Author: Wellons team

The power of a great professional bio

Posted on by Wellons team

You have a resume. You have a LinkedIn and a handful of other profiles, social media and professional.

So why is it, when your team needs bios for the website or a contact asks you to send your bio over, your fingers freeze over the keys?

A great professional bio is one of the shortest pieces of content you’ll write, but it’s also one of the most important—and that’s exactly what makes it so paralyzingly difficult.

Need to add one to your professional stockpile? Here’s how.

You have a resume. You have a LinkedIn and a handful of other profiles, social media and professional.

So why is it, when your team needs bios for the website or a contact asks you to send your bio over, your fingers freeze over the keys?

A great professional bio is one of the shortest pieces of content you’ll write, but it’s also one of the most important—and that’s exactly what makes it so paralyzingly difficult.

Need to add one to your professional stockpile? Here’s how.

Just like a headshot, a solid professional bio is a key piece of content every executive should have on hand. It’s just like a logo or boilerplate for a business—it’s part of your personal professional brand.

And just like a branding piece, a bio says a lot about you, from the tone in which it is written to what accomplishments you choose to highlight. Giving the piece some thought in advance means you’re not only prepared to act quickly and capitalize on opportunities when you need it, you’ll also have time to ensure it says exactly what you want it to say.

Additionally, having a crafted bio on hand means you’ll be able to fully fill out profiles and add a personal touch to your digital trail, including your company website.

What makes a great bio?

There’s no one way to write a bio, but great ones all share a few traits—they’re informative, they’re interesting and they’re short.

Similar to a cover letter, your bio is your chance to express yourself. It shouldn’t be a reiteration of your resume or a chronicle of everything you’ve done since graduating high school. Instead, think of it as your chance to tell your story.

In order to keep your bio interesting, steer away from the cliches, and hit the high points. Think about it like your own personal elevator speech. Take a page from a journalist’s playbook and write it in the inverted pyramid style, with the most important features at top, lesser details below and the boring tidbits left out completely.

And most importantly, keep it short. It’s tempting to include all of your amazing accomplishments, but try to keep your bio between 300 and 500 words (or, at least give yourself a “short” version and a “long” version).

How to write a professional bio

OK, so you know why you need it and you know what to do—but how do you write a professional bio?

At our Orlando marketing agency, we have plenty of experience doing just that. When we sit down to write an executive bio or bios for the whole team, we follow a few simple steps.

First, figure out what direction you want to go. Do you want to strike a casual tone or a more formal one? Will you write in first person or third?

Next, determine how the bio will be used. Is this for your website? Something to have on hand for award programs or speaking engagements? Will you be writing this for yourself, or will the entire team need a bio? This will help determine what you want to include and if you need to create a template for uniformity.

Now, consider what you want to say. Here are a few common sections you might want to include.

  • First and last name
  • Position and company name
  • Short description of responsibilities
  • Professional history and experience
  • Professional achievements
  • Education
  • Personal hobbies
  • Fun fact

Once you’ve decided what to include, it’s time to get writing (and editing) until you have a great bio you can customize for any need.

Turn to our Orlando PR firm for help mastering the bio 

Writing a professional bio takes a little time and a lot of understanding of the audience and process, but a well-written bio is a vital tool.

Fingers still poised over those keys? Writing about yourself can be tricky, so if you’re stuck and still want to reap the benefits of a great bio, leave it to the professionals. Give us a call at 407-339-0879 or email will@wellonscommunications.com. We would be happy to review your goals and share our writing skills with you.  

Expand your PR payback: 6 steps to develop PR campaigns

Posted on by Wellons team

All too often, public relations is viewed in terms of special events and one-off activities that attract attention for a short time but often fail to yield a long-term payoff.

Special events do have a place. New product launches, grand openings or service changes all cry out for some kind of attention-getting activity that can immediately signal that something is new or different. When successful, the payback can result in immediate gratification: widespread publicity and awareness and a corresponding surge in response from your target audience.

Ongoing public relations campaigns, however, are different. They require careful planning, patience and a long-term view of what denotes success in your overall marketing plan.

How to plan a PR campaign

No two public relations plans are alike. However, in more than three decades of creating and implementing public relations campaigns, the most successful campaigns we have developed at our PR firm have been derived from a disciplined approach that invariably has heightened the chances of success—and marketing impact—for our clients.

  • Find an interesting subject

In order for a campaign to be successful, the subject must be newsworthy, engaging and different. It should get people talking. Media must want to cover it, and consumers must want to read it, share it and engage with it. To determine whether your story is “newsworthy”, try to place yourself in the mind of your target audience. What might feel like news to you may not provide a big enough hook to those who aren’t yet invested in the minutiae of your brand.

  • Link to your brand message

It’s not enough for your story to simply be newsworthy; it must also communicate the message that your brand wants to convey if it is to be truly effective. Generating a conversation is meaningless if it doesn’t help you to achieve your business’s goals. 

Ask yourself what you are ultimately trying to achieve. Are you trying to change perceptions of your brand? Raise awareness of a new product or service? Promote your unique selling proposition? Establish your brand as an expert in a certain field? Reach a new audience?

Whatever your strategic goals, a sound campaign will help you achieve them by providing you with an opportunity to communicate your message in a way that connects with the audience you are trying to reach. There is no point in pouring effort into a story that offers no opportunity to meaningfully link back to what your brand really wants to say.

  • Identify the right time

Timing is crucial, and a badly timed campaign can have a detrimental effect on its chances of success. This has never been more apparent than during the COVID crisis, when so many brands have learned that undertaking a campaign that seems tone deaf, insensitive or irrelevant to people’s current circumstances can do more harm than good. 

However, during less exceptional times, the most successful campaigns will always be those that are topical and tap into the moment. Before launching a campaign ask yourself, “why now?”. If the answer is not obvious, or if you can think of another time that would be more relevant for the launch, it is better to launch the campaign at a time that offers a better chance at success.

To help determine the best time for your campaign, stay in tune with your audience and ensure you are putting out content when they are most likely to be susceptible to your messaging.

  •  Ensure you have an opportunity to drive traffic

PR has the power to drive high quality, targeted traffic that is already engaged in your brand, product or industry. This traffic can be directed to your website or to your store or office, where you will ultimately have the opportunity to convert the traffic into sales.

To maximize online traffic, ensure that the web links are relevant and add value for the reader by offering them the opportunity to find out more about what they have just read or to gain tips and advice. If driving web traffic is your primary goal, efforts should be focused on securing online coverage, including within online media outlets, e-newsletters and on social media, where you will have the opportunity to include click-through links to relevant content on your website. That said, never underestimate the power of print media coverage for generating brand awareness—it’s just harder to track through web traffic. 

  • Plan for multi-platform content

Rolling a campaign out across multiple platforms will maximize exposure and impact. To determine which platforms to prioritize, consider your audience and target the channels that they engage with. Think beyond the traditional media outlets they might read and consider ways to engage with them across other platforms that they use, including social channels. It is vital that the content appears in places your audience trusts and spends time.

  •  Measure success

Measuring success is one of the most important aspects of a successful PR campaign. Lacking analysis and measurement of results, you have no way of knowing whether the campaign was successful in achieving what it set out to achieve. 

It’s crucial to measure against the initial goals for the campaign. If your goal was to drive web traffic, measure the number of hits you received from websites and social media pages that covered your story. If your objective was to reach an audience of high earners, evaluate whether the campaign was featured in places that attract this demographic. If you aimed to change the perception of your brand, assess whether the campaign conveyed your new key messages. Column inches and large readerships are meaningless if they are wasted on the wrong audience or fail to clearly communicate your brand’s message.

Count on Wellons Communication for sound public relations strategies

Clients at our Orlando PR firm expect results from their marketing dollars.

We view our role as finding and developing a path to achieve those results and make an impact on your bottom line. And we believe that campaigns, carefully thought out and conducted in a disciplined fashion, are an important key to achieving marketing success.

If you’re exploring PR agencies in Orlando, look to us to help you go beyond one-off events. Call on us to develop, execute and measure public relations campaigns that deliver ongoing, long-term results and reputation building that can benefit your business.

How to employ creative marketing strategies for business success

Posted on by Wellons team

By definition, creativity is seeing things differently.

In public relations, creativity centers around the ability to transcend traditional ideas and come up with interpretations, rules and alternative ways of doing things. Often a marketing problem—be it dealing with a stubborn sales challenge or figuring out how to freshen up a tired message—requires an alternative approach. And coming up with that alternative approach requires creativity.

Do the basics…and then add some creative

At Wellons Communications, the majority of our approaches employ disciplined, tried-and-true methodologies to address client marketing challenges.

Calling on standardized, proven strategic and tactical approaches effectively resolves the majority of client needs.

Two examples of successful standardization include repetition of a successful theme line or headline in all communications so your key audiences hear your message with clarity and consistency and issuing news about your organization on a consistent basis, always keeping your name in front of key media audiences.

The bedrock of our marketing agency approach centers around doing the basics well…and then dressing them up in a creative manner.

The three key elements of creative thinking

In one of the many motion pictures in which actors Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland appeared, there was a memorable scene in which the pair of actors was faced with a problem. They both ruminated for a moment and Rooney then raised his finger high and proclaimed “I know! Let’s have a show.”

For many, the notion of creativity is exactly that. “Let’s have a show!”

The reality is considerably different. Coming up with creative solutions is a disciplined exercise that requires a combination of control and a willingness to listen and consider the ideas of others, no matter how strange they may seem.

At our Orlando marketing agency, we develop creative approaches using three benchmarks:

  1. Unconventionality: Is the approach totally different? Can it be a different approach using a tried-and-true method?
  2. Autonomy: Is anyone currently doing what we are thinking about doing? Will we be the only ones in our product or service category with our creative approach or message?
  3. Risk: How much or how little risk is involved if we change what we are doing?

How we organize and manage these determines the extent to which our creativity is stimulated or stifled.

Look at things differently. Be open to new ideas.

In the 1980s, Roger von Oech, a successful toymaker and popular conference speaker, published The Innovative Whack Pack, an effective creative tool that lists 60 creative strategies to provide and inspire creative thinking von Oech’s approach centered around stimulating creative thinking around ideas like “Slay a Sacred Cow” (i.e. putting aside, for a moment, ideas considered sacrosanct), “Change the Direction” (e.g. Is a 12-year-old female an old child or a young woman), and “Let Nature Be Your Guide” (Imagine you are a plant, an animal or an insect. How would you go about solving your problem?).

Using an outside prod (like the Whack Pack) may, in fact, serve as the trigger for someone on your team to come up with a totally new, different and successful creative approach.

Wellons Communications is your creative Orlando PR firm

Our clients depend on us to help them engage with their audiences and stand out from the crowd. We continue to do our lateral thinking homework even when we’re not working on a specific assignment. It’s part of our job assignment.

If you are in dire need for different marketing thinking or simply in need of freshening what are you currently doing, keep Wellons Communication in mind. We’ll sit down with you, listen to what you want to accomplish…and respond with some fresh, new ideas that will combine creativity with conventional marketing.

The end result? A stronger connection with your clients and wannabe clientele.

Call Will at 407-462-2718 and let’s set up a creative get-together.

How to set a winning communications strategy in 2021

Posted on by Wellons team

We’re still right at the start of a new year. Possibilities for your business stretch out in front of you right now, and it’s the time to set big goals to strive toward. If you haven’t already, it’s also the perfect time to sit down and get serious about a communications plan and editorial calendar for 2021.

Don’t close your browser. We know that with so many things on your plate in the first few weeks of the year, you’re likely scoffing at adding one more. But this is crucial. At our Orlando marketing agency, we see it too often with businesses. If there’s no plan set, communications get bumped and bumped again for other items. Doing the thought time up front means it’s not a monumental task chasing you throughout the year. And with a plan, you can leverage communications as a pillar to reach your overall business goals.

But where to start? Developing a winning communications strategy for your business in 2021 doesn’t have to be a painful, time consuming or even formal process. Here are a few easy steps you can take now to create one.

Understand your goals.

You likely set goals for your business already. Perhaps you want to hit a certain revenue number, complete a certain number of projects or attain a certain number of new clients. How can communications support that? A few examples of communications goals could be increasing your number of social media followers, consistently sending out a monthly newsletter to prospects, attaining a certain reach on earned media hits or producing a certain number of pieces of sales collateral. Think about your overall goals, and set communications goals to help you along the way.

Add some context.

Now would be a perfect time to involve your PR agency if you have one. Your agency has a lot of practice at looking at goals and setting effective strategies to help get there, and they can really add value at this point rather than later. In addition, you will want to add some context to your plan. Pull out your latest SWOT analysis. Is there anything you can learn there that can inform your plan? Do some research on your competitors. What are they putting into the marketplace? Are there any winning strategies you can adapt? You can jot down a few notes here or tweak your goals.

Start thinking tactics.

How will you reach your goals? If you want to send out a monthly newsletter, for instance, think through a few things. Who will be responsible for this? Who will you target, and do you have an email list? What do you want to say? What will it look like? While you’re fleshing out the process, you might also come up with a few sub-goals to add to your list.

Set the editorial calendar.

Much of your communications strategy will likely be driven by news, or your editorial calendar. To start to develop this, think about some of the business milestones you’re expecting this year. Perhaps your business has a big anniversary year on the horizon. Or, maybe you know that your huge project will top out in June. Put a few stakes in the ground on an editorial calendar, even if it’s just an estimate. This will allow your entire team and marketing agency to better plan and prepare to implement the communications strategy around these events. Next, brainstorm other content ideas. Again, you can refer to industry leaders and competitors, or turn internally to things you’ve been hearing or seeing. Maybe you want to implement a monthly staff spotlight to go out in that email newsletter or on social media. You don’t have to fill in every slot right now, so there’s plenty of room to pivot later. Add your editorial calendar to your communications plan.

Get going, and analyze.

Now that you know what you want to do and what you want to say, put everything in motion. Start executing on your plan, but don’t forget a key step: reflection. You might not see the needle move immediately (don’t quit just yet!) but after you run your plan for a bit, take a look to see what’s working and what you might need to tweak. Don’t forget to celebrate success.

It’s never to late to set a communications plan and start leveraging this important piece of your business. Having a plan in place sets you up for success.

Need a little help? At our Orlando PR agency, we’ve been thinking strategically for businesses for more than 15 years and can help you set a plan in motion. Give Will a call at (407) 462-2718 or shoot him an email at will@wellonscommunications.com.

What’s ahead for marketing and PR in 2021?

Posted on by Wellons team

The new year is almost upon us and, with the pandemic still raging full-bore, it is challenging to try and look too far ahead.

As difficult as it is to forecast the future, making preparations for what we can reasonably believe will happen in the upcoming months is a must. None among us, of course, has the ability to precisely predict, for example, how consumers will respond when COVID vaccination peaks in the springtime or how businesses will respond to a new presidency.

There are, however, certain characteristics we consider as we develop marketing and public relations approaches for the immediate future.

Recognize the increased emphasis on health and safety

A recent Consumer Index Report by Ernst & Young reports that 26% of consumers surveyed prefer brands and products they trust to be safe and minimize unnecessary risks. Fifty-seven percent say they now pay more attention to how healthy the products they buy are for them.

So how does this translate to your business?

First of all, it means that consumers will continue, at least until they feel less threatened by COVID, to deal remotely. Projected even further, that means that your business must make it as easy as possible for your customers to do business with you. Outdated software or barriers for people to reach you or conduct business with you can be a deterrent to retaining existing customers or attracting new customers.

Upgrade your ability to connect with your customers online

According to an eMarkerter report from June, the average U.S. adult will spend 23 more minutes on smartphones per day in 2020—and that was in June!

We are socializing, working, shopping, and more—online. It’s not just Gen Z and Millennials anymore; it is all of us.

Though digital fatigue is real, there are certain digital experiences to which consumers are growing increasingly accustomed, like buying online and picking up in a store, curbside pickup or home delivery. Your website and social channels are now the front door to your brand or business. Looking ahead into 2021, this may translate to tactics like brief virtual events, online channels and creating video content to tell your story more effectively.

Keep you staff’s tech skills equal to those of your customers

The COVID threat has accelerated behaviors with a speed that no one could have forecast. Business professionals routinely conduct Zoom meetings, and youngsters attend classes without showing up in a classroom. People attend exercise classes online and talk to their doctors in virtual visits. The scale and magnitude of these changes is absolutely staggering.

This huge shift in behavior means your employees, particularly those who are in frequent contact with your customers, need to clearly understand how to work the levers of tech interaction.

So how to upgrade your staff’s tech skills?

Some people are resistant to new technology because they don’t see how it’s any better than the current system. Your employees may be thinking, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The problem with that attitude is that they may not realize how broken the current system is.

If you want your workforce to be more tech savvy, you have to make them want to be more tech savvy. It’s never easy to get people to do things they don’t want to do.

Start by showing them how your technology will make their jobs easier. Just saying it will benefit them may not be enough.

Have them work side-by-side with someone who has embraced the technology. Your tech-savvy employees can demonstrate how easy it is to use and how it will simplify their job.

And, finally, look to the future with confidence

All of us want to return to “normal,” but, realistically, we must recognize that “normal,” will never be the same at it was before COVID.

Even after suffering through the ravages of a pandemic that none of us ever could have anticipated, Americans still possess a tough, resilient spirit that is seeing us through a period of uncertainty.

Given the exceptional abilities that have made our nation the leader of the free world, we find a way to create and prosper in a new normal.

No one, of course, can accurately predict what a new normal will look like, but by examining and responding to trends that are manifesting themselves in the marketing world, we can be better prepared for what is coming and how to adjust to it.

Happy holidays to all and a safe and prosperous 2021

We wish all of you a happy – and safe – holiday season. And we join each of you in hoping that we turn the corner toward an even more positive life as we will know it once the pandemic is behind us.

Marketing the holidays: 5 quick and easy ways you can reach customers this holiday season

Posted on by Wellons team

It seems like every year, the holidays creep closer and closer up the calendar. You may have even walked into a big box store recently to be greeted by a display of trees and lights—all before Halloween.

But whatever your thoughts on premature cheer, the early displays might have one upside. It’s a good reminder that you should already be planning your strategy for reaching your customers this holiday season.

Before the weight of anxiety settles upon you, let us say that this doesn’t have to be complicated—but you should do it. Q4 is a key time for many businesses, and a little foresight, combined with creative thinking and simple execution, can make a big difference for your bottom line. Here are five quick and easy ways you can reach customers this holiday season, whatever your strategy.

Social media

This tactic probably isn’t a surprise. People these days spend so much time scrolling on their phones, and social is a natural way to reach customers. But your efforts don’t have to stop with plenty of organic posts touting your product or end-of-year sale. Put on your thinking cap and come up with a creative campaign themed to the holidays. Dive into the season of giving with giveaways, partnered with favorite brands or influencers. Or, run a retargeting campaign so your customers see your product at every turn and can quickly check it off their gift list.

Email marketing

You (hopefully) use a robust email list all year long to reach your customers. But, at a busy time like the holidays, it doesn’t hurt to up the messaging and try to stand out. Plan a countdown campaign, with gift ideas every day leading up to Christmas, or launch a contest with eye-catching, lucrative prizes people actually want to win. And don’t forget to segment. Offer tiered discounts and perks to your best customers to drive serious sales and nurture those relationships.

Traditional PR

Don’t sleep on the power of true PR. Having your product included in a gift guide, whether it’s an influential trade publication or a popular website, can be a grand slam in terms of holiday sales as people are searching for ideas. Even sending samples to great influencers or bloggers in your space for a gift guide feature can help you both reach new audiences and bolster SEO, which can support the bottom line.

Holiday cards

You get them every year from family and friends and maybe send your own. Why not do the same for your business? Especially if you’re on the B2B side of things, a card from your team can add a personal touch and let clients and prospective clients alike know you’re thinking about them this holiday season. Like this idea? Now is the time to order.

Personalized gifts

When it comes to holiday marketing, it’s easy to think about customer acquisition. But don’t forget about some of your best customers—your current clients! For those involved in business to business industries, a personalized gift to some of your best contacts, or even some highly qualified leads, can help you stand out among the noise in a highly busy, highly competitive season. Whether it’s a gift basket, piece of marketing swag, a digital gift card (perfect in the time of COVID) or even a donation to charity in their name, a personalized gift is a high-touch show of customer service and can bolster your relationship.

With a little planning, the holiday season can be a huge opportunity for any business. But you shouldn’t let it stop there. While you’re at it, work to incorporate these tactics into a 2021 marketing plan, pinpointing key dates that make sense for your business—and keep the holiday cheer rolling throughout the new year.

Need some extra bandwidth to make it happen this year? Wellons Communications is your Orlando marketing agency, and we’re here to help. Give Will a call at (407) 462-2718 or shoot him an email at will@wellonscommunications.com. 

Use visual storytelling to make your message stand out

Posted on by Wellons team

The competition for your attention has never been so fierce.

From the time your alarm goes off and you check the news to the moment you check tomorrow’s weather and click the television remote before going to sleep, you are deluged with messaging. And by messaging, we mean all kinds of information—advertising, news and anything else designed to capture your attention.

The fact is we are receiving more information than any other time in recorded history, primarily due to the onset of the internet and the sheer volume of information that can be generated and distributed through digital and mobile communications.

The end result: we begin to ignore or tune out messaging and information.

And that neatly presents the challenge we face as professional communicators: how to make your message stand out and distinguish who you are, what you do, and how well you do it.

Pictures are, indeed, worth a thousand words.

Let’s take a quick glance at some pictures to make our point. This is an instantly recognizable visual cue. It needs no words to clearly explain its meaning.

Here’s another example: it illustrates our point about the exponential growth of messaging that bombards us daily:

The meaning is pretty clear. The number of advertising messages to which we are exposed every day has doubled in the past 13 years.

This example is a little more complex:

This example uses words, in combination with a powerful graphic, to convey the notion that “thoughts” can result in a “change.”

The overwhelming importance of using graphics to project your message

The majority of your potential clients get to know you by your graphics. Your logo. Your letterhead. The sign on your door. The graphic on your website. Even the graphic design on the cup of coffee you may be sampling while you read this.

For those who are already doing business with you, the relationship is far greater than graphics, of course. But, for those whom you want to serve, graphics are often the first step in making an acquaintance.

The things you interact with every day were all created by a graphic designer. These elements communicate an idea or concept—that’s the purpose of graphic design. It’s the graphic designer’s job to marry creativity and strategy in order to effectively communicate with the world around them.

Our Orlando marketing agency relies on graphics to make your customers relate to you

Our digital marketing agency practioners are huge believers in blending your ideas with visual elements that make your ideas come to life.

Photos. Videos. Charts. Illustrations. Cartoons. Website graphics. Postcards. Signage. There is no graphic expression that is off the table.

If a graphic can tell your story without a thousand words, so much the better. We are firm believers in infographics to capture attention. And we utilize creatively talented resources to help make your messages come to life and convey ideas that will attract attention and make your product or service pop.

Picture this: Call on Wellons Communications to convey your message

We describe what we do as marketing public relations. We specialize in public relations aimed at selling a product, service or idea. After all, isn’t that why you are in business?

If you are seeking a new, fresh way to cut through the white noise of the informational messages that hammer away at us every single minute, then consider calling Wellons Communications, an Orlando marketing agency, for solutions.

You talk. We’ll listen. And after we’ve listened, we’ll respond with recommendations and ideas that will be tailored specifically to the wants and needs of your potential customers…and aimed at helping your business grow and succeed.

Now, how’s that for a picture?

Contact me at 407-339-0879 or email me at will@wellonscommunications.com and find out more about how we can serve you.

Tips for starting an influencer marketing program

Posted on by Wellons team

You’ve probably heard of influencer marketing before. Maybe the term brings to mind visions of Kylie Jenner sharing a product she loves on Instagram, and it seems out of reach for your business.

But to be honest, that’s just not true. There are options within influencer marketing for many types of businesses. You just have to find the right fit for you—and get started.

What is influencer marketing?

Influencer marketing blends the ideas of traditional advertising, public relations and celebrity endorsements. It involves working with a brand or person who has influence in your space, likely on social media or a digital platform, to drive awareness for your brand and/or drive sales.

The sticking point for many people is that they envision these elusive influencers as celebrities with millions of followers. But influencer marketing can also mean working with what are known as micro influencers—a somewhat misleading term for influencers who have a smaller following, but who speak to a specific niche and have very engaged fans. These influencers might reach fewer people, but they tend to give you a bigger bang for your buck.

How to develop an influencer marketing strategy for your business

In short, influencers can make a big difference for you (we’ve seen it!), whether your business is a nationwide product or a local restaurant, drawing new fans to your pages and property and building that bottom line. You just have to find the right fit for you. Want to learn how? To start, you need to think long and hard about your brand and your goals. Check out our best tips below.

Define your goals. As with most things in business, you need to go in with eyes wide open as to what you want. Do you want to drive SEO results for your company with seeded keywords? You might want to focus on bloggers rather than social influencers. Do you want to reach young people with a wow-worthy, trendy product? Maybe TikTok is for you. Do your users have a big Instagram community? Maybe Instagram influencer marketing is the best way for people to discover your product.

This decision is going to drive all others—and ultimately determine how happy you are with the results—so choose wisely.

Outline the ops. Before you actually start working with an influencer, it’s a good idea to work out what that will look like. How will you package your product (special touches might stand out!)? How will the influencer check into the hotel or make their restaurant reservation, and how will you communicate to staff what’s going to happen?

At this stage, you will also want to think about budget. Many of the best influencers have a media kit outlining their rates for things like a blog post or social story. Others will accept products or experiences—depending on the value—in exchange for a reasonable scope. Some businesses also offer affiliate benefits for partners, allowing them to earn a commission on sales. Decide what your budget will be for this campaign and how you will handle it.

Find your fit. Now comes the fun part. Get on your chosen platform and do some research. Find the go-to influencers in your space. Explore hashtags, or check out other brands you admire to see who they work with. Do a quick search. When you find someone you think is a fit, look deeper. What kinds of things do they post? How many followers do they have? What is their engagement rate, and who is their target audience? Make sure they have enough sway with the right people to help you reach your goals, and make sure they’re someone with whom you want to align your brand.

Make it happen. Find your chosen influencer’s contact info and shoot them an email or just reach out on their popular platform. Outline what you’re thinking, and see if it aligns with their vision and standards. It might help to draw up an informal influencer agreement outlining what both sides can expect for the partnership. If this is a paid partnership with a big budget, you might even draw up a contract, like you would with any other ad deal. Be sure to ask influencers to follow all guidelines regarding disclosures. It can also be helpful to provide your influencer with your own media kit, especially if there are certain messaging points you’d really like to hit. Influencers will often pull from this so they can give their followers reliable information, and it can support your overall branding goals.

Track and reuse. Your influencer received your product, loved it and shared. They came to your resort and wrote a glowing blog. They visited your restaurant and posted a swoon-worthy pic on Insta or video on TikTok. Amazing! Now, you need to see if your program worked. Follow up with your influencer about their experience (you are, hopefully, building a relationship, after all!). Ask them to provide any internal stats they might have about performance (page views, reach, etc.). Take a look yourself at your web traffic or social analytics and see what can be tied to the partnership. This will all help guide you in future influencer partnerships.

And don’t forget a vital step—reuse this influencer content wherever you can. Influencers produce some amazing content for your brand, and you should be engaging with it, reposting it to your page and sharing blogs and vlogs to make the most of your partnership.

Influencer marketing can work for you

Now that you have the steps, tweak and repeat. Despite the sometimes bad rep influencer marketing gets, when done correctly, it can be a great thing for your business.

Feeling a little overwhelmed by the prospect of starting from scratch? Call in the pros. At Wellons Communications, we’ve put our PR savvy to work for years building influencer programs for everything from national products to local restaurants. We understand how the process works and have built great relationships with all kinds of influencers. We’d love to put our know-how to work for you. Give us a call at 407-339-0879 or email will@wellonscommunications.com, and let us get started working for your busines

How PR can help you get ahead in today’s E-commerce marketing environment

Posted on by Wellons team

The shift toward an E-economy arrived with bewildering speed during the past decade. While it did not catch businesses off guard, E-marketing surprised many with the speed by which it overtook traditional marketing processes.

Now, with the entrenched presence of the COVID pandemic for the next year or so, E-commerce has become not just another adjunct to your marketing program, but, for many, the primary means of reaching customers.

It’s important to recognize that E-commerce has advanced well beyond simply initiating a Search Engine Optimization program and hoping you show up in generic Google searches. It’s an ever-changing process that is the marketing program for many businesses.

E-commerce, however, is not a one-trick pony.

It requires marketing agility, the necessary resources required to gain a foothold in the E-commerce battleground, and the know-how to present one’s values and benefits to customers so the business can jump off the page and become recognizable…and wanted.

E-commerce success demands more than digital outflow

Successful digital marketing requires a mix of activities, not all of them online. You need communications that will reach and attract your potential customers before they head to their computer screen.

We’re talking about the kind of activity that will build online interest in your brand, products or services and draw people to your site. This could be special events, attention-getting visuals, storytelling in a compelling fashion, news, information only you can deliver, or best of all, having the story told by someone who already has an online following.

Next, your digital marketing needs to make customers want to continue to return to your site.

But it can’t end there.

Your online marketing needs to engage prospective customers so they not only recognize what you do and what you stand for but want to buy your product or service.

Is your E-commerce approach still fresh…or is it getting tired?

Even if you are an E-commerce veteran, you need to constantly review how you are doing things to ensure your E-commerce marketing is firing on all cylinders.

Your approach to E-commerce marketing and communications cannot remain static.

You have to maintain a balancing act of familiarity, like your logo and your headline, along with something fresh and new that signals that you are in tune with whatever changes your industry is experiencing and reflective of your ability to remain in touch with what’s around the next corner.

Amplify your E-commerce marketing with a strong PR program

Most often, our clients call on us to develop and implement aggressive media relations programs to support their keyword strategy and boost their site’s performance on search engines.

We rely on building a focused, multi-faceted communications program that calls attention to their keywords and aggressively addresses those niches where those keywords have the most potential to augment someone’s message…like appearing in an influential blog or a magazine article.

But there’s a lot more to PR than simply reinforcing keywords.

We seek out and create opportunities for others to present you in a credible, favorable manner people will want to view … and Google will rank. And, when we capitalize on these opportunities, there’s the added benefit of of countering Google’s changing ever-changing algorithms.

No black hat nonsense, or SEO “experts” seeding your content onto poor websites to chase backlinks.

We are talking simple, easy-to-understand, practical distribution of information and ideas to sources like bloggers, vloggers, traditional media and influence leaders who will understand the value and importance of your message at a glance and want to share it with their audiences.

Messaging and communications are where PR comes into the picture

From employment of visualization using photos and video to special events, PR can serve as a springboard to generate attention both inside and outside of E-commerce channels of communication.

PR can reinforce what you are all about and amplify your messaging through news and communications outlets beyond your normal scope. PR can serve as a different kind of driving force to direct people to your website so they can learn more about you and see what you can offer them.

The cost is relatively inexpensive, particularly when it compares with paid advertising, which online readers recognize and often bypass, to get to whatever subject is most important to them.

Look at your E-commerce marketing with a fresh set of eyes

Even if you are well-versed in E-commerce, it doesn’t hurt to take another look at what you’re doing.

E-commerce has advanced and will only continue to do so. The pandemic has brought that to light more clearly than ever before.

Our approach? Developing and executing awareness-building programs that encourage online readers to put your company straight into their search bar.

We maximize E-commerce marketing efforts by clearly identifying and establishing those qualities that what make you special: your expertise, authority, personality and ability to deliver. And, once we attract reader attention, we aim toward making your potential customers feel completely confident in buying from you—and in recommending you to others.

Find out more about how we can help you energize your E-marketing.

Email me at will@wellonscommunications.com (or call me… 407-339-0879) and let’s talk about how we can add new life to your digital marketing.

How to get started with Facebook and Instagram ads

Posted on by Wellons team

Maybe you’ve been there.

You’re posting and posting great content for your business, and yet you still see your post reach hovering in the same sad range. You’ve heard about social media ads, and you’ve even started researching how to get started, but every time you fall down a Google spiral, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of deploying ads on Snapchat and Pinterest, setting up a landing page and mapping out a sales funnel until you just give up.

We’re here to say it: Getting started with social media ads does not have to be that complicated—and they can make a big difference for your business.

Just start small.

The why and where

First, know you aren’t crazy for thinking you’re running in circles relying on organic reach. In fact, besides a 0.5 percent increase during the social media surge of the pandemic, organic reach on social has been declining for years. Now, only 5.2 percent of your page’s followers see any given organic post.

That alone is a strong argument for the use of paid social media strategies.

There’s also plenty of opportunity out there. While nearly all social platforms offer ads (Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest and most recently TikTok to name a few), Facebook and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) are great first steps. Facebook’s ad platforms have been around for years, and with 2.6 billion monthly active users, it’s also the largest social platform.

Because of this, we’ll focus there first. Ready to get started? Check out some of the most basic steps below.

Give yourself a boost.

If all you’re looking for is a little bump of engagement on your page posts and you just want to dip your toe in the social media advertising waters, boosting a post on your page is the way to go. Simply go to your business’s page and select the post you want to amplify. There should be a blue button offering to boost. Here, you’ll see a simplified version of Ads Manager where you can decide how to boost, who to target and how much to spend. And just like that, you’re doing it! While you can read on for more about how to refine your efforts, think of a simple boost as giving the organic content you’re already doing a little more “oomph”.

Ready to go bigger? Define what you want.

If you want to turn that “oomph” into a “POW,” you’re going to need to use Ads Manager. Take a few moments to familiarize yourself with it (we promise it looks more complicated than it is). Facebook offers a variety of options right off the bat. They break down to:

Awareness

  • Brand Awareness—Increase people’s awareness of your business
  • Reach—Show your ad to as many people as possible

Consideration

  • Traffic—Drive people to a website
  • Engagement—Like a boost, but with more refined options. This breaks down into page likes, post engagement and event responses.
  • App installs—Promote your business’s app
  • Video views—Get your video in front of people most likely to watch it
  • Lead generation—Using a form, get people to submit info, like emails for newsletter sign ups
  • Messages—Another of your boost options, this allows people to connect with your business.

Conversion

  • Conversions—Drive actions on your site, like adding to cart
  • Catalog sales—Promote your ecommerce store to drive sales
  • Store traffic—Promote your brick and mortar location to those nearby

You need to decide what it is you want to accomplish with your ads. Do you want more web visitors? Do you just want to stay top-of-mind? Are you looking to ramp up engagement on your page? This will drive your choice. While all of these objectives are useful in the right moment, if you’re just getting started, consider engagement, a page likes ad, traffic or awareness as a first test. Some of these other objectives require slightly more complicated setups (great for your continued education!)

Know your audience

Once you pick your objective and set your budget to where you feel comfortable, you will have to create an audience to target. Facebook offers so many options here, you might feel a little creepy—and you’ll definitely start to understand more about the ads you see in your own feed. Think about who your target customer is. Then, get creative creating parameters that best fit people like your best customers. The trick here is to shoot for a middle ground. You don’t want your audience to be so wide they find your ad irrelevant, and you don’t want to be so narrow that you’re missing great targets and not getting bang for your buck. Playing with the custom audiences is a great place to start, but lookalike audiences hold huge potential for later down the line.

Know the requirements

One of the last steps to launching your ad is to select the creative—and this is an integral step. If you don’t create an ad that catches people’s attention, all the hard work you’ve put in won’t ROI in the way you hope. Worse yet, if you don’t create an ad that fits Facebook or Instagram’s parameters, it might not run at all. When you get to this step, you can either select a post from your page or create a new ad. Give good thought to if what you post makes sense for the audience and the platform. Make sure your objective carries through with the right call to action. Make sure the visual you select is eye-catching, and at the most basic level, is the right size and shape. Sprout Social has great guides like this one to help you with this. Finally, make sure your selected image doesn’t have too much text. Facebook prioritizes ads for images with less than 20 percent text.

Monitor, learn and repeat

You’re not going to get it totally right the first time. Even the most experienced marketers and social media gurus know there’s always room to optimize. Try a few things and see what works best for your business. Once you have a little more experience, you might look into installing a pixel on your website and trying retargeting, or setting up a catalog for dynamic ads to sell products.

Truly, there are huge possibilities for your business in the realm of social media ads. You can always learn and grow. But the only way to reap the benefits? Take the first small steps and get started. Still feeling overwhelmed, or ready to move on to Social Ads 201? Give us a call at 407-339-0879 or email Will at will@wellonscommunications.com. We’d be happy to review your goals and put our social media advertising know-how to work for you.

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