Begin your PR campaign the right way: Allow resources for measurement.

Most likely, your company measures sales, employee retention, and NPS scores. It’s also important to measure your marketing department's work along with your public relations agency of record.

Measurement must be a consistent process once you identify your key performance indicators. That’s easy if what you’re measuring is in-house and completely accessible. Hopefully, you already have the spreadsheets in place, so all you have to do is pull the sum at the bottom each week.

Companies should set aside resources for measuring their vendors' outputs, including their public relations agency. Being unwilling to spend the time and money upfront for proper PR measurement is one of the 15 mistakes companies make when hiring a PR firm. Read on to find out why you should include measurement in your PR budget.

5 key factors for conveying company messages effectively

Getting your messages to the right audiences is key in effective public relations. It’s important to know the different channels and platforms and the best way to use each of them. There are two types of communications in PR: controlled and uncontrolled. It’s essential to use both types of communication as well as the PESO model for successful PR.

Don’t confuse the pitch team with your account management team.

Most companies consist of several departments including sales, marketing, customer service, and human resources. Every department (or team) includes team members who each play a specific role within the company. When partnering with a public relations firm, many executives confuse the pitch team with the account management team and expect that their initial contacts will continue to be their contacts throughout the partnership. This is mistake #8 on Axia Public Relations’ list of 15 mistakes companies make when hiring a PR firm. Don’t let this be your company. Most PR firms have a process to ease the transition as you move from prospective client to signed-contract client.

With the new year right around the corner and trade shows filling the calendar, the question of how to best convey your company’s message to the media might be starting to shadow your thoughts. Before that shadow becomes a looming, cantankerous beast, tackle it to dispel the darkness and enlighten everyone with your message.

4 steps to help you choose the best media-monitoring platform

Capturing media clips to share with clients is one way a public relations firm shows its success. What many PR firms struggle with is capturing all the media mentions for its clients. No media-monitoring service can capture every media clip or media mention. Some platforms can’t access certain sites, while Google Alerts may capture a clip before the provider. When choosing a media-monitoring platform, it’s important to use the provider that best fits your clients’ needs. Some popular platforms include Agility, Cision, BurrellesLuce, Meltwater and TrendKite.

Finding a media-monitoring platform isn’t easy as each platform offers something different. Here are four things you can do to ensure you choose the right platform for your company.

2 reasons why you shouldn’t hire a PR firm that guarantees sales

As a CEO, you know that sales are the lifeblood of a company. Using public relations to increase your company’s share of voice within the media is one way to improve your sales. However, if your company hires a PR firm based on its offer to guarantee sales, you're making a mistake for two reasons:

It seems some companies never learn. They continue to create situations that become public relations disasters. No company is perfect, and we all goof up from time to time. The trick is to learn from your mistakes. Even better, learn from the mistakes of others to avoid making them in the first place. This year’s list of avoidable PR goofs, in no particular order, should be enough to keep your company out of trouble for a long time.

If you’re not using PR to grow your business, you’ll soon be left behind

It seems like every day we are asked to embrace some new product, idea or way of doing business. Each time, we are promised that if we get on board with the new plan, we will change the world. Some things hold true, such as the microwave, the internet and social media; others, not so much. However, there is now a novel approach to handling public relations and marketing that we believe will stand the test of time.

What to do when the media calls

Too often, companies discount the value of media coverage. Some get anxious about it while others are just too busy, but most simply don’t know what to do. The media has a responsibility to cover business news and industry trends. Your organization has a critical role in this process. With a prompt and strategic response, your business can leverage valuable opportunities for media coverage.

What's newsworthy?

Recently, someone asked me, “How would you define the word 'newsworthy?'” Great question; allow me to elucidate.

News elements 
What makes a story newsworthy? Pay close attention to these 10 elements of newsworthiness to see which apply to your particular announcement. These elements are also called "news values" because they give a story news value. Good news stories have more than one of these elements to help increase earned media coverage.