Tag Archive for: hiring a PR firm

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

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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.

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CBD Marketing & PR: Don’t Let Hemp Seed Oil Steal Your Thunder

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You know it: CBD beauty marketing is competitive.

We’ve all seen it, it’s a thing, especially in the beauty industry: big-name players with big budgets purposely confusing consumers with hemp seed oil to take advantage of the CBD beauty marketing trend. Except for one thing: hemp seed oil, while perfectly wonderful, does not contain CBD.

Want to know why this is so important? Check out Google Trends  .  CBD beauty & CBD skincare leads the pack, but hemp beauty is in the mix and gaining momentum.

Consumers are confused.

You can blunt this confusion with a couple of strategies that we think are really important for the cannabis beauty community to embrace.

Make CBD Your Lead Message

In ads, in content, in every interview, help consumers understand the differences between hemp and CBD. The benefit of this is two-fold. Certainly education, but if you’re smart (and we know you are,) it also gives you a talking point that leads to benefits without making claims.  Use PR to illustrate the story, give the back ground of CBD and address the confusion head-on. Use marketing and branding to highlight CBD, which is increasingly accepted and the reason why beauty marketers are even embracing hemp again.

Incorporate Sourcing Into Your CBD Beauty Ingredients Messaging

Help consumers understand what they should be looking for in CBD beauty products. Explain over and over again in your PR and in your content that appropriately sourced CBD is important and provide ingredient information on your site. Consumers are conditioned to ask about sourcing more and more. Lead the CBD marketing pack by sharing sourcing details for your CBD.

P.S. did you know that products with ingredients listed sell better? Consumers increasingly care about what’s in their skin care products. Big skin care companies know this, that’s why they always feature particular ingredients. But since you’re competing with big budgets on this, go the extra mile and include all your ingredients along with a beautiful description of why they’re included.  This strategy not only engenders consumer trust, it helps consumers understand what to look for when they want CBD beauty products.

Look For People Who Understand The Difference Between Hemp & CBD

When you’re looking for CBD marketing partners or CBD PR partners, make sure they know the differences between hemp and CBD. You’ll find yourself explaining it over and over again otherwise. And if your CBD marketing company or CBD PR firm can’t articulate the difference, how will they understand what makes your brand stand out against both hemp and other CBD beauty brands? As an industry, it’s important that we get our messages right and that we use our considerable opportunity to both educate and define our industry and the special nature of our plant.

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5 Ways Cannabis PR will Change in 2020

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How should companies prepare for cannabis PR in 2020 with an ever-changing media landscape? While the cannabis industry shows no sign of slowing down, the media landscape has seen some dramatic changes in the last year, and that affects even the cannabis industry.

According to Business Insider, 3,200 people in media have lost their jobs so far in 2019. Buzzfeed, Entreprenuer, CNN, and Vice are among the notable media brands who cover cannabis who have also laid off talented journalists. These layoffs are a gut punch to our journalist colleagues, but they also impact the ability for these outlets to cover longer features, which makes it a gut punch to our clients as well. Cannabis PR continues to be an important part of becoming an industry leader, but this pressure on media in general is surely felt within cannabis.

Layoffs aren’t the only challenge PR-seekers will face in the next year. PR in 2020 will be affected by the election. We’re already seeing writer and editor reassignments to cover the race. Brands will be faced with either jumping on the news cycle or defining the news cycle; the answer to that question will be unique to each brand. Breaking news will likely happen weekly in the later half of 2020, that means anything not immediately time sensitive from a truly newsworthy perspective will need a longer lead time and take longer to publish.

Longer Timelines

Journalists and editors are a resourceful bunch and undoubtably, we’ll see some great talent eye the cannabis industry as an opportunity. Numerous outlets are adding cannabis editors and writers, but those writers will be fighting for space and attention because of the news cycle, effecting PR in 2020. Also, for national outlets, the cannabis desk won’t be terribly deep, so if that writer is out sick or there is breaking industry news, there won’t likely be much depth to the cannabis desk to cover additional stories.

Where just 5 years ago, cannabis publications were themselves considered niche, we now have cannabis publications who target very specific and engaged audiences like Broccoli does for women and Double Blind is for psychedelics. Both these gorgeous publications are print forward but do not issue on a monthly basis. Expect to see more super niche publications make their way to our PR in 2020.

Breaking national news will also impact feature pieces and your breaking news. Before you announce something, take a deep look at what’s happening in the industry so you can plan accordingly. Of course, sometimes news needs to break, investor announcements for example. In this case, there are strategies to employ to ensure you’re announcement gets the attention it deserves. It may require a shift in strategy, but Primo PR can guide you through that process.

This means PR planning and collaboration takes a longer lead time, especially feature pieces. Make sure your PR takes into account these timelines and shift your strategies to accomodate these longer timelines and niche publications.

Publications are changing – so is PR.

Freelancers!

Keeping up with the ever changing media landscape means writers and editors are changing careers or writing for multiple publications. Freelancer journalists can be an outstanding resources and great partners in cannabis PR, but keep in mind, they are looking for stories that will get them paid, thier job isn’t to be your marketing coordinator.

Don’t expect a freelancer to spend hours gathering data you should have on hand, make it easy for them to include media (photos, graphics, video) in their stories. If you’re unsure of what kind of content suits you, or what you’ll need, that’s the perfect opportunity to use the perspective of public relations, since we understand what the media is looking for when creating stories.

We’re consistently working with our clients to ensure they have the most media-friendly content available BEFORE we pitch a story. Have some empathy for freelancers who are often working to publish 5-10 pieces a week. We’re consistently working with freelancers, but we also work exceptionally hard to make their jobs easier, knowing they they are hustling for every word they write.

When you do get press, follow our effective media relations strategy to boost effectiveness for everyone. And don’t forget to tag the journalist, they’ll appreciate it.

Have some empathy for our freelance colleagues covering cannabis.

Integrate With Your PR

You can maximize PR by having your agencies collaborate on activations and integrations. Make your paid, earned, shared and owned media work together. Events, advertisements and even your website can often turn into PR opportunities, but only if PR has a seat at your planning table. Keep PR part of your strategic planning and maximize your spends. We’re cannabis PR experts- we often see opportunities that can make your investments work double time.

On a daily basis, we may be collaborating with a client’s branding agency, their media buying agency, and social influencers. Over and again, we find collaborating with agencies creates a better branding experience for our client and better press opportunities for them as well.

This goes for SEO as well. Public relations can have a huge impact on SEO from custom content to news releases, we’re always keeping an eye on trending searches so we can help publications AND our clients maximize eyeballs.

Editorial and Advertising Together

It used to be that it was verboten for editorial and advertising to collaborate. But publications today are finding new and creative ways to help boost their bottom line. Given the media landscape, it’s not surprising. Sponsored content, when well written and editorialized, can be an extremely effective tool for cannabis PR. The key to sponsored content is to think like a journalist and deliver a story rather an a marketing brochure.

Some brands are even taking a page out of MedMen’s strategy and like Ember, creating lifestyle publications for themselves. There are multiple ways to implement this strategy; some publications will, for a fee, run part of or the entire publication on your behalf. Content doesn’t have to be generated in-house, journalists and PR writers can help keep the content on par and on edge, while delivering value to both the brand and the reader. Owned publications are also an outstanding way to add extra value to your business partners while creating an effective newsroom for your brand.

Navigating These Changes

Team Primo PR is ready for these changes and anything else that comes our way. One of our key values is remaining nimble, because dynamic landscapes demand it – that’s our job. We’re already planning on doubling down with strategy and distinctive stories that will set our clients apart in the news, even with all these changes. We’re working directly with journalists on pieces that are slated for publish at the end of the year – RIGHT NOW. As you look forward to your 2020 plans, keep the dynamic nature of industry and the national news in your planning process. It’s not too early to start strategizing for 2020’s PR changes because one thing is for certain: change.

Resources Mentioned In This Post:

Business Insider: Media Lay Offs
Broccoli Magazine
Double Blind Magazine

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