The Public Relations Blog

The digital age has changed marketing. Old-school tactics, like cold calling and direct mailing, are no longer effective as a means of increasing sales. Consumers have more control over what advertising they encounter, and most mass marketing campaigns are an exercise in futility. To grow leads and sales, you must attract prospective customers through thoughtful, insightful, informative, and entertaining content. In other words, you need a winning inbound marketing strategy.

Public relations software is one of the many important tools for earning media coverage

Every week a prospective client, PR agency peer, or another PR professional asks us:
“what's the best solution for a U.S. news media contact database?”

It’s not an easy answer. It’s like asking “what’s the best automobile?” 

At Axia, we've tried them all. And the simple answer is each has their pros and cons.

No company is safe from crisis as we’ve seen with the coronavirus pandemic. Although your communications strategy and tactics must shift to crisis communications during a time of emergency, it’s still of utmost importance to monitor and evaluate your company’s coverage as it weathers the storm.

You should continue to measure your company communications during a crisis, and you should include these four values in your criteria.

Commercial newswire services charge companies to distribute their news. 

The big players in this space – at least in the United States – are Business Wire, Cision PR Newswire, Cision PR Web, GlobeNewswire, etc.

These are often confused with newswire services, also known as news agencies.

Over the years, I’ve heard many businesspeople say, “I’m not sure what PR is, but I know our company needs it.”

When people think of public relations, they tend to associate it with news coverage. This is what PR pros call “earned media.” The dictionary defines earned media as “publicity gained through promotional efforts other than paid media advertising.”

Let’s get SMARTER about PR

By now, you’ve probably heard about S.M.A.R.T. objectives (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely) and using them for PR. We blogged about SMART objectives and how to be a SMART communications pro frequently.

There’s a movement to add ER to SMART objectives and push for SMARTER objectives, and we love it! 

In memory of George Floyd...

We've created the George Floyd Business Mentor Program, an absolutely free program that's open to 50 black men who want to succeed in life, business, and personal finance.

The definition of vanity metrics, and why they don’t really matter.

What we usually think of as vanity metrics are numbers like impressions, advertising value “equivalents” (AVEs), mentions, likes, shares, re-tweets, clicks, page views, downloads, etc. Although some vanity metrics may be important for historical benchmarking or baseline purposes, they shouldn’t be relied on for real intelligence. 

Vanity metrics are good for feeling “warm and fuzzy” and bad for action. In other words, vanity metrics are numbers that feel important yet are fundamentally superficial, or worse, deceptive. They are numbers for numbers’ sake.

This is one story in our series about COVID-19. Read 8 ways your PR agency can assist you during COVID-19 for more.

Even as the media's primary focus is on the coronavirus pandemic, journalists are looking for non-COVID-19 stories. For example, a London features and deputy news editor put out a call for "non-CV stories" and then replied with this:

This is a story about determining ROI for public relations efforts. There is also a story about learning the fundamentals of measuring PR ROI as well.

When most people think about public relations, they tend to think PR is earned media coverage. (Even though PR is more than earned media coverage.)

And what is earned media anyway?

Traditionally, measuring a PR campaign and its outcomes were challenging. You may have even been told that public relations can't be measured. When it was measured, it was often assigned "publicity value," "advertising value equivalency," or some other arbitrary number. It doesn't have to be.

The industry is evolving quickly, making PR increasingly measurable through attribution technology.