The past five years have been, perhaps, the most challenging time ever for marketers…and public relations practitioners 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 PR practitioners, 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 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:
- Where and what are the opportunities that change is creating?
- 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 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.
We 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.