The Public Relations Blog

As the economy changes, so does consumer spending, which in turn impacts most every company. Decreases in your customers’ spending can negatively impact your company’s bottom line and decrease the things your company can spend money on. In some ways, it can become a vicious circle.

When your income decreases, your company usually cuts the “extras” first. While you may need to decrease unnecessary expenses, you should look at how cutting expenses and services may impact your company overall.

Recently, an overseas company contacted our public relations agency looking for earned media coverage in the United States for its coupon bargain retail website.

Axia PR helps you measure the ROI of your public relations efforts

While it might seem difficult to measure public relations, it’s not impossible. When you measure PR, you document the return on investment of your public relations campaign. Great PR improves an audience’s awareness, trust, understanding, and consideration of the topic, and it ultimately causes the audience to act.

Many industry analysts agree that organic reach for company Facebook Pages is now as low as 2%, and some speculate it’s even lower (without sponsoring those posts). You must pay to play.

If you aren’t boosting your company’s social media posts, you’re just talking to yourself. You’re barely reaching your target audience and your social media engagement is low. It’s challenging to increase social reach and engagement, and ever-changing algorithms make it more so.

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.

How you can properly vet a company before doing business with them

We were in the final in-person pitch with a prospective client. The client was a tech company that had developed a negative reputation online for its fast-paced growth because it had hurt some feelings along the way. While the company earned this reputation, the managers saw the errors of their ways and wanted to get a better handle on the company’s reputation after improving its operations and culture.

You do have the time, money, and data to measure public relations

The reasons for incorporating measurement and evaluation into your company’s public relations strategy are many:

• You know actual metrics behind reach, impressions, items, mentions, and engagement to understand the effectiveness of campaigns.
• You see which media channels certain audiences are most responsive to.
• You can predict future trends for better planning and agile response.

Blockchain has received a lot of attention in recent months, especially after the explosive growth of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in December. Many people associate blockchain solely with financial applications. Others see potential for blockchain technology in nearly all aspects of life. It’s helpful to have a basic understanding of what blockchain is in order to thoughtfully consider how it may help your company, including your public relations efforts.

Applying the PDCA/Deming Cycle to public relations for strategic growth and improvement

Using measurement and evaluation (M&E) is a process that takes deliberate planning to thoroughly implement. It’s more than lifting some data from your analytics software and hoping to do better next month. Our previous blog posts discussed the difference between measurement and evaluation, the importance of knowing your purpose in this process, what kind of measurement data to collect and how to create SMART goals.

Is 3 months too soon? Is a year too long? Learn more about what PR can and can’t do for your business

You’ve signed on with a new public relations agency. It’s been several months and you’re not seeing any real results. Should you give the firm more time? Or, is it time to find a new PR firm?

You know PR is an ongoing process; yet, you need to have something concrete to show the C-suite or board of directors to justify the expense. This post will help explain what you can expect from your PR firm and in what time frame.