Protecting a Visual Identity

Two people planning their visual identity

Most business leaders understand the value of having a memorable business name and logo, but many don’t realize the importance of a visual identity, what it entails, and why protecting it is paramount.

Building a successful brand takes time, resources, and strategy. Typically, the brand’s foundation is in its mission statement, value proposition, and unique voice which are then expressed through the company name, logo mark, print and digital marketing materials and website. Those graphical components comprise the visual identity, or face of the business, at inception.

However, over time, a business’s actions and reputation become intertwined in the visual image establishing the business’s brand, which, done well, can become one of the business’s most valuable intellectual assets.

When starting a business, trademarking and copyrighting a logo helps to ensure a company will be the only one of its type selling a similar service or goods using the same business name. A visual identity that consists of an icon or wordmark can also be trademarked.

Purchasing a domain name that reflects the business name is another important avenue to stake claim to the business’s brand name online. Creating social profiles that secure the business name across all major social networks should be done as well, even if there is not an immediate plan to activate a social media program.

Brand Guidelines are a Must-Have for Your Visual Identity

A company’s visual messaging effectively expands as it grows if it is implemented with consistency and a long-term strategy in place. Consistency is needed in the color palette, fonts, graphical style and tone to make it recognizable at a glance thus building the brand’s equity. This consistency put into a formalized document with a set of rules to control proper logo usage, font hierarchy, iconography and tone in any public-facing visual communication is essentially the basics of a brand guide.

An example of a brand that has withstood the test of time by making intentional choices and following a brand guide in its implementation of the visual identity is Absolut Vodka. Their bottle has reached iconic status because it hasn’t changed and was used for 25 years in their marketing campaigns. The main star of the visual creative was their bottle and their product name in the same bold font with a simple headline and playful imagery. A brand guide is essential in ensuring deliberate decision making regarding graphic design.

With growth and increased engagement, a brand’s story and personality further develop. The brand personality is tied consciously and unconsciously to the consistent use of a branded visual identity and adherence to brand guidelines. Apple has mastered this practice. As a result, the company is now synonymous with simple design and innovation.

As a company successfully delivers on its value proposition as it matures, it builds trust and brand recognition in the public eye. Its visual identity is no longer simply recognized: it’s preferred. When a brand is trusted, it’s able to expand and raise prices because people are willing to pay more for products or services from a company they trust.

Protecting Your Creativity is Essential

Throughout a brand’s growth, if the visual identity isn’t protected by registering for a trademark, purchasing a website domain with the company’s name, securing branded social channels and possibly consulting with an attorney to protect intellectual property, the business risks eroding its brand equity. Worse, a copycat company with a lower quality product could use a similar logo design, social media strategy or online presence and not only dilute the work that has gone in to developing the brand but also tarnish the company’s reputation.

Another risk is that a new market entrant develops a strategic brand with a strong visual identity and is able to grow its reputation, build the customer’s trust and take market share. Even in commodity industries like insurance or consumer products like toilet paper, brands and visual identities help brands stand out and stand for something, like the GEICO gecko or the Charmin bear. One stands for 15 minutes that could save you 15% and the other stands for strength and softness.

Protecting a visual identity from the start is the best way to ensure a company’s resources aren’t wasted and safeguard its future success. The process is actually relatively simple compared with what’s at stake.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Felicia Watson is Director of Creative Services at (W)right On Communications. With a proven track record of success and more than 20 years of design and marketing experience, Felicia approaches each project with a commitment to create an impactful design that achieves results. Responsible for leading the agency’s creative services that integrate print and digital graphic design, online programming, videography, editing and photography, Felicia also oversees agency services including animation, motion graphics, and emerging technologies including augmented/virtual reality and holography as they may be integrated in strategic communication programs.

Crafting An Authentic Personal Brand

Turning an authentic personal brand to eleven!

Everyone has a personal brand, whether they work at cultivating it or not. It’s worth it to spend some time thinking about your own and how to be more intentional about crafting an authentic personal brand for your professional self. 

I recently joined Henry DeVries, Forbes columnist, author and founder of Indie Books International, on his podcast to talk about personal branding, especially for people sharing their expertise as authors. But the advice applies to everyone at every stage of their careers.

Why Work at an Authentic Personal Brand?

Crafting an authentic personal brand can help advance your career and professional goals, build your business and expand your network. Who doesn’t want that for themselves? There are a few key steps to success.

First is identifying your assets. Start with your product and service or its features and benefits. The point is to make sure your brand is marketable. Next, think about your most unique characteristics. What is it that your family, friends and coworkers say about you? What are your natural or standout characteristics?

The idea here is to differentiate yourself from others by emphasizing the things that really make you who you are. Maybe you’re boisterous and irreverent or especially thoughtful and kind.

Whatever your unique identifiers are, they must connect with your target audience on an emotional level. If they don’t, it’s not really a brand. A brand has to evoke a feeling in others and that’s what you’re aspiring to do by cultivating yours.

Your Personal Brand is an Exaggerated Version of Who You Really Are

The secret behind the most powerful personal brands on the planet is the emotional connection the make. You can get there, but you need to be willing to take your special, authentic characteristics and turn them up to ‘11.’

Consider some of the best-known personal brands: Howard Stern, Elon Musk, and Oprah Winfrey. What do you think of when you hear these names? And, most important, what do you feel?

  • Stern is the totally outrageous yet neurotic shock jock. The outrageousness is his “it” factor. Combined with his vulnerability, he becomes relatable. It’s a magical combination, and totally authentic.
  • Musk is the eccentric technology mogul. He’s taken the idea of disruptor to the extreme in his professional and personal life. 
  • Winfrey is the media powerhouse who’s famous for her extreme generosity as well as her down- to-earth persona, which works despite her fame and fortune.

When your brand is based on who you really are, it’s sustainable. Personal brands that are based on a fiction fail. Many a PR scandal has broken when someone’s personal brand has proven false. 

An authentic personal brand can take a setback. Just look at style maven and homemaker extraordinaire Martha Stewart who came out of prison and teamed up with Snoop Dogg to resurrect her brand.

How Can You Make Your Personal Brand Stick?

So, you know what makes you stand out and how to maximize your personality capital. Now it’s time to come up with your origin story. Your parents might not have been gunned down in an alley and, to my knowledge, no one has ever been bitten by a radioactive spider but that doesn’t mean you don’t have a compelling story to tell. How did your core characteristic(s) evolve? What key events built the pillars of your personality? This is your opportunity to further develop your public persona into something that makes people want to turn the page.

Your origin story is something you need to tell again and again and on every media platform: earned, owned, shared and paid.

Earned media is when your story is told by others. This is the most credible source for your audience and the most valuable for building your brand. Owned media is when you tell the story. This includes your website, newsletter, webinars, video and other assets. This is where you have the most control over the narrative. Social media is how you engage people with your brand. It’s a great place to grow your audience and cultivate the vibe your story lends itself to. Paid media is the last, and least credible, platform but it has potential to reach the most people, depending on your budget, and the ability to target the audience that your message reaches with tremendous precision. 

Proper use of the right media channels is the secret sauce of a successful marketing strategy.

Your Brand is Built Upon Your Behaviors 

Lastly, think beyond marketing copy and brochures. Think about how people experience you. That’s a personal branding opportunity. Maybe it’s how you sign off your emails, how you greet people or what appears in your Zoom background. Simple things. Or it could be more lavish and require a financial investment like an annual fundraising event you host or the furniture and art in your lobby.

People’s beliefs are formed by their experiences. So, make sure that your behaviors are consistent with the brand you’re trying to cultivate. As a career public relations consultant, I assure you that walking the talk is the most important thing you can do to create and maintain your personal brand. As Warren Buffet famously said, it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. 

Build your reputation faster through personal brand activations. If that sounds like jargon, here are some examples of what I mean by that.

One of my professional colleagues has a strong personal brand. I would describe hers as an otherworldly passion for public relations and developing excellence in the next generation of communicators (good thing she’s an educator!) with a healthy dose of aloha spirit. One of the ways she consistently brings her personal brand to life is in her thank you notes. She never misses an opportunity to pen one when she feels someone has helped our her or her students. She also instills that as a best practice in her students. As a result, when she calls on her colleagues for help, we’re all absolutely willing to jump in because we know she appreciates  anyone who takes a moment to share their passion with her, her program and her students or alumni.

Another example is a young student who graduated from her program, as a matter of fact. We met for an information interview, and I kept an eye on her career, noting that wherever she appeared online, she had a flower in her hair. It stuck with me and helped me to remember her. Now, when I describe the flower to anyone who has met this gal, they know exactly who I’m talking about! As someone just starting out, she didn’t necessarily have a calling card or a proven characteristic she knew was marketable, so she created one. Nice.

Crafting your authentic personal brand is a worthwhile exercise. While we can’t all take ours to the exaggerated extremes of the celebrity examples I mentioned, it does require dialing yourself up to 11 if you want to stand out from the pack.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Julie Wright is President of (W)right On Communications, Inc., the award-winning integrated strategic communications firm she founded in 1998. With offices in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Vancouver, B.C., her team handles complex communications challenges for B2B tech, cleantech and energy, healthcare, tourism and hospitality, not-for-profit and public sector organizations. Wright and her team elevate the agency experience through data-driven insights and measurable results for client partners.

Influencer 101: A guideline for influencer marketing campaigns

Social media post example of influencer marketing

More often than not, businesses and brands are turning to social media influencers to help spread their messages, gain awareness, and win over the masses. These pay-for-play personalities make it their jobs (literally) to make you happy and can change the way your business engages and interacts with potential customers. Successful social media campaigns must be a comprehensive mix of your personalized voice, authentic engagement, worthy visuals, branded and topical posts, and now influencer content. 

Relevant influencer content is great, but not all influencers create equal content. Here are some tips and tactics on what to look for when selecting the right influencer to meet your marketing goals.  

Create Campaign Goals & Targets  

Having a clear idea of your must-haves, required stats, and overall influencer objectives will help you understand the type of influencer you need and can keep you on track if you get overwhelmed. Not everyone will be a fit, and it’s important to be particular.  

It will help to have campaign “must-haves” in place to help narrow down the sea of options at your fingertips. Are you looking for influencers in a particular geographic location? Do they meet your minimum follower counts and data markers? This could even be something as specific as what university they attend. 

If your campaign plans to use both paid and unpaid influencers, what are your must–have stats for both categories? Creating a list of influencer and campaign goals at the very beginning of your search will save you invaluable time.  

Find Your Influencer 

Though there might be a plethora of “perfect” people to choose from, finding the right influencer for your brand can be harder than you expect. There are numerous online tools and databases that can help you plug in requirements to find potential influencers. However, depending on the size of your company, brand or campaign, and therefore your budget, paying for influencer vetting software might not be an option. 

Even if you opt for one of these services, you may find yourself having to do additional vetting, as there is no software that can tell you that an influencer’s vibe and esthetic matches what you are looking for.  

If you are trying to build brand loyalty, then you will want to focus on influencers in the same genre as your brand. However, if you are trying to expand your brand awareness and build your audience, then trying out influencers within different categories will be important. For instance, a travel brand might seek out a lifestyle influencer to expand brand awareness by targeting yoga enthusiasts. Or a clothing brand might target a high-end fashion influencer to cement their brand’s reputation as trend setters in the fashion industry. 

One free yet time–consuming way to find the right influencers for your campaign is by doing a simple search. Google is your best friend. A search for “top lifestyle influencers” delivers almost 24 million search results; each writer has a different opinion and has decided on the best influencers by looking through their own individual vetting lenses. Each blog or article will have its best choices represented, so look at a few on a couple of lists to see which writer’s vision you most identify with. You may even find that there are influencers that are represented on multiple lists!  

There is a blog for every topic and an excess of writers to choose from. Another search that is helpful will be “top ____ blogs.” You will be hard pressed to find a blog that isn’t also tied to that blog’s specific social world. Depending on what you are looking for, and if you have the budget to support it, securing an influencer with a blog has its own benefits.  

Create Your Wish List 

You may feel overwhelmed by the large number of influencers to choose from. Staying organized and listing your favorites will be helpful, because this is where the real work and in-depth research begins. An easy place to start is with your must-haves and data dealbreakers. Look at their social sites and review their follower counts. This is an easy way to shorten your list.  

With that said, if you feel there is an influencer with amazing pictures, great content, and good engagement, but who doesn’t meet your minimum numbers, don’t discount them yet. You may find you have to readjust or re-evaluate your goals as you go along, especially if you have a very specific demographic. At the very least, these particular influencers might be a great way to get some free user-generated content that you can share on your own social channels.  

Vet Your Targets Against Your Criteria 

Another easy way to cut down your list is to consider the demographics and psychographics of the influencers you are vetting. Now that you have your list, it comes down to whether they represent who you are. 

Are they the right age, gender, geographic location, or does that matter? What are their interests and motivations and do those align with your product or brand values? Do they have previous sponsored content on their page?  

By looking through various influencer’s platforms, you will eventually get an idea of what you are looking for, whether that is a certain esthetic or something that will resonate with your already loyal following. Read their posts and study their digital habits; a simple “vibe check” can go a long way.  

More important questions to ask yourself: 

  • Are they relevant to your topics or brand? 
  • What is their credibility to products in your category? 
  • What is their sponsored engagement rate vs overall engagement rate? The only one that matters is sponsored engagement. 

There are currently over 570 million blogs out there and 86% of content makers use them, so it is more likely than not that your influencer will have this additional platform for you to utilize. With blogs I suggest looking at the esthetic and vibe. Does it look like someone threw together pictures of their family vacation on a WordPress template, or are there nicely organized sections and tabs to filter their content?  

Many blogs will offer media kits with extra information about their audience, previous branding sponsorships or partnerships, or how many subscribers they have to their newsletters. It is worth noting that previous sponsorships are great, but it will be important to ask what the success rate of that partnership was. Did they just make pretty pictures, or did they increase followers and sell product? 

It will also be helpful to know the blog’s unique visitors per month (UVPM) and domain authority (DA). These could also be featured on the blog. The DA is a search engine ranking score that is a measure of the site’s relevance to a subject area or industry and shows how successful a site is based upon search engine results. Generally anything over 50 is considered good. You can get this free overview of search engine performance from a software development company called Moz.  

Influencer Budget and Negotiations 

You have your list, yay! Now it is actually time to reach out to your chosen influencers. After all of that time you spent on finding and vetting them, you want them to be a right fit and they want to be a right fit too.  

Just like your own “deal-breakers,” your budget may narrow down your list even further. Determining which one will offer the right results to fit your campaign will come down to feel and your marketing budget.  

Price tends to go up with the number of followers. If a blog post and newsletter mailing is part of your deal, the price can go even further. You may want to use paid influencers, unpaid influencers or both, depending on your budget and size of your campaign.  

Do some research online to find an example of the approximate influencer pricing for various types of campaigns. Many influencers who are trying to gain followers and popularity will work in exchange for product/experience, or whatever it is you are promoting. You can always ask them to do it for trade—the worst they can say is no.   

Online research should reveal the approximate influencer pricing for various types of campaign participation.

You’ve signed a contract—now what? 

Many times, companies will want a firm list of deliverables from their influencer. It is definitely okay to have a must-have shot list. If there is something you would like to feature, a certain product demonstrated, or event highlighted—tell them. You are paying and they want you to be successful because it helps them to have successful content. 

Do not, however, script their entire campaign. Give them creative prompts but not exact messages. Provide the message and vibe you are trying to communicate, but also give them some control and let them play to their strengths. They know their audience and what they will respond to, so work with them to decide the look of the posts and then let them do what they do best. Together, you may even go viral! 

Influencer marketing may not be right for every brand, but we find it to be an influential tool for brand awareness on specific campaigns. With a little time, a clear idea of what you are looking for, the right tools for searching, vetting criteria and a contract in place, hiring the right influencers combined with unique and relevant curated content will help create a fully integrated marketing campaign.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Corie is a Communications Strategist with Wright On Communications. With more than 10 years of experience in prior marketing roles in the Santa Barbara and Los Angeles markets, Corie supports the (W)right On team in multi-channel digital marketing, client relations management, social media, copywriting and copyediting, research and analytics, media pitching and more.

Top 5 Social Media Tourism Trends for 2020

Top 5 Social Media Tourism Trends for 2020

What do hospitality PR teams need to know about social media tourism trends for 2020? First, it starts with storytelling—or, more appropriately, story “selling.”

The San Diego Tourism Authority recently hosted a some social media gurus for a workshop on trends to leverage to get your business and brand the most exposure. The following 5 trends and tips topped their lists.

1) The WHY behind the WHAT

Go beyond storytelling and start “story selling.” That’s the key to increasing consumer awareness of and interest in your brand.
Story selling more actively engages them in what you have to offer because it appeals to their emotional needs—their desire to relax in that peaceful place, sip that craft cocktail or take advantage of that once-in-a-lifetime experience. That’s how you effectively motivate consumers to go to your hotel, eat in your restaurant, or explore your attraction. You make them want it, whether or not they are actively seeking it out. Immerse your audience in the “where” with your social media images, but make sure that your images show them the “why.”

2) Instagram: Forge a consistent brand presence

Instagram Stories stand out as the most economical platform remaining in advertising. Plus, they offer the “Swipe Up” feature, which allows you to share a link and drive the consumer exactly where you want them to go next.

Perhaps you’ve found yourself watching story after IG story, not realizing how much time has passed. Capitalize on that behavior — with a consistent style.

It’s not as difficult as you might think. You need no more than seven slides at a time. Just keep these simple tips in mind as you capture and share Stories:

  • Organization is key. Create a storyboard and timeline in advance. Plan exactly what you are going to post and the sequence or flow — with photos, hashtags, and phrases at the ready.
  • Know your brand templates down to the font, color palette, and backgrounds, and integrate them as you plan your content days, weeks, or even months ahead. The moment consumers glimpse your images, they should immediately recognize your brand.
  • Post a new Story only after the current one completes — and avoid sending followers from a serene beach to a noisy rollercoaster. Try to tell and share seamless Stories.
  • Craft ads that feel like Stories. Even when you are promoting a product or experience, you can keep the content entertaining and authentic so that the consumer won’t feel that you are “selling” and will be more open to your message. Make the message so appealing that they just have to learn more.

3) TikTok: Know your audience

You can’t talk about social media tourism trends in 2020 and not mention TikTok. If your key demographic is 16- to 24-year-olds, this is the medium for you.

This is not the kind of platform where your CEO will deliver a simple message about your brand. Posts require a sense of humor and a creative tack.

What’s recommended in this space? Use an influencer to help sell your brand, and a creative team to help show the fun side of your business. You won’t engage here with your audience, but it will give you brand recognition. Proceed with caution for now; the analytics provided aren’t yet 100% intuitive for determining ROI.

4) YouTube: The return of a classic

A resurgence in YouTube? That’s right.

Create a video — but have a hook to grab the audience right away. Skip the intro music and opening credits. Grab their attention from the first instant.

Teach and tell. Make viewers care about you and the information only you can provide. And don’t focus on the subscribers; focus on views. The more views you have, the more exposure. When the video is over, there’s no need to sign off, or roll credits. Simply lead to the next video and keep the consumer on the platform and your channel. The more times your video leads to another video, the more exposure you get. YouTube’s goal is to keep the viewer on their platform, so don’t even bother saying “visit, comment or subscribe.” Your target users — if they’re engaged in what you have to offer — are smart enough to find you.

P.S. YouTube, like IG, offers Stories. The main difference: YouTube Stories stay for seven days — not just 24 hours. Talk about the power of longevity. Use this feature to drive home what you are about. Create that sense of engagement that will have the consumer wanting to see what else you have to offer.

5) Mindshare: The power of listening

Mindshare media is gaining significant traction, too. People can engage in podcasts while driving, exercising, or folding laundry. The average listener will be on a podcast for 26 minutes. What other platform gives you that level of extended exposure? Google is starting to show podcasts in search results.

Start a show based on your area of expertise: whether that’s wine pairings, the best restaurants in the area, or how to tell when the high tides are coming in. The visitor to your city will want as much knowledge as they can get, so be the one giving it to them. Not to mention the platform is relatively inexpensive to use and an easy way to gain a great ROI.

Look at your next social media campaign: Have you hit all of these trends? Are you organizing content ahead of time? Are you engaging the consumer in a way that taps into their wants? Go outside of your comfort zone and try a different platform rather than relying on what you’ve used in the past. The only thing constant is change, so take this opportunity to see how these trends can work best for you. Remember to not just story tell, story SELL.

 

By Licia Walsworth — Communications Strategist

Public Relations Is a Personas Business

By Julie Wright —President
Twitter: @juliewright

It’s so easy today to get glued to our data, dashboards and digital interfaces as we develop and manage content marketing and other web-based communications strategies. But it’s important to remember that public relations is still a people business—or more accurately, public relations is a personas business.

As you monitor email click-through rates, social media engagement and website referral traffic, remember that behind every data point is a real person.  And to do your job for your client or company, you need to deeply understand your audience and what makes them tick as well as click.

So how can you develop and use personas to guide your communications?

1. Personas Start with Customer Data

Dive into the data you already have. Study your customer database and interview your sales and customer service team to isolate the demographic and psychographic profiles of your customers. Look at gender, age, job title, family status, education, values, hobbies and interests.

Let’s, for the sake of argument, say that there are three primary buckets into which you can generally separate your organization’s customers.

One category might be described as female public relations agency owners who live and work in California, have four or more years of university education, have teenage or college-age children, are interested in social causes, struggle to balance their demanding work schedule with family and personal needs, desire a more active and healthy lifestyle and love Champagne and elephants. (This would be me.) You might name this persona “Julie.”

You would do the same for the other two customer categories and explore their basic demographic similarities as well as their shared goals and challenges, values and fears. Let’s say the next persona is freelancers who work from home while looking after toddlers and school-age kids. We’ll dub this persona “Mark.” The third is professional women who are now empty-nesters who we’ll refer to as “Lisa.”

Once you’ve painted a data-driven picture of these three fictitious personas, you need to think about how you would speak to each of them so that they are attracted to your content and ultimately your product or solution.

The first rule of good communications has always been to know thy audience. Knowing them through this analysis of your existing customer data will help ensure that your content marketing pieces will better resonate with people like them.

2. What Problems Do You Solve for Your Personas?

How does what you do or provide in the marketplace speak to each persona’s fears and values or help them achieve their goals or overcome their challenges?

We know that “Julie” is juggling work-life challenges and has a goal of a more active lifestyle.

What kind of content might resonate to engage her?

How about humorous memes taking aim at the illusion that work-life balance is even attainable for a woman business owner? Or a more inspirational message to help her keep her mojo?

Or perhaps you’d develop longer pieces of content with advice and exercises to improve mindfulness, time management or ideas to help her take five throughout the day?

It’s not the content marketer’s job to convince each persona of what they need. It’s their job to figure out what the persona’s needs are and then speak to them with their content and present their product or solution as the ultimate solution.

3. Validate Your Internal Research with Outside Sources

From social listening on platforms like Twitter, to in-house customer interviews and third-party market research surveys and focus groups, you should invest additional budget and energy into validating your own internal research and hunches while expanding your understanding of each persona.

A custom-designed professional telephone and online survey of your persona audiences may seem a considerable expense, but it’s really a direct investment in ensuring you have nailed your personas so you can hit your KPIs and generate ROI sooner.

If budget is tight, work with your research partner who can create shorter questionnaires that will be more economical and still give you insights that your own digital data lacks. Insights you might gain from surveys are the purchase decision criteria (i.e. innovation, safety, convenience, prestige, speed?) that your personas weight before they buy. Or you can use an omnibus survey and tack on questions that help you understand what the size and distribution of your personas are in your market territory.

You could also design your own Survey Monkey survey using its recommended questions and structures.

For qualitative insights, match a handful of your customers with your personas and then conduct interviews to explore and understand their customer journey and motivations (goals, challenges, fears, and values). These one-on-one interviews might validate or challenge your assumptions and help you uncover new high-octane insights to improve your messaging and targeting. You could also approach this exercise as a focus group.

Once you’ve researched, developed and validated a clear picture of your target personas, for a little more inspiration, get creative with more descriptive names and a composite image for each. Julie, Mark and Lisa should become your team’s besties. Julie becomes “Julie the Juggler.”

You can also make her and your other personas more real and relatable with a composite.

Your research will also help you become more aware of seasonal considerations that also impact your personas’ needs and interests. Julie’s January juggling act, for instance, might include Champagne, New Year’s Resolutions for getting her fitness plan back on track and plans for attending and earning media coverage for a client’s product launch at the Consumer Electronics Show.

With research, you will get these deeper insights into your personas’ worlds so your content can be laser focused to attract their interest and drive action.

4. Go Where Your Personas Are

Imagine Julie’s customer journey starting with a discovery phase. How might you position your content to be discovered on the web, via social media, in news reports, at a conference, in digital ads or via skywriting? You get the point. Understanding Julie’s persona allows you to match her media behaviors with your message placement.

What terms or hashtags might Julie be searching? Make sure that your web content is optimized for those search terms and your social media posts for those hashtags. Focus on her interests and search behaviors versus your product’s features and benefits. You might look at your Instagram data to see which hashtags have driven the most views to your content. Instagram business profiles provide more granular data from which you can derive such new insights.

If you don’t know what social platforms Julie uses, check your Google Analytics data to see which refer the most traffic to your website. You might find that Pinterest is providing as much traffic as Facebook. In that case, make sure you’re creating pinnable content on your site so that it continues to drive Julie from Pinterest to your site. Your branded work-life memes for social media need to be given a home on your website (most likely your blog), in order to have backlinks once they’re shared to Pinterest. That way, they’ll drive web traffic for you as well as social media engagement.

With all of your content, your purpose is to attract, engage, differentiate and drive people to take an action. The ultimate action is purchase, of course, but that’s a big ask. So, create multiple smaller opportunities for your persona to get comfortable with you and your brand before you expect a purchase commitment. Examples of small decisions for Julie, Mark and Lisa might include signing up for an email offer, responding to a contest or incentive, registering to download information or attending a webinar.

Other data sources can give you insights into your personas too so you can track their customer journeys. Google Analytics can show you all referral traffic sources and data to help you understand which websites are driving the most visits to your site and the behaviors people are taking once they land on your site.  Google Analytics can also unlock additional demographic information including interests.

This can provide additional clues to Julie’s, Mark’s and Lisa’s interests and needs but also show where gaps may be opening up in their website experience. Where in the journey are you losing them and what can you do about it?

Your paid digital and social media ads can also be driving Julie and her persona pals to your website. How does the paid traffic compare to the referral traffic coming from media hits, influencer mentions and social media? Often the former can produce more traffic but of lower quality, whereas well-targeted press hits, influencer campaigns and social media campaigns can produce a smaller proportion of overall website visits but with a longer duration of visit, more pages visited and a higher conversion rate.

And isn’t that what you want from your personas?

CONCLUSION: Public Relations is Really Persona Relations

The digital universe has created so many opportunities to serve our messages to more people without ever leaving our desks.

That’s a blessing from a convenience and scale standpoint but also a curse if you spend copious hours developing off-base content that isn’t seen by your ideal customers or doesn’t speak to their needs.

Public relations has always been considered a people business. And that’s what PR brings to the content marketing equation: an emphasis on building relationships over time and not simply a transactional view of each interaction. So, don’t lose sight of the real people behind each click, and think of every interaction that a person—or persona—has with your content as another step in a long-term, ongoing and mutually beneficial relationship.

 

Julie Wright moderates IABC Los Angeles talk on Facebook’s changes

(W)right On Communications President and Founder Julie Wright headlined the International Association of Business Communicators – Los Angeles chapter’s first event of 2018.  The venue was TOMGEORGE Restaurant in downtown Los Angeles and the topic was Facebook’s changes.

“We discussed the most recent changes to Facebook’s news feed algorithm and what that means to a brand’s communication strategy,” Julie explained. “It was a perfect mix of perspectives including people who oversee communications departments for large organizations, consultants, agency folks and business owners.” Facebook changes IABC Los Angeles event

You can find IABC LA’s blog post recapping the event here: Creating Engaging Content with Facebook’s Newest Update

“I came into the discussion very familiar with the issue, but left it with even more insights and fresh perspectives. IABC always attracts such high-caliber communicators. And, not to mention, the food was outstanding.”