The Public Relations Blog

Learn how to write headlines that will attract more readers

“Titles are what sell the content.” – HubSpot

What makes you want to read an article? A title that catches your attention, right? Apply that same approach to writing your headlines. Below are tips to help you attract more readers and, in time, gain more customers through better headlines.

One of the most critical elements of a pitch is the subject line. It’s the first thing reporters read, aside from your name, when they go through their inbox. Because it’s such an important element, you should put some thought into creating your subject line. There are two sides to the subject line debate: Some say short subject lines work best and others think long subject lines are the better choice.

How many emails do you delete without opening on a regular basis? Take that number and quadruple it, and you might be near the number of unopened emails a reporter deletes each day. Journalists are inundated with pitch emails. Your company needs to stand out among the multitude of pitches in order to gain a reporter’s attention. If your PR firm is only pitching via email, it probably isn’t earning all the media coverage it can on your company’s behalf.

20 crises Axia Public Relations managed for clients that your company needs to plan for

In today’s day and age, it’s a matter of when, not if, a crisis will happen to your company. When you’re unprepared for a crisis, you’re jeopardizing your company, your employees, your shareholders, your reputation, and your future.

Public relations, like anything else, has its own vocabulary. When you’re working with your PR team to plan a successful campaign, it helps to know the meaning of terms that PR professionals use. The terms outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impacts are important elements of a PR campaign that you should know.

When designing a public relations plan for your company, Axia Public Relations starts with your goals and objectives. Then, we break them down further into inputs and activities. This is the first part of creating an effective PR program for you. We’ve created a scenario around Twidget, a fictional company, to illustrate how this process works and to help you understand what we mean by inputs and activities.

As public relations experts, we regularly secure earned media coverage for our clients at major news outlets. If you’re struggling to earn coverage for your company, use these insider tips to help you improve your media relationships and increase your earned coverage.

You don’t need a press release to get earned media coverage. 

Did you know you can earn great media coverage for your company without writing a press release? In fact, as a PR firm working with national clients, some of Axia Public Relations’ best-earned media coverage came without ever writing a news release. Instead, we pitched existing contacts by phone – contacts with whom we’d established trusted relationships.

Apply these methods to your PR and marketing materials

When you hire a public relations firm, you trust its members to make ethical decisions and use best practices in all stages of communication with your audiences. Persuasive communication methods work to change your audience’s awareness, attitude, or behavior. When working to persuade someone, whether it’s to attend, purchase, visit, follow, or donate, apply the T.A.R.E.S. test or the duty-based method to ensure ethical best practices. Read our post “3 golden rules of PR in 2018” to dive deeper into which ethical standards are trending this year.

Our PR agency bills based on value and scope. We don’t recommend billing or paying by the word or by the hour.

Ever since Reginald Heber Smith invented hourly billing, many professional services firms – including some great law, accounting, engineering, architecture, and public relations firms – have billed hourly. Our firm is somewhat of an anomaly, as we don’t.

In fact, with all due respect to our professional service colleagues who do, we have personal and corporate ethical issues with hourly billing. And we are not alone in this opinion. While you might not share our belief, we’ll explain in this blog post our ethical concerns, why brevity is key, and why results ultimately matter more.