Tag Archive for: los angeles consumer pr agency

How People Discover New Brands?

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You have a new product to launch. How can you ensure consumers find it when they’re shopping? Marketing experts say the average person sees between 4,000 and 10,000 ads in a single day; everyone of them claiming to be perfectly targeted to your ideal customer. People tune out most ads. But for DTC brands, the ad addiction is real. Why? Because it’s easy to establish direct ROI. Even when brands know the ROI isn’t great, they can’t seem to get off the treadmill because they know what to expect.  And with AI emerging, there is likely to be further disruption in the consumer industry. You’ve worked so hard to create a great brand and a great product. So, if not for advertising, how do people discover new brands today?

 

Give Them a Reason to Talk About Your Brand

Because we’re so inundated with signals and ads, buyers rely on friends and family for suggestions more than ever to help them filter through the choices. Every consumer brand understands the value of reviews, but referrals from friends and family are even more essential. 27% of consumers rely on trusted sources like friends for new brand discovery. Also, the older the target customer, the more likely they are to rely on advice from friends, with GenX (30%) and Boomers (35%) relying most heavily on friends and family.

But giving your advocates a gentle nudge and a reason to share your info with friends is even more important. We see this a lot with referral codes. Still, when a customer wants to advocate for you, or want to tell a friend about you, they aren’t likely going to go digging around for a creepy referral link that makes the receiver think their friend is only recommending a brand so they can save $10. It’s icky.

Instead, think about your content and social proof. For example, write tangential content that’s interesting and useful to your customer, not just about your brand. For example, if you’re a food brand, then write content about your favorite cooking tools in your test kitchen.

Also, when you secure consumer press, celebrate it with your customers. This IS a good time to offer a promo code because it’s one more reason to say to a friend, “hey, this is the skincare lotion you asked me about; it’s on sale,” AND it comes right next to the social proof that backs up your customer’s choice to share your product.

 

Search Engine Love

31% of consumers find new products on search engines. Consumers use search engines during two buying phases: the research phase and the buying phase. You want to be present for both, because that’s how people discover new brands

First, assuming your website is well constructed, and your product pages are well designed, your next step is to embrace the reality of the internet: content marketing. With the latest advances in AI-generated content, creating content for your website has never been easier. Just be sure to review your content and ensure the quality is there because content is often a consumer’s first exposure to your brand. There are countless ways you can use content marketing. Look at the way Sarah Blakely was always the #1 brand advocate for Spanx.

Second, if you sell DTC, use Google’s product review advice to help you build content that matters to customers. Our annual guide has many tips and hints about building consumer content that will help you stand out in search engine results.

But it’s not just owned content that customers love. When potential customers search for products, they’re in the buying phase, and that’s when they’re looking for reviews that jump out at them from search results: reviews by trusted media outlets. This is really important because publishers have massive amounts of content and SEO, so their product reviews are highly visible. And it doesn’t seem to matter if the press outlet uses affiliate links, so long as it’s disclosed. We’ve had clients sell out warehouses full of product due to affiliate links. Notably, affiliate links from friends might seem creepy, but product review affiliate links from media outlets are perfectly acceptable. Why might that be? When you learn about how people view lures and rewards, that’s another reason you must allow your marketing and PR to work together when considering your DTC consumer.

Influencers Gonna Influence

We can’t really talk about DTC PR without talking about social media influencers. It’s not just younger generations turning to TikTok for product discovery. And social networks catch buyer in all three phases – the awareness phase, the buying phase, when they’re researching a product, and the curiosity phase. Ensure your influencer campaigns work for both those phases, and be conscious of how impulsive your customers are when strategizing campaigns with content creators, because buyers are increasingly impulsive on platforms like TikTok.; 65% of GenZ and Millenials make impulse buying decisions at least once per month, compared to 38% of GenX and Boomers.

 

Using these modern PR tips to capitalize on how people discover new brands and tactics will make your investment pay for itself much faster.

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What is Consumer PR?

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Consumer PR is the reputation and awareness building brands do to improve their image to the public. From purpose-driven PR to product launches and experiential PR, consumer PR gives consumers an additional positive touchpoint that builds trust, anticipation, and loyalty from consumers. Consumer PR is an effective lever for ambitious brands, particularly during hyper-growth or product launch phases. This is in contrast to B2B PR, which seeks to improve the reputation and awareness of a company within a particular business vertical. Brands know new customers buy faster and existing customers buy more often from brands they can feel good about. Consumer PR can take on many sub-forms of public relations, including:

  • Community Relations: building relationships with community stakeholders.
  • Product Public Relations: Product reviews and placements in consumer publications.
  • Purpose-Driven PR: Proactive values that incorporate social, cultural, and environmental issues.
  • Experiential PR: Opportunities for the public to engage directly with the brand in-person.
  • Integrated PR: PR campaigns that use paid avenues to create media coverage and word of mouth.

Why do companies engage in consumer product PR?

PR is the most trusted form of awareness building. Consumers trust reviews more than any other type of product awareness, like advertising. Reviews can come as online reviews, and even from influencers and bloggers or can come from media outlets. Media outlet coverage is particularly coveted because not only does it have powerful sway, it adds extra brand cache and it sticks around for a long time online. For DTC and e-commerce brands media coverage also improves SEO, a really important ingredient in online sales. Investors also like to see a brand in the media; it provides valuable social proof.

Consumer product PR can be approached from a long-term strategic process or as the consumer PR campaigns during certain times of the year.

Why would companies engage in community relations? 

Anytime a company needs its local community’s support, community relations matters. Sometimes brands want to be good community partners because it makes recruiting for top talent easier. Or maybe they want to expand, and they need City Council approval on a piece of land they’re eyeing. Or perhaps the brand values being a good neighbor to the communities in which it operates. 

Why would a brand engage in Purpose-Driven PR? 

Brands engage in purpose-driven PR for a variety of reasons. One can certainly be to improve their brand image in the eyes of their customers. You will often see purpose-driven brands publish an annual report. Not only does this report track its own progress, but it also provides the public with the progress as well. We tell our clients that strategic purpose-driven PR should be systemic, and externally virtuous, but meaty and measurable.

Why would a brand engage in experiential PR? 

When you think of cutting-edge sports, what brand comes to mind? It’s probably RedBull. RedBull became a household name through events. That’s because RedBull’s brand is inextricably tied to cutting-edge sports. Their support and engagement of some of these sports basically gave legitimacy to the X Games because competitors could finally focus their efforts entirely on their sport. In fact, RedBull created the first international kiteboarding competition. RedBull’s commitment to extreme events and competitors keeps them at the forefront of beverage brand awareness. Experiential events can be expensive, but when you consider the ROI both in advertising dollars saved and PR and brand affinity, experiential events are powerful tools in the PR arsenal.

Why would a brand engage in integrated PR? 

The best integrated PR campaigns use many marketing PR levers to make an impact. An example of this would be Coinbase. In 2022, they purchased a Super Bowl ad that was nothing but a QR code. Millions of viewers stared at their screens in awe that a brand would purchase one of the most expensive ads in history and do nothing but float a QR code across the screen. But that was the entire point. In fact, for many consumer brands, the reason to purchase a Super Bowl is the added PR coverage around Super Bowl ads. Weeks before the Super Bowl, consumer brands release their ads, either to the press or the wider public on YouTube, to ensure their creative ad gets the free press it deserves.

 

Brands that build loyalty and love through PR grow faster and have higher customer retention, and consumer PR improves other initiatives such as fundraising, that are vital to a thriving brand If you’re interested in consumer PR, contact us. We’re a top-rated consumer PR agency.

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