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Limitless Public Relations

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

When Public Relations goes wrong

Posted on by Claire Stephenson

Public relations, even in the hands of a skilled practitioner, can still hit the skids and go terribly wrong. There have been some absolute howlers over the years, from Ratner’s Jewellery fall-down to the corporate PR storm of United Airlines following a passenger assault and being dragged from an aircraft by UA staff.

Here’s three notable examples of recent PR and communications disasters:

Veganuary by Burger King

During the annual vegan challenge of Veganuary, Burger King launched their brand-new vegan ‘Rebel Whopper’ burger that very quickly became non-vegan, with it transpiring that the ‘plant-based’ burger was actually cooked on the very same equipment as the meat-based burgers, making it unsuitable for vegetarians, let alone vegans. There was also the addition of the non-vegan mayonnaise, which customers may not have been aware of.

More of a Huge Whopper than a Rebel Whopper, which resulted in a massive PR fail. Along with an advertising ban from the watchdog, the Advertising Standards Association (ASA). They stated that the accompanying small print on the burger advertisement “was not sufficiently prominent to override the overall impression that the burger was suitable for vegetarians and vegans.”

Dominic Cummings and his Barnard Castle Eye Test

Along with the 2020 onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, came the government PR arm swinging into action, bringing with it the famed ‘Stay Home, Protect The NHS, Save Lives’ slogan that was splashed across all media and every messaging opportunity possible, so that the general public had the message embedded into their consciousness. One disastrous communications fail which had huge public consequences for this message, was the then-advisor to the PM, Dominic Cummings and his famed eye-testing drive to Barnard Castle.

Cummings fled from London to Durham, with suspected COVID-19, and then drove to Barnard Castle with his family to ‘test his eyesight’. The Guardian described the evolving story as “evasion to evisceration”, with the PR fall-out of the scandal turning the heat up for Number 10’s comms team. Calls for Cummings to quit swiftly followed, along with a ministerial resignation and public condemnation. The resulting dip in confidence of the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic was later coined as “the Cummings effect”.

Wetherspoons

Tim Martin, the wealthy Wetherspoons boss, caused a huge public backlash after informing his staff members that they would be paid up until the date that the government forced pubs to shut, with no more wages until the furlough scheme kicked in. Shockingly, Martin then proceeded to send a video message to all of his staff, advising them to look for alternative employment at Tesco if they needed money in the meantime. The negative publicity around this damaging approach was across all media, with reputational damage on a wide scale.

Plan in Advance

Even the best strategic plans can go haywire. But whether your campaign or PR strategy has covered all the bases or not, you can quickly find yourself in a comms disaster where reputational damage can occur. And the ways it can go wrong can be unpredictable and challenging. Knowing how to respond and deal with difficult situations is part of the job of a professional communications practitioner.

An issues or crisis communication plan should be something that’s already in place for your business or organisation, preferably before the crisis happens.

If you’re looking for crisis management, help with creating a bespoke strategy or advice on what your business or organisation needs, we’re here to help. Drop Michael Gregory an email at michael.gregory@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

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

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.

Creating powerful brand messages that matter: know your ABCs

Posted on by Michael Gregory

There are millions of ways to describe an approach to communications-thinking, but whether it’s a public health campaign or a drive to sell more of your products, your audiences need to understand your brand messages easily and quickly.

We have a simple but effective process to test brand or campaign messages in a three-stage filter:

Accuracy

It has to be accurate.  Just has to be. Your target audiences, whether in a B2C or B2B environment, want promises to match their expectations. And they have many ways to check what you say is accurate. And true.

Advice: Check, check and check again.

Brevity

Don’t overstay your welcome with a message. Make it brief. If you can’t make it succinct and reduce it to a few words, it’s likely that it’s too complex for your audience. You can expand later, but for getting attention, be brief.

Advice: Use the delete button wherever you can and don’t be too smart.

Clarity

Be clear. Use straightforward language, appropriate to the audience. If it’s red, say it’s red; not a delicious splash of vibrant crimson.

Advice: Test your message on a colleague. Is it clear first time?

Want to know how we can help develop your key messages? Feel free to drop us a line or sign up for regular informative tips and advice.

The wisdom of crowds and the power of ‘buzz’

Posted on by Michael Gregory

One thing that Greg Wilson learnt early in his career, even before he was in public relations, was that people follow the crowd…

As a graduate in the late 90s looking for my first marketing job, I naively came up with the idea that if I could get my mates’ band a record deal, it would look amazing on my CV. I dutifully got a whole load of CDs printed and developed a “promotional pack” to send out to record company A&Rs, inviting them to a “showcase gig” at a renowned A&R pub in Camden. I hammered the phones asking if my beautiful promo packs had been received, did they like the CD? Were they coming to the gig? Several said yes. But on the big day, to massive disappointment, all-round, not one record company showed.

When I called to ask why, I remember one particularly honest response. The promo pack was very nice, he said. He even really liked the CD, but he was only ever really interested in coming to see bands who already have some “buzz”. Put simply, “selling” a band to a record company doesn’t work. Not unless they’ve already heard that you’re one to watch.

When that happens, the direction of travel is reversed. Bands with “buzz” often ended up with record companies fighting to sign them up, to the utter dismay and disbelief of all the other bands who are pitching themselves so relentlessly.

This was an early lesson that the perceived “wisdom of crowds” trumps salesmanship and fantastic marketing every time, no matter how beautiful your sales pitch is.

But how exactly do you define “buzz”? Well following the music business example, it was hearing the band’s name from venue owners, promoters, sometimes rival artists – basically anybody who didn’t have a vested interest in the band’s success – before receiving the CD and gig date. It was about being seen to already have fans. A following, if you like.

After more than 20 years in the public relations profession, the same still goes. If your buyers can see evidence of your greatness, outside of what you are telling them directly, they will follow that crowd wisdom – and buy-in to all your empirical evidence that you are the right choice.

This is the lesson for sales and marketers who are unsure about the value of PR. Hone your marketing and your sales pitch all you like. But if you want to be a superstar, make sure you have the “buzz” to back it up. Be the one to watch before you try to sell, and selling will suddenly seem easy.

In fact, they may just come to you.

Limitless rebrands to support expansion plans

Posted on by Michael Gregory

Limitless has undergone rebrand of it’s visual identity to mark the start of a five-year growth plan for the agency.

The strategic public relations and brand communications agency is to expand nationally and internationally through organic growth, joint ventures and acquisitions. 

Michael Gregory, who joined Limitless alongside existing directors Greg Wilson and Richard Slater in November 2020, said: “The pandemic provided us with a chance to recalibrate the business, focus on what we do best and rebrand our identity. And that’s to help our clients be known for what they want to be known for.

“It’s a simple proposition and one that gets to the heart of the matter. It helps us to shape campaigns that achieve clients’ brand and communication objectives.

“The next five years are going to be exciting for us and all our partners. We’ve got realistic plans in place to grow the business domestically and internationally. We’re talking to like-minded partners in the UK and Europe, to collaborate or form structured partnerships that will benefit clients.

“Our growth will be fuelled by doing an excellent job for clients. That’s the sure-fire way of getting to where we want to be.”

Get in touch HERE to book an initial free of charge strategy session.