Tag Archive for: branding

PR for DTC Brands

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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.

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

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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?

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Should Your PR Agency Be Your Social Media Agency?

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Should Your PR Agency Be Your Social Media Agency?

[5 minute read]

One of the most powerful and precious assets every company has is its brand. With consumers being more aware of and concerned with the messages brands put out than ever before, a company’s social media channels are crucial tools for them to express their values, reach out to customers and other stakeholders, and maintain their image.  

A 2018 study from Accenture showed 63 percent of consumers preferred to support brands that they viewed as sharing their values and beliefs, and social media is a way to engage directly with your customer base. 

However, with more and more of the population paying attention to companies’ actions and what they say, your social media channels require more attention and maintenance. It may be time to call in some outside help to manage your business’ social media feeds. 

When you’re taking your brand very seriously then it becomes very obvious why social media strategy, content, and community management is a job for seasoned communications professional whose job it is to stay on top of platforms, trends, and potential landmines in social media.

Learn more about what the social media experts at Avaans PR agency can do for your brand and your business. Contact us today to learn about how we’ll grow your social media community.  

 

When Should Your PR Agency Also Be Your Social Media Agency?

 

Working with a PR agency for social media allows you to have your earned media and owned media work together seamlessly. After all, if there are two places you want brand consistency it’s in media messaging and customer messaging.  When you work with an experienced, dedicated PR team that understands social media, they won’t just learn your brand inside and out, they’ll be an extension of it. They’ll work closely with your team to make sure their social media content is an authentic reflection of your voice and your brand.   

In addition, they’ll be able to leverage robust social media analytics tools that will help you learn more about your customers, target market segments with relevant messaging, and effectively extend your brand. 

Here is an overview of the ways a skilled PR agency can benefit your social media presence.  

Crisis Management for Social Media

 

Your social media feeds need to be monitored at all times. If you have good news to share, you can post it within minutes if you have a dedicated team ready to put that content out. If there’s bad news or you get a bad reaction to a post, you need someone ready to respond at all hours of the day with a well-planned and strategic answer.  

When you rely on an internal team to handle your social media, someone from your team has to be doing that job 24/7, but you can save yourself a lot of time and hassle by having someone else take over your social media content. Having around-the-clock support also makes it easy to respond to minor technical issues, such as a landing page that isn’t quite working or a busted link in a Twitter or Facebook post. 

Expert-level advice and solutions
 

Running your social media accounts internally means putting together a team with the skills and resources to handle that job. Translating social media savvy into tangible results for your company is a skill, and it’s not something just anyone can do. This is especially true if your business doesn’t work in marketing or a related field. In the time it takes to find, hire, and train an internal social media team, you could hire an outside team of experts to do a much more effective job. 

Stretch your marketing budget further 

 

Marketing and advertising are essential components for any growing business, and you want to make sure you’re getting the most value for what you’re spending. If you’re relying on your own team to manage your social media, you may not be using your platforms and resources as effectively as you could be.  

 

An outside company that specializes in social media management is more likely to be on top of the latest trends and tools. They’re also more incentivized to help you grow, as they’ll need to deliver positive results if you’re going to keep using their services. 

Outside perspective 

 

Never squander an opportunity to get an outsider’s perspective on your business. While they may not know the whole history of your company, they’ll be quick to learn it, and an outsider will be better able to see both your strengths and your weaknesses. They can then help you promote those strengths in a way your customers and others in your audience will find compelling. 

Top-tier tools 

 

While there are many free tools or individual subscriptions available to track your social media performance, these tools are somewhat limited and can become cost-prohibitive once you start using several of them every month. PR agencies have access to much more robust systems, and you get access to everything they have when you hire them to run your social media. 

Let your team focus on essential tasks 

 

Creating an in-house social media team when your company isn’t in the social media space means you’re taking time and effort away from doing what you do best. Save your attention and energy for other matters while letting an experienced social media team handle that aspect of your business for you. 

Proven Results 

 

At Avaans Media, we want to help purpose-driven brands find success using our proven tools and methods. Our founding and culture is digitally forward, which means we’ve been a leading source of social media by brands around the country since 2008. By harnessing our strengths, your organization can expand its reach and find new, exciting ways to interact with your audience. 

 

We’ve already applied our skills to social media campaigns for a number of brands and organizations. In one case, we partnered with a group aiming to improve early-education outcomes for young children in poor families where English is not the primary language. By relying on content with heavy visuals and a peer-to-peer tone, we were able to generate more than 401,000 impressions among our target audience over six months, with an engagement rate of 52 percent.  

Our efforts also helped spur the state legislature to pass more funding for early education programs, especially among younger children in economically challenged families. 

More Articles of Interest:
6 Times When Your Company is Ready for a PR Agency
Should You Hire Inhouse or Agency for Your Marketing & PR?


Contact Us Today 

Our team is ready to jump into whatever challenge you have for us. We’re a virtually enabled organization with team members in Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Phoenix, San Diego, Honolulu, and Washington, D.C. You can get in touch by visiting our contact page or stopping by one of our seven offices. 

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

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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)

 

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6 Free Cannabis PR Ideas During a Cannabis Correction Without Additional Costs

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6 Free Cannabis PR  Ideas for an Industry Correction

Now is the time to maximize brand value on things that don’t cost extra.

You may look at these 6 cannabis PR ideas and wonder what they have to do with PR, but when you consider that your reputation is a holistic, dynamic entity, you can appreciate how these actions can add up to big value. You’ve seen the headlines, the cannabis industry is experiencing its first correction. Consolidations abound. Business closures are making headlines. Capital markets are all but frozen to anyone besides the big guys – and even to them sometimes.  So surviving this time is likely front and center in your mind.

Corrections are quite literally a matter of time – it’s just part of capitalism, and it’s literally just physics. But what is also usually happens is there is a recovery. When it does come back up, it will look different, no doubt about it. Look, the cannabis industry isn’t going away, the market hasn’t even come close to peaking. According to Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics in 2020 alone, we’re projected to be a $16 BILLION dollar industry and next year, in 2021, over a $19 billion dollar industry.

Yes, absolutely, tighten up your books, reduce inventory, keep a tight eye on your cash flow and finances. All those things are 100% legitimate and important. But since we’re a cannabis PR & branding firm, we’d like to suggest ways you can still excel in this market that maximizes brand value.

Frankly, while we’re writing this in response to the 2019 cannabis correction, these are 6 cannabis PR ideas that will improve your bottom line during the good times too.

arcview cannabis industry projections 2020

Image from Business Insider’s Cultivate Newsletter. Subscription link at bottom.

What should cannabis businesses do to survive and possibly even flourish during this time?

Those who survive this phase have a great opportunity to emerge even stronger. Certain efforts, particularly in marketing and PR, will actually provide you more ROI than they would have even a year ago because when panic sets in, balls get dropped, budgets get cut.  Branding and PR are inside-out jobs. These 6 free cannabis PR ideas are here to give you ideas of places you can probably improve immediately. There is so much more to branding than a sexy logo. Look deep inside your company for opportunities to distinguish your brand-many of these things won’t cost more and could save you millions.

Use these free cannabis PR ideas to improve your brand, your reputation, and loyalty, which means your cannabis PR and marketing when things improve will be even more effective than they would have been otherwise.

Double Down On Relationships

“People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” -Maya Angelou

Join and Participate in Active Industry Associations

Right now, we need to commit to the industry associations that are actively working to improve and defend our industry on the local level and the national level. When you join, ask how you can more actively support the organization. By supporting the organization, you’ll not only strengthen its mission, but you’ll also be able to get to know the people better too. Double down with your time and you’ll find the returns are immeasurable. Take full advantage of the membership benefits, if there are ways to share your point of view, maximize those. As the industry consolidates, people are looking to do work with people they trust and the best way to encourage trust is to be present, take part, show your commitment to the organization, the mission, and the people who are contributing to the industry At Avaans Media, we’re big fans of the way National Cannabis Industry Association (NCIA) treats its members.

When It’s Time to Say Goodbye

If you have to separate from employees or partners, do it with class. Be communicative and as a fair as you can possibly be. Anything you do when severing a relationship, especially when it’s abrupt, will be especially remembered. So take a hard look at what your brand is worth and treat goodbyes with respect and dignity. If you’re letting employees go, be sensitive to timing. If you’re canceling a contract, have a real discussion with your partner about how to do it fairly. It’s easy to feel shame about these conversations, but don’t hide from them. Yes, these conversations are the worst kind to have, but during the tough times, it’s what you do more than what you say that people will remember.

Treat Your Partners & Vendors Like Gold

When was the last time your CEO attempted to make bud tenders feel special? Now is a great time. Bud tenders, like it or not, are the face of your brand to the consumer and trust me, they feel stressed about the cannabis industry’s challenges too. Why not do something no one else will do for the front line during a correction: treat them with respect. Small efforts can go a long, long way right now. I’m not talking about training, I’m talking about thinking of ways to thank bud tenders right now, genuinely show your appreciation. It could be as simple as a surprise visit to every dispensary with gift cards. Sure you can go bold and that’s fantastic too, but if you can’t be bold, that’s not an excuse to do nothing. Everyone else will do nothing, do more and get more.

While we’re at it, let’s talk vendors. Sure, go ahead, negotiate good terms – AND uphold your end of the bargain. No one will forget that you drove a hard bargain, but that’s business. But go the extra mile and hold up your end of the deal as if your life was on the line because, from a brand perspective, it is. The last thing you want right now is lackluster partners or partners who don’t really love you, what you want right now is passion, the vendors who are going the extra mile for you-but to do that, you need to treat them well too.  Any partner who will go through the craziness of a correction while looking out for you is worth their weight in gold, treat them that way. Pay on time, acknowledge their efforts and the importance of the relationship. Put a little free-but-important muscle into it and watch how that pays dividends.

Celebrate Your Most Passionate Customers

Customers are the obvious driver of revenue. Now is a great time to make being your customers more fun. Think about what’s REALLY important to your customers. What drives their motivations?  Reward cost-conscious customers with small incentives like purchase cards that can be turned in for promotional products.  If your customers are creative, how can you encourage them to spend their creative energies on their brand commitment? It could be making the inside of your packaging a game, it could be encouraging them to share your brand through social media. And by the way, track your most passionate brand advocates on social media and never forget to celebrate them and acknowledge them. No cannabis brand is too big to thank its customers right now.

 

Don’t Stop, Won’t Stop

“When they go low, we go high,” -Michelle Obama

Emphasize Your Strengths-More

You might not have had the time last year to really see where your best success stories were, but now is the time to look – and celebrate – what worked by actually increasing the heat of what’s doing well. Invest in things that are working well. Increase ROI of the things that are already returning value by committing to them at a whole new level. If your brand is great at social media, keep at it and make it better. Issue a special version of your most popular product line.  Really taking a stand and focus on something you do well will make you stand out from the pack and return more ROI as your competitors struggle to figure out how to manage the dynamics of this marketplace.

Maintain Quality

Consumers know, especially your most passionate consumers, they can tell when you’ve made substitutions and formulation changes. As tempting as it may be to cut corners on the product right now, don’t. Keep your customers happy by maintaining quality while your competitors decrease theirs. Keeping the quality up doesn’t cost extra, but decreasing quality will cost you in the short and long run.

Keep Your Chin Up and Your Numbers Up Too

Incentivize your sales, marketing and PR teams & vendors with trackable KPIs and hold them accountable. Self-serving as this sounds, if you devest cannabis PR, marketing and sales now, you’ll struggle to regain market share when the market starts its inevitable upward tick. Resist the urge to reduce these expenses because the hidden costs are ginormous and tend to extrapolate themselves in silent but deadly ways over years, not months.   I’ve seen this happen over and over again, eliminating these roles, or worse, hiring someone for cheaper, costs companies more. Instead, attend sales, marketing, and PR meetings and show that you’re in touch with the marketplace and work collectively to address issues early. Make sure you’re keeping a close eye on benchmarks and competitors so you have a real idea of how you’re faring in comparison.

In Short

Kindness, professionalism, and time don’t cost extra, but in a cannabis industry correction, they can be the difference-maker.  Now is a great time to really make your brand stronger. These free cannabis PR ideas are inside-out jobs, now is a good time to focus on the solutions that will bring you the most value during a rebound.

PS: By the way, I grabbed this image from Business Insider’s Cultivated newsletter (link). If you’re not reading it, you should. 

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Brand Trust: Why Disappointing Social Metrics May Be A Good Thing

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What exactly IS brand trust and how do we measure it?

Brand trust is measured in many ways, sometimes we use a metric like a net promoter score. Sometimes the value of a brand is incorporated into EBITA, and we infer higher brand-value equals trust.

But really, what IS brand trust?  In a global environment where, according to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, trust in institutions and media is at an all-time low, it’s more important than ever for brands of all sizes to keep ahead of the trust curve.

Neuroscientists have been researching the effects of our brains on trust with interesting results.  Neuroscientists have been researching the effects of our brains on trust with interesting results. In the book Brand Seduction-How Neuroscience Can Help Marketers Build Memorable Brands, Daryl Weber reveals how the unconscious mind is constantly picking up cues from our environment, including cues from brands, most of us don’t even realize our brain is doing this monitoring on our behalf. What this means though, is that every single subtle brand cue sends a message.

So how should we interpret trust in everyday execution and metrics analysis?

THE BRAIN ON FEAR

Think about the last time something you saw on social media enraged you. Chance are, just reliving that moment has your blood pressure spiking.  “Flight or fight” response, makes our brain neurons fire like mad. This, in turn, creates an emotional response. In contrast, our brain on trust is relaxed, open, I compare this state to homeostasis in the body. It’s the place our brain WANTS to be, but it’s also the place where triggers are not as emotional.

What this means is that emotional responses may NOT be positive for a brand trust. Take, for example, Facebook reactions. Content that triggers the most “viral” response is often content that creates anger, fear or other negative sentiments. But social media platforms (and their algorithms) aren’t yet evolved enough to understand that highly emotional reactions may not mean a piece of content is valuable for trust.The most viral content may do nothing to enhance trust. This does not mean that good never goes viral, but it DOES mean that computers don’t yet really grasp the difference,  even if humans (subconsciously) do.  But, humans are imperfect, and we’re often not even aware of our own reactions to messages.

This is to say, that in trust building, messages or ads that are viewed, but without huge emotional responses may actually be better for building trust. If you track reactions or sentiment on social, it might be disappointing at times to see that trust messages or messages built with trust intentions don’t get a lot of “lift.” But I would argue, that is exactly what you want from trust messaging.

LOW RESPONSE BUT MORE OF IT?

Imagine you’re making a special chocolate cake.
You create the first layer and ad the frosting.
It’s a good cake. It will taste good.
But it isn’t very impactful. So you add another layer. And another.
And before you know it, you have this impactful cake with layers of goodness inside. And when you finally EAT the cake, you enjoy it, even more, knowing there are multiple layers of goodness.  Trust is like that. The first layer of trust is good. It’s acceptable. But multiple layers of trust are better. Multiple layers of trust take time. The emotional response to trust is not “at the moment,” trust building is a front-loaded proposition. The payoff comes at the end. The payoff comes when the brand’s experience matches the anticipated trust. The brain remembers THAT satisfaction. Perhaps more subtly than an outraged response. But the brain DOES remember it at buying time. When you ate your beautiful chocolate cake, you enjoyed it. The next time you make a cake you’re more likely to make a chocolate cake over say, vanilla. This is how brand trust works.

The thing is, you need to reinforce that positive experience and positive response over and over. The subtle cues build up over time. But they can be replaced by constantly good experiences of vanilla cake too – because, you know, vanilla is equally yummy. Consistency is the key.

Have you ever known a brand one way than seen an ad that completely shifts the message? It’s jarring. Just today I was watching a conversation about a brand whose messaging, packing, product and ads were all luxury-level classy. Then they ran an ad showing a woman in panties with a pretty vulgar statement written on the panties. WOW! It got the attention of everyone, but overwhelmingly, their current customers were outraged, they thought they “knew” the brand, in some cases, people actually expressed betrayal.  These customers related to what they thought the brand was, a luxury-level classy product.  The brand’s trust has been shattered in the eyes of some. This particular ad may get high virality, but will the sentiment be overwhelmingly positive? And even it works, with what I call “a sugar spike” of sales, will those new customers be as loyal as the old ones? Will the old ones stick around?

Consistency is key. In branding trust, slow and steady wins the race. Look for consistently growing results, not “sugar spikes.” Sugar spikes mean you’re appealing to a specific audience over a short period of time, but not building any loyalty. That’s an even more expensive proposition than branding.

 

HOW DOES THE BRAIN BUILD TRUST?

We’re conditioned to trust our tribes.  Our brains attribute trust to brands who our tribe use. That’s why influencer marketing and customer reviews are so powerful. The person doesn’t even have to comment about using the product, they simply have to be seen using it.

One of the more brilliant examples of this is Jennifer Aniston’s water. This campaign works for two reasons: I KNOW Jennifer Aniston’s face already AND it’s consistent.  If you read any of the “celebrity” publications at all, you have seen Jennifer Aniston leaving the gym, getting out of her car or shopping with a bottle of water in her hand. SmartWater (and it’s parent company Coca-Cola) tapped into the inherent trust that Jennifer Aniston brings and then they gave her enough water to last a lifetime. Yes, Jennifer Aniston also appears in ads for this water, but the most memorable (to me, at least) are the pictures of her going throughout her daily life using the water. Every single time I open a magazine and there is a picture of Jennifer Aniston going about her daily life, she has SmartWater. This has been going on since 2015. Every single time I’m at the airport, I grab SmartWater, and I’m not even a particularly huge fan of hers, but somewhere in my brain I say “if it’s good enough for Jennifer Aniston, it’s good enough for me.” It’s not a conscious thought – it’s the brain operating and choosing based on those many layers. My hand just reaches for SmartWater, I don’t even really think about it. That’s what I mean by trust being a front-loaded proposition.

Zappos is another great example of brand trust. When Tony Hsieh started Zappos, he didn’t double down on ads, he doubled down on customer service. When the company was acquired by Amazon for $1.2 billion, 75% of its customers were returning customers.

 

BRAND ACTIONS OUTWEIGH ALL OTHER MESSAGES

If your water brand hires Jennifer Aniston and does all the same things as SmartWater did, but if it’s revealed that the water isn’t what it says it is, none of this will matter. Experience trumps all in trust. Worse, trust takes a long time to build, but it’s easily shattered. If you’re going to invest in trust, you must invest in an authentic way.

Above when I mentioned the jarring change of tone from classy to trashy, this also indicates that the brand isn’t clear on who it is and creates questions about the brand. “What other brand values are negotiable?” asks the brain. If this brand has built up trust with its existing customers, those customers now (even if subconsciously) question that trust.

An example of brand trust that does work is Red Bull. They’ve built their entire brand around adrenaline-fueled messaging. They went so far as to sponsor Felix Baumgartner when he jumped from space in 2012.  While this kind of stunt is absolutely designed to attract your attention, it’s also building brand trust – Red Bull’s customers know exactly what Red Bull stands for and they love it. Brand trust doesn’t have to be boring. 

IS BRAND TRUST WORTH THE INVESTMENT?

I suppose that depends on whether you’re in it for the long haul or not. Brand trust makes it easier for your customer to buy, creates triggers at the exact buying moment and that’s huge. But what else? Brand trust actually adds value to your company, makes it easier to attract talent and decreases costs because the product is easier for salespeople to sell. In the long run, brand trust saves money by also retaining customers.

In the end, brand trust is accessible to businesses of all sizes, but it takes commitment and consistency and yes, authenticity. You don’t need to be the biggest player on the block, just the most trusted.

In a world where trust in organizations is diminishing, building trust can be your most valuable asset – and because suspicion is so high for known brands, smaller niche brands who really do what they say and are consistent about it, have lots of room to develop that trust.

So what can you expect when you invest in brand trust? You might not see “sugar spikes,” and huge social media shares, instead you should see brand value reflected by consistent sales, repeat customers and even a stronger valuation that you’d have without it.

If you’re ready to invest in your brand, we are here to help you develop and execute your vision with aggressive elegance, contact us today.

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