Our very best collection of PR insights, tips, and ideas, especially for emerging industries, fast-growing brands, and hyper-growth companies.

Why Hiring a Cannabis PR Firm Matters

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Ask anyone who works in the cannabis industry: it’s different from any other industry. It’s not “just another CPG” product. It’s a highly regulated, heavily watched, extremely volatile industry. Our firm handled the first cannabis product recall in California, and we can tell you it’s not like other product recalls. We’re deeply engaged in the cannabis industry through our NCIA leadership and we proudly spearheaded the Best of 420 Clio Cannabis last year. The cannabis industry, which started in 2012 when Colorado and Washington legalized recreational use, has a history and patchwork of regulations even though it’s an emerging industry. Navigating these waters takes strategy, foresight, and the ability to read the tea leaves, which only comes from experience – that’s why hiring a cannabis PR firm matters.

 

The Cannabis Industry is Not The Green Rush

The ACTUAL gold rush was famously unregulated; it was a bonanza of rebels who swarmed government lands with impunity. Or the tech industry, whose ground-breaking innovations in media, medicine, and technology happened without major government oversight for decades, giving time for some of the world’s most profitable companies to take root.

The cannabis industry is on fragile ground. Even the most basic of business tools, the bank account, is challenging to secure for plant-touching cannabis brands. Unlike the surge of other emerging industries which merged into hypergrowth businesses, from the very first, the cannabis industry has been highly regulated. No startup industry has managed so many regulations, taxes, and hurdles early in its growth.

Why does this matter when hiring a cannabis PR agency? Because there is a more significant responsibility to consider and more to lose for cannabis brands. Anytime a bad actor lands in the cannabis industry, legislators can point to the irresponsibility of that single company as representative of the entire sector – fair or not. Cannabis brands must take the reputation of the whole cannabis  sector seriously. Cannabis owners have the opportunity to be cultural leaders, and that’s a heady but consequential task that a cannabis PR agency knows how to handle.

If the cannabis industry is to change its federal legalization situation, then it must take the reputation of the cannabis industry seriously; that’s why hiring a cannabis PR firm matters.

 

Building a Brand Matters More in Cannabis

There are only a few ways for cannabis brands to differentiate because of the limitations on cannabis brands. Therefore, cannabis brands must use the marketing and communication tactics that are open to them, strategically.

While a cannabis connoisseur may be able to detect the subtleties of your flower’s terpene profile, the average U.S. consumer is still blissfully unaware of what a terpene is. Its essential to meet your consumer where they are and celebrate their lives through the articulation of your brand. People are rarely drawn to a brand because it educates them; educational content has its purpose, but as a cannabis brand, you must know its purpose and place more than other consumer brands. And when I say brand, I mean every touch point from cannabis packaging to website. If your website looks amateur, then it doesn’t scream luxury or lifestyle; it screams “cheap, and uncommitted.”

It’s more important than ever that brands articulate clearly WHO their customer is. This is true of all consumer brands – but for the cannabis industry, where it’s even more challenging for the consumer to differentiate between brands, it’s even more critical that you tell them. No successful brand is everything to everyone right away. It took decades for Coca-Cola to be a brand that crosses generations and lifestyles, and even with that, Coca-Cola is continuously adding new products and new campaigns to reinforce its connection to segments of its audience. No cannabis brand has the history or the budget to operate the way the world’s biggest brands do – and that’s OK. You can’t be ubiquitous, but you can be niche.

But being a cannabis company doesn’t make you a cannabis brand-a brand you must build. And PR is a vital tool for emerging industries and ambitious brands for a reason.

Today’s cannabis brands have a multitude of strategies for their future. Some want to create generational family businesses, some want to be acquired, and some want nothing less than world domination. All those things are possible when you build a cannabis brand and that’s why hiring a cannabis firm matters.

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Can Growth Marketing and Public Relations Work Together?

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Can growth marketing and public relations work together. Growth marketing is about customer acquisition and retention, often through paid media, with relentless iterations and deeply engaged knowledge of the consumer. Public relations is reputation management of a company’s image, often through earned media and deep understanding of broader cultural and media trends. So what do they have in common? On the surface, not much, but when you dig deeper into the tactics and the metrics, we can see where together growth marketing and public relations can work together successfully.

Suppose the business objective for a consumer product launch is to increase sales through decreasing competitors’ market share. In that case, a digitally savvy PR agency knows how to do competitive research of the entire digital landscape and media landscape and use that data to determine the opportunities to overtake a competitor, while a growth marketer is reviewing how the company attracts customers and retains customers. But where do growth marketing and public relations work together?

Data Driven KPIs

Today’s modern PR firms and PR campaigns should be tied to business goals and identified public relations metrics that support and funnel up into that goal.  While growth marketers are developing ads, PR agencies are developing ways to capture the target audience’s imagination. PR agencies may present a word-of-mouth activation or a targeted quality over-quantity earned media campaign that overlaps targeted audiences. A PR agency might also recommend content which can boost SEO and support brand values that interest and retain customers.  Just like a growth marketer, a modern PR agency is tracking metrics. What metrics might a PR agency track in the above scenario?

  • Mention Quality
  • Article Reach
  • Brand Placement in Article
  • Share of Voice
  • Domain Authority

All of the above PR metrics are measures of awareness and credibility. These metrics support top-of-funnel AND bottom-of-funnel customer journeys and can support growth marketing efforts with a keen eye on target audiences and messaging which supports growth marketing.

The Digital PR Toolkit

For growth marketers, the digital tool kit is primarily paid (but not exclusively); for growth marketing PR, the digital tool kit is primarily owned (but not solely). But there are a few areas where growth marketing and growth PR connect. One of those is SEO. For the growth marketer, SEO provides opportunities for retargeting and organic acquisition, growth marketing PR adds value to both. With a savvy eye on keywords and quality inbound links, PR supports growth marketing objectives to funnel into business objectives.

That’s not all; PR agencies working with media outlets to build revenue opportunities can help growth marketing with a high domain authority on inbound links as well as excellent reviews from credible media outlets, which send potential new customers searching for the product. These reviews could be in gift guides or hero reviews where the consumer product receives an in-depth study that meets Google’s product review update recommendations. Meanwhile, growth marketers will typically focus on reviews from influencers or existing customers. And a brand with positive customer reviews gives a journalist further confidence in a brand and a product.

Today, PR and growth marketing can use some of the same tools, they use them slightly differently:

  • Inbound Links
  • Owned Media
  • Credible Review Acquisition

Credibility: Where PR Fills The Gap

I often tell our clients PR creates the awareness and solidifies reputation; ads are the conversion driver – that’s how they work together, and they both work better. Why? It’s simple: earned media from credible media outlets is more trusted than paid ads. But few journalists look at it as their job to write conversion-focused marketing copy. The journalist’s job is traditionally to create the content that keeps you on the pages. From a longer tail and more strategic point of view – PR also builds brand credibility on the corporate level, trusted brands have faster aquisition and they have longer customer retention, meaning growth marketing is even more influential.

So when someone sees a great review of a product, and THEN they see the ad, they get the trigger to purchase the product, or maybe they sign up for a newsletter, or maybe the look for more reviews and do a Google search that lands them on another referral site. The pathways are endless, but they all come back to one thing: supporting the brand’s business goal.

I’m a fan of understanding and maximizing the media environment for our clients. The Avaans Media client is ambitious and goal driven, so understanding how our jobs support overall marketing strategies and business goals is essential. When we evaluate the landscape for our clients, we find a distinct point of view, and because our tools are different than growth marketers, we can glean insights and data that drive new insights. To be honest, I’m not concerned with being a purist about owned, earned, and paid. It’s the job of a digitally savvy PR agency to know what levers to pull when and how to shape campaigns that create success. That’s our job – and that’s why growth marketers and public relations can be best buddies.

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Consumer PR Trends for 2023

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Today’s digitally native consumer brand challengers need to know how consumers are changing in order for their  DTC brands to grow.  The media landscape is distributed and yet overwhelming. The average daily time spent with major media, including television, newspapers, magazines, radio, and digital formats, amounted to 12 hours and 30 minutes (Statistica). This means that consumer brands and their consumer pr agencies need to stay engaged with how consumers are discovering and purchasing products. When looking at consumer PR trends for 2023, several things stand out.

Consumers are More Socially Conscious Than Ever Before. 


Emerging consumer brands and emerging industries can not afford to ignore this trend, because it has been on overdrive since the pandemic. Whether the brand dives deep and engages in purpose-driven PR or takes a stand on social impact issues, consumers are voting with their wallets, and the up-and-coming generations have big expectations for businesses to contribute to improving society, not just the bottom line. 

  • 68% of consumers say brands celebrating what brings us together and emphasizing our common interest would strengthen the social fabric
  • 63% of consumers buy or advocate for brands based on beliefs and valued (Edelman)
  • 59% of consumers will pay more to purchase from a favored brand — a 4% increase since 2022 (Marigold)

Consumers Want To Find Products Through Trusted Sources

Let’s face it: everyone from your niece to your Mom is looking for credible information, and search is still one of the most critical places for consumers to find trusted information. Google knows this, and they’re doubling down on making sure their search results are from trusted sources. From consumer tech to CPG, consumer brands who want to grow must align with trusted sources.  It is no surprise that, over all, social media is not a trusted source for adults; however, they still use it as a discoverability tool. They then go search for more information.

  • 90% of searchers haven’t made their mind up about a brand before their search. (Zippia)
  • 68% of GenZ adults turn to social media for new at least once per week. (Morning Consult)
  • A considerable 82% of consumers trust print ads more when making a purchase decision. (Zippia)
  • Only 20% of GenZ named Instagram their favored platform. (The Atlantic) TikTok and SnapChat were #1 and #2, respectively.
  • 90% of U.S. consumers find targeted ads intrusive and annoying. (Zippia)
  • Online-only news sites are second only to social media as the most commonly used GenZ medium (Morning Consult)
  • The average person is now estimated to encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day (lunio)

New Technologies Give Rise to Consumer PR Trends

The era of AI search is here – owned content needs to shift to long-tail search (Algolia) and there’s more. Voice search, most often done on mobile phones, is also on the rise. Consumer brands need to create content that reflects these new search methodologies and remember to take full control of their owned content in order to feed the algorithms.

  • 41% of US adults use voice search daily, higher in comparison to countries globally. (Google Mobile Voice Survey)
  • 25 to 49-year-olds use voice search more often than any other age group (PWC)

As you look at these trends, consider how you will use these ideas in your consumer PR strategies and with your consumer PR agency. You also might appreciate our report on how to make your earned product reviews more Google-friendly. As a consumer PR agency, we have a distinct approach that sets us apart. If you’d like to learn more, contact us today.

 

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How Direct-to-Consumer Brands Can Continue to Grow

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We live in a world where ideas, products, and signals are happening so fast that it’s hard for the consumer to process everything. Yet, direct-to-consumer brands can continue to grow with a strategic eye on awareness and trust.  If we weren’t bombarded with over 5,000 advertisements per day, we could be more subtle.

The fact is, worldwide, the average person spends 473 minutes per day engaging with media. We also live in a post-ChatGPT world, and one still ruled by search engines and algorithms. Plus, newsrooms are shrinking (in 2021, they had fallen by 25% since 2008) as competition for ad dollars becomes less and less centralized. For this reason, DTC PR strategies need to keep up with the changing media environment and rethink earned media.

There are two ways to approach CPG PR; one is a holistic approach of communications, digital visibility, thought leadership, and product PR where metrics match key business objectives; the other is a laser-focused approach, which could be consumer product PR or thought leadership, depending on the brand strategy with more PR-focused KPIs. In an ideal world, all brands embrace a holistic point of view with a complete bespoke PR program. But, by choosing a strategic consumer PR lever, challenger consumer brands can be precise and thoughtful about their earned media. This is about the laser-focused approach, and consumer brand PR firms must expand their definition of PR to stay useful to DTC, CPG, and consumer product brands.

The Argument for Laser-Focused Media Relations

It’s a harsh world for direct-to-consumer brands to continue growing. For challenger consumer product, DTC and CPG brands – those past startup mode but not a household name – there are an overwhelming number of media options. From Instagram influencers to a dizzying array of advertising choices, the challenger brand has more choices than money. Therefore, it needs to act strategically to do two things at once to scale: build awareness and trust.

That’s one reason PR is the signature choice for consumer product PR: Trust and Awareness.

Trust is the longest game but the most crucial communication goal of any brand. Yet, trust takes a long time to build. Unlike Instagram Influencers (whose influence is waning) and paid advertisements, and the 68% of consumers who think cookie-based advertising is creepy (Marigold 2023), earned media addresses the #1 PR challenge for upstart brands: trusted reach. Whether your target audience is GenZ or a target broader, consumers must trust your brand before you edge in on the market share of competitors or create a new product category altogether, trusted reach is where the smart money goes.

So how do you build trust and awareness when your branding budget is limited? The fact is that branding is expensive, and brands with hyper-growth ambitions need a more direct form of branding.  Indeed, product reviews play a vital role in both trust and awareness, and there’s one way to super charge product trust: product reviews in trusted media outlets. Media coverage has several advantages over other brand awareness options, including stickiness. Unlike a fleeting social media post or a questionably targeted ad, product coverage, especially reviews on online media sites, is extremely sticky, lasting in search results for years.

Owning Content and Messaging with Thought Leadership

Executive visibility has never been so vital. A well-developed owned content program isn’t a blog program; it’s a program that embraces all the thought leadership opportunities available to hypergrowth brands today. From blog posts and contributions to emerging topics to the multitude of contributor opportunities to executives willing to share insights with the broader public, thought leadership is ripe with opportunities for challenger brands. This is especially true for younger audiences who distrust established and entrenched brands more than they do startup consumer brands.

Even if your audience isn’t reading those contribution sites, they add a credible and authoritative SEO link to the website and present executives as willing and open to engaging with their customers. According to the Edelman Trust Report, businesses were more trusted than the government and NGOs. But that trust is tenuous because CEO trust isn’t on solid ground, yet business leaders are seen as unifiers next to NGO leaders and teachers; that’s some pretty good company business leaders are keeping. Plus, the best way to earn trust is to be more visible.  Harvard Business Review says one of the most important ways for consumer brands to succeed includes deepening customer relationship, not just making comparisons with competitors.

Now is truly the time to embrace thought leadership because of the trusted status of businesses. From 2022 to 2023, businesses earned a 20-point bump in ethics on the Edelman Trust Report, so this is an area of opportunity for consumer brands – especially if they embrace purpose-driven PR. But even if a true purpose-driven message isn’t right for a consumer brand, there are likely aspects of ethics to which the leaders of the consumer brands can speak. And that’s important because 63% of consumers buy or advocate for brands based on their beliefs and values.

 

Embrace Digital PR Completely with Product Reviews

Digitally savvy PR keeps their eye on the future instead of “of the moment.” Let’s be clear: for trust and authority, there are no short cuts Google sees those work around tactics and actively adjusts against them. This is not a recommendation to game the system; it’s a recommendation to embrace the system. Getting a bunch of low-grade links is actually more damaging than helpful. And the idea of an influencer is changing. A few years ago, brands rushed to implement Instagram influencer campaigns, 90% of which fell flat because they weren’t well executed influencer campaigns. And as the influencer’s trust continues to wane, brands need to understand where their target markets are and who they trust. GenZ audiences don’t trust social media but look to social media to find the news. And 49% of GenZ trust cable news and network news, while 52% trust online only news sites. These online-only news sites are a boon to consumer brand PR because they constantly work to churn out content; they always need new ideas and angles. Plus, product reviews drive eyeballs and, as an added benefit, can also be sources of revenue through affiliate programs. Creating digitally savvy content that supports hero reviews alongside gift guide inclusions is an excellent way to focus consumer product PR budgets.

How Digital PR and Earned Media Work Together

Working alongside journalists to support their objectives is and always will be the objective of media relations. Today’s savvy media relations teams understand how to help digitally savvy online news outlets so that their content surfaces on Google (and AI-driven search like Chat GPT). It goes beyond keywords into the deep algorithm that is Google’s search engine. Direct-to-consumer brands can continue to grow by leveraging Google’s search and trust algorithm for themselves. And that search engine is leaning heavily into authority and trust. There are millions of ways to signal that your brand is trustworthy, but one of the most attainable is aligning with Google’s most trusted sources, and that’s where consumer product PR can make the biggest impact.

Upstart consumer brands can become hypergrowth consumer brands by investing in very defined strategic PR initiatives. Connect with us today to learn more about our laser-focused PR programs for ambitious brands.

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