Month: November 2023

In its most basic form, public relations centers around reaching people or organizations who shape and influence perceptions and opinions. It is PR’s role to persuade people that your business is the correct answer to whatever you are marketing.

The topics can range from what you want people to know to purchase your product to shaping people’s perception about issues and matters of importance.

No longer, however, can PR firms depend primarily on mass media to help shape opinion.

Targeting one’s most influential media resource now centers on finding and defining “influencers” whose recognition and endorsement can have enormous impact on how folks view your product or service. These influencers can range from specific individuals at a mass media outlet to a lone blogger, whose recognition can make or break a marketing campaign.

Gaining traction with influencers

One cannot simply blast away with emails to media (both mass media and online media) in the vain hope that they will use your information.

Successful influencers are deluged by unsolicited emails, most of which end up in the trash can.

One must gradually reach out to influencers first, build up their trust, before even considering asking them for recognition. You must convince them of your legitimacy as a media resource and the newsworthiness of your product or service. It is a slow, gradual process that requires being in it for the long haul. There are no shortcuts.

Finding influencers

At Wellons Communications, we rely on well-established mass media communications programs to immediately reach media outlets that can help boost recognition of your business.

Beyond mass media, however, we have a well-defined approach to zeroing in on influencers whose recognition can augment your marketing efforts. These steps include:

• Hashtag audits

We search for hashtags that are relevant to your business and narrow them down to those best suited to what you do. It’s a tedious process, but an important step in finding your correct target audience.

• Google Alert communications

We use Google Alerts to identify influencers by keywords. We set up alerts for suitable terms that will enable you to start receiving notifications when somebody posts information related to what you are marketing. From that, we can choose from the list of influencers and contact with what information they are seeking.

• Contact with Blogger Outreach Groups and Platforms

Facebook organizes groups by their interests – from investment seeking information to invest in oil drilling to housewives seeking recipes for air fryers.

We identify those groups best suited for our client’s information and seek to build relationships with its most active members.

• Aggregator and outreach tools

We can call upon specialized outreach resources like Pitchbox and Buzzsumo to help build campaigns targeting specific influencers. By employing carefully selected keywords we can scan the internet to identify and reach out to dominant online influencers with the kind of information they are seeking.

Call us to find out how you can benefit from influencer marketing

At Wellons Communications, we pride ourselves in keeping pace with the rapidly change ways in how people absorb information, particularly in the online marketing arena.

Online marketing is an increasingly sophisticated and complex form or marketing, but we keep our programs simple, easy to manage, and well within the budgets and capabilities of our clients. We want you to understand what we are doing, how it can benefit you and increase your business.

As 2023 winds down and you are looking at new ways or more effective ways to help you sell your product or service, think of Wellons Communications.

Contact us about creating a well-rounded public relations program that includes basic PR strategies and new and different approaches to reach your target audiences…. like reaching the influencers best suited to help you increase your reach and sales.

Marketers are fond of talking about “positioning” their product or service in their competitive marketplace.

Often, marketers fall in love with the notion that if they simply advertise or talk about what they do, they have successfully positioned their product.

Wrong. And here’s why.

Positioning is the way companies and brands are perceived by one’s consumer not by you. Positioning is where you exist in mind of your present and prospective customer.

Where does public relations fit into positioning?

Simply stated, PR is one of the key building blocks in an integrated marketing campaign.

The sole mission of public relations is to help you sell your product or service. How PR helps you sell is to develop ways and means to create a distinct identity, image, or concept for a product or service.

In other words, positioning.

At first glance, you might say to yourself, “Well, ‘positioning’ might be great for Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, IBM, or some corporate giant, but I’m only a medium-sized business and simply don’t have the kind of marketing budget that can support positioning.”

Positioning is important to any business, large or small, because all businesses face the challenge of identifying who you are, what you do, and why it is important to your target audience.

Should you pass on positioning for less complex marketing approaches?

It’s easy to skip pass on the notion of “positioning.” It’s sort of like jumping immediately to tactics without having objectives or a strategy.

Three of the primary reasons of why it’s so easy to reject and avoid “positioning” as a part of your overall marketing strategy are that positioning is hard to understand, positioning requires time and positioning is difficult to measure.

Making positioning even hard is the fact that we live in the most overcommunicated era in human history.

Today, the average person sees around 10,000 ads per day, though only a quarter of that or less will be relevant.

On top of that, the flood on online traffic is overwhelming. The Harvard Business Review reports that the average professional spends 28% of the work day reading and answering email, according to a McKinsey analysis. For the average full-time worker in America, that amounts to a staggering 2.6 hours spent and 120 messages received per day.

That’s a lot of information. And it makes positioning a challenge.

So how do you successfully position your business?

The most efficient way to help you achieve successful positioning is to call on folks who position products and services for a living, like our team at Wellons Communications.

We are positioned as a marketing services company that relies primarily on public relations to build awareness and subsequent sales for our clients.

We have worked in all aspects of marketing and have keen insights on how to battle through the maze of overcommunications that exists in today’s competitive marketplace.

As you shape and modify your business’s overall marketing communications program, keep Wellons Communications in mind.

We are ready and able to assist you in developing – and maintaining – an effective positioning for your business. We rely on creative marketing approaches that put your customer first and positions your business as the best means of delivering what your customer wants and needs.