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Limitless Public Relations

Agile communications for a post-Covid world?

Posted on by Claire Stephenson

If you’re part of a communications team that replies on heavy planning and forward planning with messaging and calendars, you may not need to invest so much time in creating content and timing plans that often don’t come to fruition.

A changing world

The global pandemic seems to have revved up another notch with the discovery of another mutation – Omicron – a Covid variant that is suspected to be highly transmissible. In turn, this finding has cast a chaotic and unstable future for businesses, travel and planning in general.

Agile communications could be the approach that makes a constantly changing and uncertain digital world, one to your advantage.

Rooted in the IT world, Agile has migrated over to public relations and communications in recent years, lending itself well to iteration and adaption as situations – Covid being a great example – happen.

But what is it?

The Australian software company, Atlassian, offers this definition:

Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable, increments. Requirements, plans, and results are evaluated continuously so teams have a natural mechanism for responding to change quickly.

Atlassian

‘A waste of money and effort’

Dr Betteke van Ruler discusses agile processes as a continual adjustment, but only to reach the best results possible. Collaboration between the project owner, team members and potentially, stakeholders, work closely together, with a reduced project hierarchy to maximise flow and results.

Van Ruler states that old-style strategic planning and time-heavy administration aren’t dynamic enough for communications in a fast-paced world, with these traditional methods being “far too linear” to be helpful.

Scrumptious

Ever found yourself in a Scrum? This Scrum, whilst still team-based, is off the rugby pitch. A Scrum is just one facet in agile methodology, describing how the project team learns on the go, addresses problems dynamically together, reflects what works/what doesn’t work, and improves their process to ensure a successful project outcome. A Kanban board is often used as part of the Scrum.

Ken Schwaber, in Agile Project Management with Scrum, says:

“Most people responsible for managing projects have been taught a deterministic approach to project management that uses detailed plans, Gantt charts and work schedules. Scrum is the exact opposite.” 

Ken Schwaber

There are four main project roles within a scrum:

Scrum master = the facilitator, helping teams to self-motivate and follow the agreed process.

Project owner = the client representer

Scrum team = team members

Stakeholders = people who have an interest in the success of the project

The benefits of the scrum process are the fast-paced workflow allows for team creativity to be fostered, reduces costs and time while increasing productivity and quality.

Agile for the win

If you’re feeling a need to shake up your traditional communications methods, an Agile planning method could be something that benefits your organisation and clients. You can read more about Agile communications via this (surprisingly) good blog from DEFRA and a fuller explanation from Lucidchart, here.

It’s worth regularly revaluating your communications and messaging, using your metrics and data to assess what’s working and what isn’t working for your organisation.

Here at Limitless Public Relations, we can help you with your communications strategy.  Whether that’s creating powerful messaging from fresh, or consulting on an existing plan to ensure your words are reaching the right people. We’re your people.

Contact Michael Gregory for an informal chat on 0845 625 0820 or you can message us here.

Stakeholder engagement and why your business needs it

Posted on by Claire Stephenson

What is Stakeholder Engagement?

The term stakeholder is used to determine individuals or groups of people who have an impact or can impact a business or organisation.

R. Edward Freeman first used the phrase in 1984, in his text Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach, when he described stakeholders as:

“…any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives.” 

Stakeholder engagement should be viewed as a positive opportunity to inform, consult, influence, learn from. To analyse information from people surrounding your business, and to help you gain the best outcome on how you share your communications.

Identifying Your Stakeholders

So how do we work out the impactful people surrounding our business or organisation? A good place to begin is with a brainstorm of all of the people who are impacted by your project or business, or who might hold influence over the outcome – good or bad. This could be co-workers, community groups, customers, shareholders, residents, regulators, politicians…the list could be varied depending on your business.

Once you have generated your list, you’ll need to work out the priority of your stakeholders, by deciding on the power and interest that they have in your work

We can do this by stakeholder mapping. Quite literally, making a map of who they are and at what level they interact with our business. Only then can we address how we can engage with the relevant people in a human, respectful and engaging way.

Aubrey Mendelow (1991) created a power-interest matrix to help identify the importance of stakeholders within and beyond an organisation. Stakeholders can be both internal and external and both groups should be considered.

Here are the four levels of power-interest and a general breakdown of meaning:

  1. High power, high interested stakeholders (ENGAGE and CONSULT) = fully engage with these people and groups, paying close attention to expectations.
  2. High power, less interested stakeholders (KEEP SATISFIED) = maintain contact and messaging without excess.
  3. Low power, highly interested stakeholders (KEEP INFORMED) = engage, inform and ensure smooth communications.
  4. Low power, less interested stakeholders (MONITOR) = monitor with low-level communications

Why You Should Have a Stakeholder Engagement Strategy

For projects, campaigns and launches, it’s crucial to analyse, understand and strategically reach the people who can support your endeavours. And conversely, who negatively impacts what you’re trying to achieve. By laying the good groundwork in identifying and engaging with all of your relevant stakeholders, you’re more likely to succeed in your project and messaging mission.

If you need help determining your stakeholder engagement strategy, Limitless can help you with a clean and clear process. Contact Michael Gregory for an informal chat on 0845 625 0820 or you can message us here.

Does your marketing need an oil change?

Posted on by Michael Gregory

When a client asks us to help them promote a product or service, we always want to know more about their marketing and PR activities. We look at three distinct areas:

  1. Lead Generation
  2. Sales Conversion
  3. Brand Awareness

Why these three?  Well, these are the holy trinity of effective sales and marketing. To get sales, you need to generate leads, right? But there’s no point in generating leads unless you convert them into sales.

Factors one and two are basically the engine of your marketing. Your business is going nowhere without them.

Brand Awareness

But what a great many younger businesses don’t understand (before they come to us, that is) is the importance of the third element – brand awareness – in getting the most effective performance from your lead generation and sales conversion tactics.

Essentially, brand awareness is like adding oil to your marketing engine. You might generate leads with your SEO and PPC campaigns and convert them using the great UX on your website. But more people will click your search results or PPC ads if they have heard of your brand (read our previous blog on creating a buzz around your brand).

They’ll also be more comfortable completing a transaction on your website if your brand was already known to them before they got there.

Sales v Being Known

Your superstar salesperson might be great at setting meetings and smashing it out of the park in their presentations, but it will be a lot easier for them if the prospect has heard of your company before taking the call or sitting down for the meeting.

You might get all your business from referrals and recommendations, but think how reassuring it feels when someone recommends a company, and you’ve actually already heard of them.

Nobody likes unknowns. That’s why it’s important to Be Known. Being known means your business is running at optimum efficiency. It’s what will help you pull ahead of the pack and become the leader…if that’s what you want?

Call us today if you’d like to find out more about how we can help you Be Known. Phone 0845 625 0820 or email: enquiries@limitlesspr.co.uk

Is public relations what your SEO campaign is missing?

Posted on by Michael Gregory

It all changed with Penguin. Before that, SEO and public relations (PR) were entirely separate entities in terms of Google rankings. Yes, good brand awareness would always improve click-through rates on search results, but in the old days it had nothing to do with actually getting you on the page in the first place.

From an average client perspective, search engine ranking was all about technical wizardry, dark arts and voodoo, practicable only by those with special knowledge. Before Penguin, public relations had started to seem a bit unfashionable to some, with its vague promise of “brand awareness” compared to the hard, empirical facts of SEO rankings and click rates.

Changes for the PR profession

But in April 2012 everything changed for the PR profession – though few people noticed straightaway. The sea-change came when Google announced a new update to its search algorithm. The Penguin algorithm was aimed squarely at putting an end to the “trickster’s handbook” of old school SEO and ensuring search results truly “earned” their place on the all-important first page.

Overnight, Google began penalising brand websites for using “manipulative” techniques to achieve high rankings in search results, while rewarding websites with high-quality editorial recommendations from influential journalists, bloggers or social influencers.

In short, Google got smart. Really smart. It was no longer so fooled by the technical existence of a link anymore. It was all about the quality of implied recommendation. And you didn’t even need a link per se.

Always watching, Google now sees brand mentions themselves, in the right places, as a recommendation of rank worthiness. The more influential the journalist, blogger or social influencer, the more Google sees the brand as an authority on the topic in the content, which means it’s more likely to be what its users are truly looking for.

So nowadays, PR’s impact on SEO is a double whammy. Firstly, search result click thru rates will always be boosted by increased overall brand awareness achieved by PR coverage, simply because people are more likely to click a result they’ve heard of before. But secondly good PR coverage will now actually help get you higher in the results in the first place.

So, “that’s awesome”, you say. All I need do is ensure my SEO campaign is backed by great earned media campaign and I’ll shoot up the results! Well, yes and no. The truth is, though brand citations will still boost SEO overall, the real magic does still come from links. This is where PR not only has to be active but also must be really smart.

The challenge is that the more authentic a journalist or blogger is as a source, the more valuable the citation or link is for SEO. But authentic sources won’t include a link to your site, unless they have a very strong reason to do so, which will add real value to their audience.

Why an integrated approach matters

The solution comes from an integrated approach to PR. The holy grail, from an SEO point of view, is to achieve coverage with an authentic source, where the earned media content you have achieved is enhanced by further content on your owned media – the website you want to link to.

An example might be an HR company that wants to boost brand awareness with its target audiences but also Google rankings. Yes, regular PR about contract wins, CEO interviews and opinion pieces etc all help with citations and brand awareness. But the magic comes when the company conducts a survey into, for instance, “Sociopaths in the Workplace.”

The survey results are pitched with a press release to high authority publications, which is provided with a link to a Psychopath Test hosted on the company’s own website, where interested readers can get their own test results, just for a bit of fun. And then post them on social media if they like.

So, if picked up in HR trade press and also maybe some national newspapers, not only does the journalist have a reason to publish the link, there’s a good possibility readers will re-post their results on their own social media. Result: high quality links galore.

In short, a PR campaign aimed at boosting SEO as well as brand awareness works at its absolute best when it’s a combination of Earned, Owned and Shared activity, working together.

Is PR part of your SEO plan? Email today to find out how we can help enquiries@limitlesspr.co.uk. 

Why public relations is like taking your brand to the gym

Posted on by Michael Gregory

When talking to businesses and individuals new to public relations (PR), Limitless Public Relations’ director Greg Wilson is proud to be full of explainer-analogies. A consistent one is that PR is like taking your brand to the gym.

Why? Well weirdly for someone selling PR, the starting point is that nobody needs to go to the gym.

If you think of your business as a human body, then you might think of having a sales function as being like water. Without a sales function, be that online, in person, over the phone, whatever, your business will die just as quick as your body would without water.

But sales on its own is not enough to keep you alive for long. For a long life, your sales function needs to be supported by marketing. If sales is like water, then marketing is like food for your business.

In the same way your body needs food to grow and develop, marketing feeds your business. Lead generation is provided by SEO, PPC, telemarketing, networking or whatever you use to generate interest. Sales conversion is provided through your website, or your salesperson and their literature, or a mixture of both, dependent on the nature of your business.

You are what you eat

Like food, marketing comes in varying degrees of quality – often linked to price. Cheap food, like cheap marketing, is rarely the best. And like cheap food, cheap marketing will keep you alive, but it won’t necessarily allow you to live your longest or best life.

Good quality food however will put you in good health. Likewise, good quality marketing will do the same for your business.

So there you have it. With food and water, you will live. What more do you need?

This is where the PR analogy comes in. While you need food and water to survive, you will not die if you don’t go to the gym. Similarly, your business will not die without PR in the same way it would without sales and marketing.

The honest truth is that good PR and brand awareness is not essential to achieving sales. There are many, many businesses out there whose brand awareness is zilch, and they still get sales.

So why do it? Well, it’s because brand building is an activity reserved only for those who want, not just to survive, but to excel. It’s for those who want to pull ahead of the pack, stand out from the crowd, and be a big name in their industry. It’s for those who want to invest in long term growth, with an aim of one day being the obvious choice, so that sales is no longer a struggle. To achieve a scenario where customers gravitate to you, because you have gravity. And not just customers, people too, because aspirational businesses will grow better when they have the best people working for them. It’s about understanding the payback you will receive by increasing your overall attractiveness.

Why you need a consistent PR approach

Making the step-up from sales and marketing and into PR is big business thinking. Lifestyle businesses need not apply. If you’re going to go for gold, once your sales and marketing is up and running, you’d better hit the gym.

A common mistake many businesses make when looking at PR is that they think in terms of rocket-ship based analogies like the “big launch” or military style “campaigns” – single battles that can be won in a day for glory that will last forever.

But PR isn’t like going to war. It’s like going to the gym. If you go to the gym once and do a massive session, hit every machine, lift every single weight, when you look in the mirror afterwards, guess what? No difference. Why did you even bother going? Waste of time, and now you’re just tired.

But if instead, you go to the gym consistently, three times a week, doing a basic set, perhaps gradually building overtime, guess what happens when you look in the mirror after a year? Better still combine your efforts with a healthy diet, how do you think you will look after 5 years?

Other reasons brand PR is like going to the gym include:

  1. People do it to thrive, not just survive
  2. Consistency is as important as intensity
  3. Results come from commitment, overtime – not overnight
  4. You’ll get better results if you take professional advice
  5. Ignoring professional advice can lead to injuries
  6. There’s never a bad time to start – except too late
  7. The positive results benefit your entire being
  8. A mixed programme works best
  9. The more you do it, the easier it becomes
  10. You never “complete” the gym – it’s a lifelong commitment and attitude

Big brands don’t become big brands overnight. They build overtime, and so it is with public relations. So, when do you want to start?

If you’d like to know how we can help, please email enquiries@limitlesspr.co.uk

Celebrating International Women’s Day

Posted on by Claire Stephenson

Claire Stephenson talks about International Women’s Day, where we acknowledge the challenges that women face on a global level for equality but also recognise achievements and gains that have been made.

Challenge

International Women’s Day (IWD) is a global day, where women from across the world are celebrated for their social, economic, cultural, and political achievements. It is an annual event which is marked on the 8th March for well over 100 years now. The focus of IWD is centred around highlighting women’s achievements, whilst continuing to raise our voices and awareness over the barriers that women face. Barriers include the greater equality for women and the speeding up of gender parity in the workplace and beyond. These are still areas of concern for many countries.

This year’s theme is Choose To Challenge. The focus is directed towards calling out gender bias and inequality whilst encouraging women to use their voices collectively to increase inclusivity and balance. There are global events occurring all month for International Women’s Day. The pandemic has seen and events transfer to online rather than in-person like in previous years. The upside to this however, is that a more global conversation can be had on these crucial issues. Grassroots work is essential to challenge for gender parity on a more global level.

Women have been stood at the forefront of the COVID-19 pandemic since its unwelcome arrival. From critical health care staff, to women with caring responsibilities at home during lockdown, to political leadership, women have shown strength and resilience. However, the crisis has highlighted the disproportionate inequalities that women already faced prior to the pandemic. The economic, emotional and social impacts of COVID-19 have only added to existing inequality.

Inequality

Analysis has been carried out recently by UN Women and UN Development Programme. They suggest that in 2021, around 435 million women and girls will be living on less than $1.90 a day. This will include 47 million who have been pushed into poverty as a result of COVID-19. 

The UN also raised concerns during the first wave of the pandemic, stating that COVID-19 risked increasing inequalities for women. The UN’s senior gender adviser, Nahla Valji, said:

“There is no single society where we’ve achieved equality between men and women, and so this pandemic is being layered on top of existing inequalities, and it’s exacerbating those inequalities.”

Nahla Valji

Limitless Public Relations

At Limitless, we currently have 61 people both at Associate and Director level. Out of this, there are 44 women and 17 men. All of our people at Limitless are senior, as every single one has a minimum of 10 years’ professional experience.

We’re proud of our 100% collaborative culture, which is based around an agreed framework. There’s no top-down management at Limitless and we all set our own commitments. We confidently lay our trust entirely on the exceptional personal talent of our majority-female team to ensure that we deliver our professional services to the very highest standards achievable.

On International Women’s Day, it’s a great time to reinforce our commitment to gender parity within Limitless. We’ll ensure that gender equality is a strong, positive and continuing feature within our network of people.

Photography? Who needs that?

Posted on by Michael Gregory

Best-selling author and acclaimed photographer, Brian Lloyd Duckett, gives his views on how photography plays an important part in forming opinions.

When we see a business – whether it’s appearing on a website, in a magazine or newspaper or on social media – we form an impression. A ‘picture’ develops in our minds about that business which, once formed, is difficult to change. It’s all about first impressions.

And ‘picture’, here, is the key word. The image, or set of images you’ll be looking at, has a huge impact on how the world perceives your organisation, whether you’re a small dental practice, a regional law firm or a global consumer brand. Yes, it’s all about image.

This is where photography comes in. The good news is that you’re in control: you can decide on what images the world sees; you can shape that image to the extent that you’re leading people down a very focused path in terms of what they think of you. You’re in complete control. Or you should be . . .

The bad news is that too few organisations use photography to its full potential. Take PR photography, for example. What do you think a picture of four blokes in grey suits standing in front of a giant cheque says about your business? How do pictures like this link to your brand values or your messaging?

Photography by Brian Lloyd Duckett.

Public Relations is an interesting case in point. Photography should be at the heart of any campaign – but sadly it’s often an afterthought; it’s the ‘giant cheque’ scenario – or a z-lister cutting a ribbon, all big smiles and gleaming teeth but no substance. Any photography used to support PR (or any marketing) activity needs thinking through. Find a photographer who’s not only a good photographer but one who understands branding and communications; one who will collaborate with you to develop and shape a brief. This work up-front always pays dividends later in terms of campaign reach and cut-through but too often it gets overlooked. ‘Let’s brief a photographer’ comes late in the conversation – when it should be near the beginning.

Then there’s the portraits of your directors or employees. Do they show thought, humanity and attention to detail? Are the pictures fully on-brand and on-message? We often see forced, cheesy portraits that tell us nothing – either about the person or about the organisation they represent. But it’s such a simple thing to get right! As one candid marketing director said to me recently about photography, “Getting it wrong is easy. Getting it right is even easier – but how many of us do that?”

I’m sorry if all this sounds harsh but every week I see opportunities missed and marketing spend wasted because photography has taken second stage. It needs to be right up there at the start of the conversation – not chucked in at the end as a ‘PS’.

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Brian Lloyd Duckett is a commercial photographer with offices in Liverpool and London. He provides organisations from entrepreneurial start-ups to global brands with distinctive imagery to support their marketing and PR activity.

www.duckettphotographer.com

Tel 07948 528656

Want to know how the media works?

Posted on by Michael Gregory

Here at Limitless we can provide you will all the knowledge you need when dealing with the media. Our media training experts have all worked in major news organisations such as Sky, BBC, ITV including national and regional newspapers, so they know exactly what the media wants, particularly in our digital age.

We offer media training programmes to fit your exact requirements or we can deliver specific modules that focus on a particular topic, such as:

  • An introduction to today’s media landscape
  • Knowing how to get your message across
  • Preparing for media interviews in the Zoom era
  • Dealing with the media in a crisis

They are hugely beneficial in giving your team an advanced understanding of the media landscape and knowing how journalists work and what they need.

The sessions give you the confidence and skills needed when dealing with the media but can also help you with public speaking engagements and delivering sales presentations.

We offer 1-2-1 sessions or group workshops that can be either delivered online or in person.

If you’d like to know more, please contact Michael Gregory

What is the PESO model? How to get your ducks in a row

Posted on by Claire Stephenson

PESO is a well-used model within the communications industry. The acronym stands for Paid Earned Shared Owned in terms of media. It relates to the channels used to communicate your campaign messages and how they can cross over with one another.

For us as public relations professionals, we often like to call it the ESOP model as we lean to the earned media channel because securing influential media coverage is our priority.

But what does it mean? Gini Dietrich of Spin Sucks created the model in 2014, although others believe Ketchum’s Don Bartholomew developed it previously in 2010. Here’s the breakdown of what it means:

PAID: The channels you pay to place your campaign message on.

EARNED: Coverage secured about a cause, product or a business on an influential media site.

SHARED: Sharing of your campaign message by people through social channels.

OWNED: Editorial created by you to sit on channels controlled by you.

The diagram below, which is our version of Dietrich’s, shows channel examples so you can see how they interlink. The middle section is the area you should aim to be working towards: a positive reputation that helps you to succeed.

No individual channel is more important than the other in the PESO model. The amount to which you use them will ultimately depend on your overall communication objectives, who you want to target and, of course, your budget.

When planning your communication strategy, we always start with one single powerful question: what do you want to be known for? Once that’s clear, we work with you to determine your messaging strategy.

We then apply the PESO model, and depending on your objectives; we may use one or many elements of this model.

It sounds simple. But in all reality, the best campaigns often are.

If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you achieve your communication goals, drop us a line.