Tag: Orlando PR

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

Does your agency do that? The service you need to take advantage of

Posted on by Wellons team

When your agency crafts a social media strategy that gives you a great ROI, it’s amazing. When they knock it out of the park with a huge media hit, it’s impressive. When they execute on an email campaign that boosts the bottom line, you’re thrilled.

All of that is great (and we hope that’s happening for you). But if your agency partner is not an expert in one key area, chances are, you’re underutilizing your resources—and none of the above outcomes will be possible.

What is it?

It’s content.

More often than not, potential clients come to us requesting help with social media or wanting a press release written and distributed to the media. We do both, but the reason we’re able to do so successfully is because what we do best at Wellons Communications is craft content. And your agency should be able to say the same.

What is content?

Content is everywhere, from an organic post on Instagram to an SEO blog, a marketing email and even a white paper. It could be an internal communication, like a letter to your employees, customers or vendors, or a sales sheet, like a case study.

It could even be a non-written form, like a video or infographic.

To put it simply, content is how you tell your story, how you express your brand to your audience and the world. It is the lifeblood of everything your agency does.

What are the benefits of content?

When done right, content can help you achieve your marketing and PR goals. You can expand your reach with an SEO blog or a well-crafted digital ad.

You can cut through the clutter and grab your audience’s attention with an eye-catching email. Or you can communicate your point of difference clearly in success stories, sales sheets and white papers.

With content done right, you can gain customers, makes sales and position yourself as an industry leader.

Why should your agency lead content?

It’s true that content is incredibly important to businesses of all sizes. There’s a good reason many CEOs, CMOs and everyone in between try to hold on to content. They know their story, and they believe they can tell it better than anyone else.

With the wrong agency, that might be true. But the right agency should be a partner for your business. They should not only click with you right away, making you feel like they just “get” you from the start, but they should continue to hone that relationship, learning and circling in on the core of your message.

They should come to understand you like you understand yourself and be able to explain that across all sorts of platforms.

If they don’t, you’ll feel the limits of your relationship even in something as simple as a social media post or a press release.

But when your agency does have this level of understanding, having them hit on all levels of content is an amazing benefit—and one you should take advantage of.

For starters, your agency should be made up of professionals. You hire them to take in information, synthesize it, and determine the best way to share it. When you can use that storytelling ability across platforms, you’re firing on all cylinders of communication. Drawing on content, your agency can tell your company’s story as a united front, from a single tweet to a guest article in your favorite trade publication. And that’s incredibly powerful.

At Wellons Communications, we’re storytellers first. Our agency is made up of former journalists and PR pros, all of whom have been trained to listen, tease out the unique details of your story and tell it eloquently. We’re not limited by platform or length.

Want to take advantage of that? Give Will a call at 407-462-2718 or email him at will@wellonscommunications.com.

Lean on simple messaging and graphics to tell your reopening story

Posted on by Wellons team

What’s the best way to re-establish commerce as we knew it before the onset of COVID-19?

Truth be told, no one has all the answers. And, there is no “one size fits all”. Whatever approach you adopt for reopening must be tailored to your audience and what you can communicate about your business.

And, whatever you convey about your business needs to immediately connect with your current and potential clients and possess relevancy to their needs, as well as your ability to deliver services.

So, what are some ways you can affordably and instantly cut through the clutter of COVID-19-related messaging to get your message across?

Use graphics to fast-track your message.

Lean on high-impact PR graphics to tell your story…graphics that present memorable, easy-to-understand information about you, and your service, at a single glance.

Something as simple as a postcard can re-establish that you are open and operating. A message like “We’re up and running”, accompanied by your name and how to reach you will immediately establish a key element of reopening marketing communications.

The same message can easily be reconfigured to a visual-centric email that can be viewed and understood in a single moment. It can also be adapted to a text message or posts on social media.

Make your graphics as powerful as possible

Make it easy for your target to understand you are up and operating.

Aim for high impact and a minimum of clutter and distraction. A simple message surrounded by white space, for example, can have the same power and impact as a costly billboard or a paid full-page ad in a newspaper (either the printed kind or their online editions).  

A single, memorable graphic or combined headline-graphic, along with your company’s name and logo, can get your point across and immediately convey that your business is moving forward.

Your message has to be more than “We are open.”

 As businesses reopen, one’s first instinct is likely to blurt out “We’re open” or “We’ve reopened.”

That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t exactly jump off the page. That’s because millions of other businesses are saying the very same thing. So many businesses are saying “We’ve re-opened” that it is difficult to remember who is who, what they are selling, and why it is relevant to you.

Your message has to be short. Simple. And different.

Creating short, simple messages that are different can be amazingly powerful. But it’s not as simple as it sounds.  

It is a process that requires some hard thinking on the part of your communications team and discipline on your part.

In these communications-overloaded times, we have found that keeping it simple is a strategic approach that consistently works to cut through the clutter and enable our clients to stand apart from the pack.

It’s an approach we are ready to put to work for you.

We thrive on the challenge of creating simple but powerful messages and blending them with memorable graphics to convey your key marketing messages.

Creating short, simple messages and making your message different is where Wellons Communications can assist you. 

If that’s the kind of fast-track approach you need to help get your marketing communications re-established, then talk with us.

We’ll listen carefully to what you want to accomplish with your messaging and work quickly, but thoughtfully, to provide solutions that can accelerate getting your business operating as much “back to normal” as possible in as short a time as possible.  

Call me, Will Wellons, at 407-462-2718, or email me at  will@wellonscommunications.com and let me put our team of messaging pros behind you

Cut through the clutter and make your voice heard

Posted on by Wellons team

As we head toward the rest of 2020, the challenge of effectively projecting your message — and unique characteristics — to your target audiences is going to be increasingly difficult.

Media will remain neck-deep in coverage of the presidential race, as well as state and local races. The coronavirus will remain at the top of the news for the remainder of 2020. And who knows what other news is around the corner waiting to pull attention away from your message?

The competition for consumer attention has never been more challenging

Forbes contributor Paul Jankowski neatly sums it up with his observation that “…brands have a better chance of keeping the attention of a goldfish than their targeted consumer.”

Need convincing? Try these observations on for size:

That means you cannot spend a lot of time trying to explain who you are and what you offer. It means that your message must possess simplicity and visibility to have a reasonable expectation of breaking through.

Wellons Communications solution: short messages and great visuals.     

Our Orlando PR agency has consistently preached “keep it simple.” It’s a philosophy we embrace and one that underlines a strategic approach we consistently adopt to ensure our client’s message is both heard and recognized.

Arriving at that messaging, however, requires discipline and hard work.

To formulate the message (and the approach that backs it up), we work with clients to address the following questions and identify the message that will get attention and connect with their target audience:

  • What is it you are selling?
  • Why should your product or service matter to your target audience?
  • What problem does your product or service solve?
  • What is the benefit of what you are selling?
  • What is the solution you bring to your target audience?
  • What are you trying to say?
  • What do you want your target audience to do in response to your message?

Once we agree on the answers to these questions, we are in position to determine what you should say and how you should say it.

And when we say it, we want to keep it short and memorable.

Communications have to go beyond words

Words are only a part of the communications process.

At Wellons Communications, we also promote the notion of relying on easy-to-understand visuals to project your message.

The old adage “A picture paints a thousand words” has never been truer than today.

Today’s consumers simply will not always make time to sit down and pore through an article or browse through a post — or even read your headline.

However, graphics and imagery can connect with consumers much faster than text. Witness the popularity of graphics-oriented apps like Instagram, TikTok and the many other photo-related apps that have become so popular.

That places a premium on a well-designed graphic that tells your story in an impactful, memorable way.

So, how can we make your messaging cut through the clutter?

We are bulldogs for adhering to simple solutions.

Keep it short. Keep it simple. Keep it understandable. And make it relevant to your audience.

If that’s the kind of approach you want to employ to improve your marketing, you need to be talking with us. You do the talking. We’ll do the listening. And together, we’ll generate the kinds of marketing results you are seeking.

Share your message with Will Wellons at 407-462-2718 or will@wellonscommunications.com.

Find out more about how our public relations and social media firm can make your messaging work harder, smarter, and more effectively.

How to prepare for media interest now

Posted on by Wellons team

A great TV story about your business’s latest charity effort runs on the 10 p.m. news. The local business journal publishes a feature on your growth strategy. The trade publication your partners read runs an item on your latest product.

Who doesn’t want that?

As an Orlando PR firm, we are no stranger to gaining media attention for our clients. In fact, earned media placements are one of the most common requests we get—and we’ve seen what they can do for a client’s reputation and reach.

Even so, there’s a big misconception with how these kinds of hits happen. Clients tend to expect that they will put out a press release and the media will come knocking. Sure, that happens sometimes (when it’s a good story, or we use our connections and skills to pitch media the right way). But often, media attention comes from being flexible. It comes from working a current event angle or building a relationships and reputations. And more often than not, it comes fast.

If clients aren’t prepared to make things happen, they might miss out on an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. And nobody wants that.

Businesses who want to truly take advantage of media opportunities need to be ready. Below are a few steps you and your business can take to prepare now.

Nail your talking points

You know your elevator speech…right? CEOs and business leaders know what their company does, but you’d be surprised by how often they realize they can’t quite verbalize it. Before you take an interview with any media outlet, you need to be sure you can share your mission in a clear, concise way. Take some time to boil what you do down to just a few talking points, and be sure to share them with anyone who might handle media requests so your message is aligned.

Flag potential problems

Just like you want to know all the good things about your company, you’ll also want to do some introspection and identify any potential problems. Once in the public eye, anything and everything is fair game. If you can identify any tricky spots, you can be proactive in developing responses to any questions you might be asked about these things. This will help you avoid being caught off guard so you can mitigate any negative attention you might receive and position your company in the best light.

Identify a spokesperson

When time is of the essence, you need to know who’s stepping up. Identifying a spokesperson in advance allows that person to have time to complete the above steps.  Be sure to choose a company leader who is comfortable in the role and who can confidently speak to the company’s mission. Your reputation rests in their hands.

Know your visual opportunities

It is important to not only tell a great story, but to show it. Words are a powerful and often essential aspect to telling your story, but there are many times a story will die without visuals. This is particularly important for TV media. Be prepared to offer visual opportunities to journalists. You should also start to build your media kit with high-resolution, professional photos of your company, including headshots for all executives, shots of important services or activities, and videos. You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute to get these, and often, if you can offer these assets, you can land a story that might otherwise be passed over.

Complete media training

Completing the above steps will take you far, but when you find yourself in front of a camera with a microphone in your face for the first time, it’s natural to freeze up. Completing media training can help you know the tips and tricks of the trade so you can feel comfortable and properly prepare for each individual interview.

How we can help

At Wellons Communications, our Florida PR agency is made up of former journalists and PR pros. We’ve been on both sides of the camera and notepad, so we know how to help you prepare and put your story in the best light.

We also understand how media works and can craft the right pitch to gain media interest in the first place.

Need some help? Call 407-339-0879 or email will@wellonscommunications.com and see what we can do to help you prepare for any media interest and news coverage that may come your way.

Involve your PR firm at the start of marketing planning

Posted on by Wellons team

When businesses put together important marketing initiatives, it’s surprising how many times publicity and public relations are treated as an afterthought.

In an overwhelming number of instances, organizations invest enormous energy and time into involving their advertising agencies at the beginning of a communications program aimed at increasing sales. When the idea has been formulated and approved, all too often someone says, “Why don’t we involve PR, too?”

This results in a structured program being handed off to the PR firm with the demand, “Get results.”

Whether or not the marketing message is actually attractive, from a publicity and PR perspective, is a different story—but it is a consideration that needs to be baked into marketing planning from day one.

The best marketing initiatives get PR involved in ground-floor planning

As the old saying goes “Advertising is what you pay for. Publicity is what you pray for.”

Advertising most often occupies the center ring when it comes to marketing planning.

Why?

First, advertising costs a lot of money. For that reason alone, marketing chiefs focus their attention on what is consuming the majority of their marketing budget.

Second, the company can totally control the advertising message. Where it goes, what is says, and when it is issued all are under their direct control.

For those two reasons, marketing chiefs usually start planning by huddling with their advertising agencies—winding up with expensive media plans, accompanied by equally expensive production costs necessary to make a message come to life.

In the rush to center their marketing efforts around advertising, however, businesses often totally fail to capitalize on the PR potential of what their message can—and should—deliver.

That’s an opportunity missed.

It’s also an expensive whiff that can be avoided by putting a member of the PR team in the room at the start of the planning cycle.

Two ways involving PR at the start of planning can benefit you

  1. PR can augment and reinforce advertising messages
  2. PR can connect with audiences in ways advertising cannot

PR’s ability to reinforce and amplify marketing messages is surprisingly effective. Publicity—be it word-of-mouth, customer testimonials or editorial media coverage—is regarded by consumers as more trustworthy.

According to a 2014 Nielsen study, PR is 90% more effective than advertising in influencing consumers. In short, getting a favorable mention of your product or service, which is earned and not paid, holds much more weight than an ad. 

By involving your PR team at the start of your planning process, they can better understand what your advertising message is intended to do and what it cannot do—and they can fill that gap.

Second, by involving your PR folks in planning, they can more clearly visualize how they can present your story to editorial media and expand your message into stories that have a connection and credibility advertising simply cannot deliver.

Remember, PR provides you a different marketing weapon

One of the 21st century buzzwords that has become popular is “influencer marketing,” which is simply a more contemporary way of saying “believability.”

It’s another way of saying that PR provides your product or service with believability. It’s not a new idea, but simply a new way of asking yourself:

  • Who are you more likely to believe, a salesman or a person just like you who bought or used a product or service?
  • Which is more believable, an advertisement on TV, in a newspaper or magazine or on the internet, or something that appears in a story that involves a product or service?

Editorial coverage has two great advantages over advertising. Editorial coverage provides third-party validation that advertising lacks. Simply by being recognized in editorial media, coverage implies “this is important.”

PR’s ability to augment one’s believability does not discount paid advertising—it is a totally necessary component of marketing.

The difference between the two serves as a reminder for the need to include PR as an integral part of one’s marketing plan—at the very beginning of the planning process.

When you begin to look ahead to the rest of 2020 or even 2021 and shape your future marketing planning, keep Wellons Communications in mind. We’d love the opportunity to sit down with you, learn more about your vision for your product or service and explore how we can help you improve your overall marketing effectiveness.

Call me at 407-339-0879 or email me (will@wellonscommunications.com) and find out for yourself how we can help you augment your marketing effectiveness.

Beyond the elevator speech: Five questions you need to answer for your business

Posted on by Wellons team

We’ve all heard the importance of having an “elevator speech” that tells your audience what you do and how important your product or service is to them.

We at Wellons Communications agree with the idea of a short, punchy message. However, we also believe that you need to work on and perfect a more robust message than a 15-second elevator speech to truly explain the value you bring to your clientele.

With that in mind, at Wellons Communications, we ask our clients five important questions that help define the messages they want to project … and the impressions they want to create.

The Big Five are:

  • What do you do?
  • How does your product or service help your client?
  • What do your competitors say about themselves?
  • What distinguishes your product or service from your competitors?
  • Who and where are your potential customers?

Build from the basics

Surprisingly, many business leaders have a difficult time answering these five questions.

They have successfully grown their businesses to the point where they need to expand their marketing program — including public relations — to continue growth. However, when it comes to more precisely defining themselves and what they do for the audiences they serve, they run into challenges.

They know they need to continue reaching out, but struggle to find the ways and means to reach new and different audiences in order to continue expanding sales and growth.

PR is part of your overall marketing package

We view public relations as one of the four primary components of our client’s marketing programs: paid advertising, public relations, sales and research.

Our job centers around publicity management — attracting attention or, in some cases, clarifying and shaping the attention that is defining our clients. That requires us to interact, for the most part, with editorial media, whose independence means their viewpoints and opinions cannot be purchased but can certainly be shaped and influenced with proper messaging.

That means we have to know about you, your business category, your audience, your competitors and what you want to accomplish.

And that means that we need to know the answers to The Big Five questions listed above.

Sometimes, less is better

When we first meet with potential clients, we always ask the Big Five questions.

Often, these potential clients struggle to concisely and clearly answer the Big Five. And, while we listen closely to what we are told, we often learn that the longer a potential client takes to answer these questions, the more difficult it is to concisely and clearly answer the question.

Our first priority is to clearly understand what you do and what you want to do. That means asking tough questions and boiling the answers down to strategic approaches that will result in messaging that your audience can understand and act upon.

The end result may appear to be a very simple solution. But reaching a simple solution requires some complex planning and hard work to achieve.

We think like marketers. We act like PR professionals

If a client were to ask us The Big Five, our answers are:

What do you do?

We provide publicity and related communications services that augment our clients’ overall marketing.

How does your product or service help your client?

We help our clients increase sales by reaching their target audiences with clear, concise messaging that amplifies their reach beyond advertising.

What do your competitors say about themselves?

Our competitors most often claim they are bigger, more experienced, have a larger client base and have greater depth in resources.

What distinguishes your product or service from your competitors?

We are smaller and, because we are smaller, we provide more personalized, hands-on services that are more creative, more nimble and more effective than our larger competitors.

Who and where are your potential customers?

The vast majority of our potential customers are based, or have significant operations, in the Central Florida region. Some of them are in tourism, hospitality and food and beverage and others are in real estate, development, legal and related business categories.

How would you answer The Big Five?

Ask yourself how you would answer the five questions listed above. If you find you have difficulty clearly and concisely answering them, it may be a signal that you have grown to the point that you need some help to augment your marketing program, particularly in the public relations area.

If you’d like to share your answers with us, we’d be eager to hear them. And we would be eager to learn if your business — and ours — would be a good fit.

Want to learn more?

Call or email me (407-339-0879 or will@wellonscommunications.com) and let’s talk.

Or, better yet, you talk… and I’ll listen.

Bring your story to life with visuals

Posted on by Wellons team

People often think of public relations and journalism in terms of the written word.

Mention “public relations” and people immediately think of “press releases.” Say “journalism” and people connect it with “stories.”

Both perceptions are only the tip of the iceberg. Public relations firms and print journalists are, indeed, centered around the written word. We certainly value the importance of what you say, but in today’s contemporary Big Data environment, at Wellons Communications, we place equal emphasis on using visuals to project your story.

Here’s an example, as illustrated by London-based NeoMam Studios, a leading graphics design communications firm based in the UK:

The picture, indeed, is worth a thousand words.

Your brain craves visuals

Written communications are designed to conjure up a picture or image. With that in mind, let’s cut to the chase and examine just how important visuals are in telling people about your business:

• The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text.

• Ninety percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.

• We can get the sense of a visual scene in less than one-tenth of a second.

• Color visuals increase the willingness to read by 80%.

• People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.

Visuals make your information more engaging

Organizations that specialize in visual communications have a name for communicating visually: infographics.

Infographics are particularly effective at communicating complex ideas. Non-experts better comprehend and understand information that requires long, complex explanation when graphics present the idea. Statistical information, e.g. trends in your industry or key points about why your product or service is superior, are more easily understood by laymen when presented visually.

An example of the power of infographics is the popularity of the informational graphics published regularly by USA Today. Not only is your eye attracted to the graphics, the ideas they project are quickly and easily understood. Even if you have little interest in the subject or know nothing about it, once you look, you come away with an image and information that you cannot easily forget.

Put Wellons to work on making your story easy to see … and understand

Our team at Wellons Communications firmly believes in making your message as easy to understand as possible. Simplicity in understanding is augmented by visuals. And that’s why we look for the best way to visualize your story and get people to notice you and your organization’s key attributes.

If you want to make your story come to life and possess qualities that will make people look at you a first—and second—time, keep Wellons Communications in mind. Contact us (407-339-0879 or will@wellonscommunications.com) and let us show you how we can blend words and pictures into memorable stories aimed at increasing your bottom line.

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