Effective public relations is both an art and a science. It’s a combination of understanding your audience, the proper execution of a carefully designed plan, and the ability to adjust your message and approach on the fly as needed. Most of this work is done before the campaign is launched.

Too often, though, people and brands try to react to a situation, rather than planning for and responding to likely scenarios. Worse, people sometimes base their campaign narratives on assumptions or traditions, when the plain fact is “what always worked” may not work anymore. To avoid finding your campaign falling into these traps, here’s a pre-launch checklist for your next PR campaign.

Most startups have a challenge to face when they’re dealing with public relations. Young companies know that they need to create buzz for their organizations – but it’s hard to do that when they don’t have the right connections and budgets in place.

Developing a successful PR strategy for a startup is a critical component of ensuring your business has the right foundations for success. However, most companies simply don’t know where to get started. Here are a few tips that can help startups to set up a more effective PR campaign.

Call To Action, or CTA, is a key part of your marketing strategy – it’s the part where you tell your target audience what action they should take after arriving at your landing page or reading through your blog post. The most basic CTAs would involve encouraging the customer to buy your product or service. Other types of CTA involve asking your reader to share your content, make a donation, subscribe to your emails, and so forth.

Creating content without an effective CTA is a lost opportunity to encourage your audience to be a supporter, follower or buyer of your brand. A CTA is what turns marketing into active engagement and hopefully, profits. Here are some tips to create a call to action to get the best results:

For companies looking to build their brand, there’s no better tool than a solid PR strategy. The right plan can help to nurture new leads, facilitate rapid growth and improve an organization’s reputation both online and off. Of course, there are still many businesses out there that don’t know how to use PR as a brand-building tool.

As the world of marketing continues to evolve, the strategies available to modern firms are sure to grow and transform. However, for 2018, the following tactics could have the best results.

Held in Anaheim, CA, this year’s Natural Products Expo West drew over 80,000 attendees and more than 3,000 innovative brands. Expo West is known for showcasing innovative brands and trends across the natural, organic and health product arenas, and our consumer team was on the ground to discover them firsthand.

Executive Vice President of Consumer, Dara Busch, and Senior Vice President of Health/Wellness and Parenting, Annette Banca, were on site meeting hundreds of the movers and shakers disrupting the marketplace.

The SXSW Interactive Festival has long been a test bed for new trends that frequently capture global attention. The most anticipated subjects and hottest new trends being discussed at this year’s festival offer a glimpse of the new technologies and social trends that may be just around the corner. In addition to making waves at the latest festival, the following five trends all have the potential to make a significant impact in consumer markets far beyond the city of Austin.

The SXSW Festival provides entrepreneurs, new business founders and those seeking to invest in a new startup the chance to meet and interact. Changes seen in the past year, including the controlled deflation of both the early- and late-stage private company economic bubbles, has done much to influence the startup ecosystem. This subject is one that may have a considerable impact on the ways that new businesses establish themselves in the days to come. From privatized aerospace businesses to tech-startups that cater to micro-niches, new developments shaping the full market-wide startup ecosystem has been a hot-button issue that conference goers have been unable to ignore.

In a previous post, we highlighted how your company can benefit from tying in a product/company launch with PR – and the huge ROI that comes with the strategy. Today, we will break down several crucial aspects that your company must include on their pre-launch checklist. Creating a business plan requires more work than many people tend to anticipate. Conjuring up a basic business model devours close to 100 hours of mental consumption in total. This means the process of thinking non-stop for roughly eight hours daily would have to continue uninterrupted for about 10 to 12 days to make one step in moving a business forward.

But let’s face it. Pacing around for eight hours consecutively just to think is something very few people have time to do. So you’ll need an advantage to push your business concepts forward while still giving your venture the attention it needs. You’ll find more information on a few things to be done in our pre-launch checklist below.