Author: Wellons team

The past five years have been, perhaps, the most challenging time ever for marketing and PR agencies that help marketers.   

•  There’s been a pandemic that has totally overturned the norms, routines, and expectations that govern the way we work. 

•  There’s been the overwhelming coverage of division among Americans that, at least for the foreseeable future, does not appear to any closer to any kind of resolution.

• There has been the introduction of new technologies that have impacted both how we project information and how we gather it. The overwhelming presence of the Internet, for example, has birthed new ways of projecting and gathering information. Newspapers have been forced to become digital communications. Cable, which overturned over-the-air TV, is battling streaming services. 

When you consider how dependent publicity and public relations is on the oxygen of media attention, these factors have forced Orlando marketing and PR agencies, like Wellons Communications, to be as nimble as possible to adjust to a remarkably new and different media landscape.  

Recognize that change creates opportunity  

At our PR firm, our first step in response to the changing marketing landscape has been to acknowledge that marketers are being buffeted by unforeseen challenges.  

Rather than throw up our hands in despair about rapid change, we are asking ourselves two important questions: 

1. Where and what are the opportunities that change is creating? 
2. How can we help our clients take advantage of these opportunities?

So, with marketing in mind, we are looking for opportunities that we can capitalize upon in this new, kaleidoscopic marketing world.  

What kinds of changes? And what kinds of opportunities? 

An explosion of new media outlets. New websites, blogs, podcasts, and related online communications forms emerge every day. This has created an opportunity to project our client’s messages to a tech-savvy generation that no longer reads the newspaper, listens to the radio, or gets their news from TV. 

 Influential new online communicators. The Internet has created an entire new galaxy of “journalists.” The opportunity: ferret through the thousands of blogs, podcasts and websites that have emerged and identify those who can benefit our client’s marketing initiatives.  

 New communications technology. By arming our clients with the tools that can be used in new journalistic technologies, we take advantage of two opportunities: 

• We make it easier for journalists and online media to tell our client’s story.

• We put our clients into position to react rapidly to tight deadlines and demands. 

These tools can be as simple as digitized photos and video or, at the other end of the spectrum, virtual reality productions that make our client’s products and ideas come to life in dramatic fashion. 

 New PR tools. New public relations programs like Prowly, Meltwater, PR Igloo, Prezley and Muck Rake have supercharged the old marketing notion of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) into a media relations CRM tool. These enable PR practitioners to more efficiently and effectively “sell” stories and ideas to those journalists who are most likely to want or need specific information about specific industries.  

Let us help you find the Orlando marketing and PR opportunities…and capitalize on them. 

Underscoring our fascination with changes — and the opportunities changes create — is our philosophy that we are marketing public relations practitioners.  

The only reason we practice public relations to help our clients sell their products or beliefs.  

Our Orlando marketing and PR firm can help you create—and execute—and public relations and publicity program that will be tailored to put your message in the hands of those media outlets that can best reach your audience. And that’s an opportunity you need to consider.  

 Call us and let us help you find the opportunities…and take advantage of them.

At Wellons Communications, we embrace the notion that we now live in the Digital Age of marketing.

That’s because the amount of time Americans now spend daily on the Internet continues to grow and has become a cornerstone of how people obtain information.

How much time are folks on the Internet?

The average person spends 2 hours and 24 minutes every day on social media.

And how do they spend their time on the Internet?

According to data released just this month (January 2024) by Exploding Topics, the two primary reasons folks use the Internet is for social interaction, followed by filling spare time.

Now, take a closer look at the third reason: reading news stories. And that’s where public relations…and Wellons Communications…enters the picture.

We market information that helps websites attract and hold readers

At Wellons Communications, we embrace the notion that online resources have a never-ending need for content.

Information is the fuel that drives websites. That means that websites must continually serve up information that will keep their readers and attract new readers.

And it’s our job to create new and different information that websites can use in their never-ending battle to retain their audience and attract new readers.

What kind of information do we market to informational websites?

Press information. Reports. Studies. Graphs. Visuals. Videos.

All of these are the kind of content that websites seek to serve up to readers and underscore their authority. And these are the kinds of tools we create for our clients and serve up to websites to satisfy their hunger for information.

How do we attract the attention of website editors?

We employ two strategic approaches to reach website editors: frequency, to keep our client’s name in front of website editors and utilization of the word “new,” which immediately attracts the attention of website editors.

By issuing information frequently, we accomplish two important objectives for our clients:

1. Frequency increases the likelihood of our client’s information being used.
2. Website editorial teams recognize our clients as an authoritative source of information.

“New” serves as a powerful call to action for website editors to look at our information. No editor is after information that is old or dated. New and different is always what they are after.

Call on Wellons Communications to create a digital PR program for you.

Including digital PR as a part of your overall marketing approach is becoming a must component in marketing your business.

Digital PR is an affordable means of reaching your audience and generating recognition and putting your business front of mind and at the fingertips of your customers and would-be clients.

When you boil it down, what we do at Wellons Communications is create information and distribute it to sites that want and need it. And, in keeping with how marketing has changed, we increasingly do it via affordable digital publicity and public relations programs.

So, with the 2024 business year now in full swing, contact us at 407-339-0879 or email us at will@wellonscommunications.com and learn more about how you can augment this year’s marketing program with a robust digital PR component.

Sometimes it seems like the pace at which the Internet has revolutionized marketing and communications is overwhelming.

The sheer volume of communications that float across your computer screen, along with all the outside communications you see every day, is far more than one person can absorb.

The enormous volume of communications places a premium on three important elements critical to your audience’s understanding of what you do and how well you do it: clarity, frequency and consistency of communication.

Clarity cuts through the clutter

It’s easy to become caught up in throwing out trendy lingo and technical language when communicating with potential clientele and your current customers.

The health care, insurance and technology industries provide three vivid examples of using language and phrases very few—even their customers—can understand.

While it is important to stay current, it is even more important to be understood. And that likely means using old-school communications that underscore a communications basis: keep it simple.

A December 2023 issue by the Content Marketing Institute’s Ahava Leibtag showcases the value and importance of clarity and simplicity in communications. Her study makes a great case for using clear, concise communication that first-time readers can understand without breaking a mental sweat. It’s worth a glance.

Use the Rule of Seven

Think about how many TV ads, news reports, magazine articles and online communications you receive every day. The amount of information to which you are exposed is staggering. There is no way you can remember all of it.

That’s where frequency comes in.

An old marketing adage is The Rule of Seven. In short, it means that you must reach your target audience with seven impressions before they start to pay meaningful attention to what you are saying. It is a rule frequently employed in advertising.

At Wellons Communications, however, we subscribe to the notion that there is a more affordable way to achieving those seven impressions. We adhere to the idea that advertising, augmented by an effective publicity program, can both speed up achievement of The Rule of Seven while costing you less.

By publicizing who you are and what you are doing, you can accelerate your frequency of communications at considerably less cost.

Say the same thing. Over and over and over.

We’ve established that you must keep your message simple. People must understand what you are saying.

And we have established that you must frequently project your message to cut through the volume of communications that exists today.

Our third tenet is to keep your message consistent. While you may become weary and experience “client fatigue” in the repetition of what you say about your business, keep in mind that what you are saying may be the first—or seventh—time your audience is being exposed to your message.

Suzanne McGovern, one of our staff members at Wellons Communications, effectively used consistency as part of the publicity team that prefaced the opening of Walt Disney World. Suzanne’s credo was “tell ’em what you are gonna tell ’em….and tell ’em again and again and again.” The publicity results of her approach remain one of the benchmarks for success in the public relations industry.

Our message: use Wellons to augment your marketing

As 2024 ramps us and you seek new and better—and more affordable—ways to add strength to your marketing program, keep Wellons Communications in mind.

We’re good at creating new, simple PR programs that will not weigh down your budget, while delivering substantial results.

And we promise to keep you message clear and understandable, put it out there on a frequent basis and keep it consistent throughout.

“Deck the halls with boughs of holly
‘Tis the season to be jolly
Don we now our gay apparel
Troll the ancient Yuletide carol”

– Opening lyrics to Deck the Halls

The holidays are, indeed, the season to be jolly.

This is the time of year that we truly feel the magic of the season.

It is the beauty of twinkling lights that illuminate the darkness that descends upon us earlier each evening as winter arrives. It is decorated trees, colorfully wrapped presents beginning to appear underneath and the sounds of beloved music and carols that serve as the background for gatherings that bring us together.

It’s a time when we all feel the anticipation of family memories and the excitement of gifting that we had as children.

The holiday season is truly a special time that encourages the best feelings within each of us to be shared with those who we love, cherish and value.

In that spirit, all of us at Wellons Communications want you to know how mindful we are of those who are close to us.

We are truly grateful for the friendship and loyalty of our valued clients. We are equally as grateful for our dedicated team of professionals, who have shared their abilities with both our organization and our clientele.

May the love, joy and extraordinary magic of the season be with you this holiday season, and throughout 2024.

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.