Telling brand stories that pique the public’s interest.
In order to communicate with consumers, brands should start by crafting a cohesive and engaging message – and that’s just the easy part. Ensuring that those messages resonate with target audiences AND cut through the noise is the challenge. Determining how your brand can contribute to cultural conversations in a meaningful way is imperative to remaining relevant in the rapidly changing print and digital ecosystem.
Once we have a brand message to stand on, we follow a series of steps crafted by our experience that allows us to effectively share that message with the world.
Audit
Through a deep-dive brand audit, we identify different brand and product storytelling opportunities that will resonate with your brand's key target audience, as well as evaluate your brand position in its specific category and market. From these vantage points, we can determine the best medium for communication of your brand’s message. Is it highly visual? Does it require a spokesperson? Will product demos serve the message?
Strategize
Following the identification of the appropriate storytelling opportunities, we then build a strategy. During this process, we answer the questions of who, what, where, when, and why to determine what the KPIs for success look like. With this information, we can curate strategic recommendations for the best mediums, media contacts, timelines and tactics for your brand messaging.
Planning + Prep
Timing and preparation are everything. In order for each brand story to have its moment, we advise that brands carefully plan launches, events and announcements through a holistic approach. This helps to ensure not only that big storytelling moments for your brand don’t compete with cultural moments, but also that spokespeople and information sources are well-rounded and prepared for media.
Coordination
The biggest part of our role as PR professionals isn't just helping you craft the perfect message – it's cultivating relationships with key media to tell your brand story. From our experience, we’ve found that the best pieces come from our media friendlies in the editorial space. As such, in the beginning stages of partnership, we identify these partners and begin the process of building mutually beneficial relationships.
Optimize
These days, a well-rounded PR approach includes more than traditional media relations. By examining other communication avenues such as paid editorial placements, influencers, and SMTs, we can further drive brand messaging with a unique spin.
At every stage from message curation to optimization, we help brands reach consumers in effective ways. Take a look at a few examples below.
The Red Bulletin – an international lifestyle magazine published by Red Bull Media House since 2005 – asked us to create and develop a “Big Moment” experience for their first solely-owned, branded experience in celebration of their December Heroes of the Year issue. To achieve this, we helped them plan and promote a party at Red Bull Arts in Chelsea, NYC.
By naming annual heroes and celebrating them with an event for the first time ever, The Red Bulletin created a splash in the news cycle and created its own “news” with a special announcement. We then leveraged the announcement as a whole and used the heroes’ unique stories to create a curated list of NYC-based contacts to invite and attend the event. Beyond inviting over 200 relevant media members and social media contacts via digital invitations in the SplashThat platform, we also shared an advanced copy of the December Heroes of the Year Issue, a press release and a Know Before You go informational one-sheet for attendees. The results? 1,659,352 potential daily impressions to-date.
In November 2018, Pier 1 partnered with us to drive product storytelling through media relations efforts. Throughout the year that followed, we built strong relationships with key media contacts that not only helped us garner Pier 1 placements in key lifestyle outlets month-over-month, but successfully positioned Pier 1 as a go-to source in the home decor space.
Specifically, we implemented a local storytelling approach focused on broadcast media in an effort to drive in-store traffic and product interest in key target markets. Tailoring pitches to each market and centering segments around what was available at local stores helped drive local consumer interest and brand consideration. These relationships ultimately yielded nearly as many inbound request-based placements as earned placements, resulting in an average of 3x greater monthly impressions YOY.
Since 1977, Maruchan has been making America’s highest quality Ramen noodles. In addition to their longstanding popularity among the college-aged audience, Maruchan sought to grow the premium ramen category by expanding their appeal to busy moms. To meet this challenge, we helped Maruchan build a multi-pronged influencer and media relations campaign.
To compliment our experiential tours and influencer support, we secured a custom segment on a local media outlet to highlight the tour. We had California influencer, Lindsey Baruch, join the two morning anchors of a popular KTLA morning show to introduce Maruchan GOLD to their viewing audience right before the tour kicked off. In addition to the conversation about Maruchan GOLD, the preview of the bento box and golden airstream gave viewers a sneak peek at what they could expect to experience with the tour. The segment garnered an estimated 3.16M impressions and several tour visitors mentioned date segment as a reason they attended.