a great marketing agency or a great branding agency, chances are, they know a PR firm they like and trust.

In-House PR Advantages

Proximity

If you like having someone to bounce ideas off on a whim, in-house PR teams offer that flexibility more than PR agencies. PR agencies are typically a little more formal about meetings and goal-setting.

Cross-Departmental Integration

As companies and brands grow, it’s often great to have someone in-house who formalizes internal communications and ensures other departments are considering PR implications.

Agency Management

If you’re managing multiple agencies, like a marketing agency and a public relations agency, having an in-house point person is a great advantage. Agencies will often work together, but someone needs to ensure the brand’s objectives are always at the forefront.

But what are the practical business reasons for hiring an agency over an in-house team for brands?

Cost-Effective

A single hire’s salary can cost you more than an agency, and that single hire, because they are human, has limitations. Agencies specialize in providing you with the team of specialists you need when you need them. Add this to the fact that you won’t be paying benefits, payroll taxes, and health insurance, and it adds up to savings for both big brands and startups.

Think about it, in addition to your CMO and/or a Communications Officer, who will each need a manager and team, including a media relations specialist, a content writer, a social media manager, a graphic designer, and a multitude of marketing and listening tools which can all easily add up to $400,000 or more, plus benefits.

Plus, if something dramatic happens, it’s also usually less expensive to separate from an agency. Many PR agencies, including us, have a separation agreement in the contract that spells out the process if something radically changes, so it’s a reasonably straightforward process that brings peace of mind to executives in this volatile time.

The IRS Sees PR Agencies As an Expense

Agencies streamline payroll AND they are also a straight business expense. Talk to your CPA about what makes the most sense for your business.

PR Agency Superpower: Scaleability

Think of your agency as your expansion team. In addition to receiving top-notch strategy and planning, you’ll also have access to team members who are in the thick of it and can give a point of view from the front lines too. When you have a team of people, it’s easier to tap into insights and trends that you might otherwise miss. But it’s also important to note that when you hire a cannabis PR firm or a cannabis marketing firm you’ll get a team of professionals who can more easily scale up during launches or big campaigns.

Even if you do decide to take certain elements in-house, your agency continues to serve you with perspective and resources that support your in-house team. For example, many brands want a PR expert in-house for a multitude of reasons, especially corporate communications and investor relations. But your PR executive still needs a team to help execute, especially in the area of media relations. Few in-house communications executives are actively pitching and engaging with journalists as often as our team is, our media relations team is a top-notch time saver for in-house PR teams.

Seeing the Forest Through The Trees

It’s easy to lose perspective when there’s a lot going on. An agency can provide additional listening and strategy insights you might not have considered. Having a team that has your back and isn’t bogged down in your office politics can really keep things moving along.

In-house team members tend to be front-line advocates internally. And that’s a really important role, especially if you’re trying to build a culture as many brands are. But those day-to-day tasks, meetings, and internal cajoling tend to make consistent outward-looking perspectives difficult. Use your agency to bring you a consistent overall vision of the marketplace and strategies that will set you apart for the long run. Look for agencies with whom you can have open and collaborative dialogue to get the most out of your agency.

Get to Work Fast!

The right agency can get to work much faster than onboarding an employee. Agencies have a client on-boarding process that will be systematic and strategic because they want to get to work too. You won’t spend your time showing someone where the coffee maker is, you’ll spend your time reviewing strategy and goals.

Access To The Latest Technology & Tools

You pay a fair share for platforms and services that are critical to your business. So do agencies. We have top-notch monitoring, analytics, and communications platforms – you get access to those without adding those non-critical operating costs to your bottom line.

by Tara Coomans

What Does PR Do?

Hiring A PR Firm, Public Relations Services

What Does PR Do?

There are more ways than ever for brands to communicate directly with prospective customers, investors, and stakeholders. Along with traditional marketing platforms like TV, radio, print, and billboard advertising, alternative methods such as social media and YouTube give companies even more ways to tell their story to their audience. Also, new data tools let you target that message with a level of precision that would have been unthinkable in the past.

And yet, there are still limits to what traditional advertising, and even social media can accomplish. Being so exposed to the constant deluge of marketing and advertising around them has made many consumers skeptical of most brands. One study from Ragan found that 86 percent of TV viewers skip or ignore ads, 44 percent of direct mail is never opened, and 91 percent of email users had unsubscribed from a company email list that they had initially opted into.

What’s more, consumers are becoming much more selective about which brands they support, and are increasingly shifting toward brands that are more involved in political or social causes. Unlike in the past, new research shows that consumers want brands to get involved in social issues. The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer shows that 67 percent of employees expect their employers to take a stand on issues that employees care about.

Edelman also found that 71 percent of employees believe their CEO should respond to social and political challenges. This follows trends among the public, as 76 percent of everyone surveyed by Edelman said that CEOs should take a leading role in addressing society’s problems instead of waiting for governments to act.

However, while more people are expecting businesses to get involved in political causes, skepticism remains about many brands’ intentions. This is especially true when it comes to younger audiences, a core demographic for many brands. A 2018 report from the research agency MediaCom found that 37 percent of teens age 16-19 were skeptical of the claims brands made about the causes they support, and 69 percent of teens said they believe brands overstate their support for charitable or social causes.

How PR Can Help You Reach Even More People

How can brands counter this entrenched skepticism to persuade new and existing customers? One tool you may not have considered is public relations. With so many more ways for brands to spread their own message to consumers, many companies have neglected the value of PR. But if building trust authentically is what you’re after, then you can’t ignore what a well-crafted PR campaign offers.

If marketing and advertising are the tools brands use to tell their story, PR is the art of getting others to tell that story for you. While it may seem counterintuitive for brands to put their faith in having other people tell their story, there are benefits from good PR that can’t be matched by marketing and advertising.

First and foremost, we’ve already noted how consumers have become increasingly distrustful of the messages they get directly from brands. PR circumvents that issue by having a third party mediate your message. There’s an element of faith involved here, but consumers are more likely to trust your message if it comes from a brand they already trust.

How Can I Be Sure That PR Works?

There’s already plenty of data to back up these claims. The Content Marketing Institute found that 70 percent of consumers prefer to get information on a company from articles as opposed to ads. This is even more true among businesses; CMI also found that 80 percent of business decision-makers prefer to learn about a company from articles instead of ads. Lastly, HubSpot found that Millennials are 247 percent more likely to be influenced by blogs and social media than by traditional advertising.

Brands who take advantage of what PR can do have an advantage over those who ignore these potential benefits. Getting articles about your company into trustworthy publications will generate more engagement and goodwill than even the strongest, most effective ad campaign. For brands that are purpose-driven, this kind of PR is priceless.

Frankly, more brands should be promoting themselves as values-based and purpose-driven. It’s a good business strategy; the MediaCom report we mentioned above found that 54 percent of the teens surveyed said they had bought from or intentionally avoided specific brands because of their ethics and values. MediaCom also found that 63 percent of teens said they were more likely to buy from a brand that supported causes or charities that the teens cared about. But consumers hold brands to high standards, so it’s important that companies back up their words with concrete actions and policies.

This is another area where an experienced, innovative PR team can help in ways most marketing teams can’t. A PR campaign will help you shape the narrative around your company, its mission, and its goals. Furthermore, a PR firm can help your brand solidify its position and clear up any misconceptions by putting the right information where your audience will see it.

How Avaans PR Can Help

Avaans Media has a strong track record of helping brands tell their story in an interesting, creative way. Take our work for a hemp-based wellness brand. We had our work cut out for us with this campaign, as we had to establish the validity of hemp-based products in the consumer packaged-goods space despite skepticism from many prospective customers. But by harnessing our media contacts and crafting a campaign across a range of business, science, and lifestyle publications, we were able to place more than 200 stories about our client over a period of three years, averaging five stories every month.

Ready to find out what PR can do for you? Contact us here.

by Tara Coomans