4 Things That Can Truly Ruin Your Media Relations

At the commencement of every year, hundreds of startups emerge from each corner of the country. But by the end of the same year, we see only a handful of those survived successfully. Every startup is evolved out of one brilliant mind, but not every idea is executed well. With one brilliant business idea, there come thousands of strategies all laced up with the idea which should be put to work. If not, the startup would fail before it is even fully developed.

One such strategy is managing media relations. The soon you find white space in your industry, and make yourself well-equipped with the staff and resources to fill it up through delivering your services, why not slightly beat around the bush? Out of hundred many mistakes that startups do, one is the negligence towards healthy media relations.

The relationship a company shares with the media, press, journalists and other media stakeholders greatly affect its overall reputation amongst the target audience. Suppose you have launched a new business which would uplift the farmers and small workers, should not this be spread at large? However, many such startups do turn up to social media relations but all in a wrong way. And disturbed media relations mean the downfall of the organization. Henceforth, people outsource such work to any reliable Media Relations Agency in Delhi or around.

1.    Sending release requests to more than 3 journalists at once:

Smart choice, isn’t it? If you think sharing the same release to three different journalists at the same time would save you a lot of time, you are walking on thin ice I’m sure. At times, this trick may do wonders for you but not all the time. Many journalists were in the same niche are accredited to each other, if they get to know about your over smartness, they may straightaway reject your story or news to publish.  

2.    Pitching the journalist of a different niche:

In frenzy, avoid pitching the wrong or naïve journalists in the concerned niche. If your story pertains to health & fitness, approach to a journalist having expertise in Finance would mean a total zero. Hence, you must do your homework before pitching the journalist. Research on what they write about, study your story’s o agenda and evaluate your media pitch before sending it to the media journalists. If required, take assistance from any of good Media Relations Firms in Delhi.

3.    Proposing thin content for coverage:

Journalists are busy people and barely would like to skim over irrelevant or thin content in quality. If your story is not crisp and might not interest the general public, then avoid sharing it with journalists. The proposal for publishing poor or not-so-good quality story may form wrong impressions on media envoy. So, unless you have a value-adding or impeccable story to publish, avoid approaching media.

4.    Making too many assumptions with too little evidence:

Media works on shreds of evidence! For any press release, news brief or article request, you should have videos, blogs, reviews, collected data, etc. as a justification of every statement you make in each. Because media avoids biased or fake coverage, the evidence and references you provide should be genuine.

For strong media presence, you must be aware of these four things that can ruin all your media relations within seconds if not handled diligently. If you are dubious how it all works, you can always opt for professional public relations services in Delhi.

Why You Need a Professional to Translate Your Official Documents?

With digital becoming the soul of every industry and country, the world has forgotten it all about the boundaries and regional restrictions and paced ahead in the direction of being one universal trade and finance market. In order to be relevant and stay up close to the investors, traders & borrowers around the globe this universal market fuelled by digitization also holds a requirement of good professional translators. For many, their multilingual friend might seem the perfect ones for this job role but practically speaking, this isn’t a task that can be handed over to just anyone and instead requires a professional who can provide and guarantee a quality-rich, accurate and appropriate as per standards translation without much hassles.

Let’s go in deep and scoop out the reasons why trading markets and business sectors spread across the world require expert linguistics to translate their website or online content:  

Specialization ensures quality work

Deep insight into the industry proceedings and workings is a must-to-have requirement for ensuring the quality of a translation document. Irrespective of the industry they belong to every organization is particular about its rules, regulations, and kind of terminologies used in them. Therefore, while hiring a translator or translation agency it needs to be made sure that the prospective option has a solid and proven expertise of the concerned industry which the organization belongs to.

Cultural adaptation for the target audience

The amateur translators might help one with the simple word-to-word translation but they are not well trained enough to grasp and convey the nuances of technical or cultural knacks. For this job one needs someone who is well-linked with the industry. More so, the translators need to be well- trained with the technique of localizing the content as per the cultural needs and requirements of the audiences one is targeting.

Consistency brings good results

Translating official documents require a technical approach that only experienced translators can provide. They have the expertise to convey the message across languages with the right grammatical and literature ethics selection that resonates and makes sense to the client’s target audience. 

As content has the potential to make or break the image of a brand, so it’s important for the translation firms to not just understand the official terminologies but also utilize them in the best possible way. The translators need to be well aware of that even the slightest mistake in translation of official documents can land them in big trouble which can also land them behind the bars. Don’t go by the word-to-word translation method instead make it a habit to deliver the context of parent language in the translated language, too.

Changing Landscape of Consumer Market 2018

The success of any organization is solely dependent on the manufacturing ethics and marketing practices. If any of these is not up to the mark, the organization must suffer a great loss. Looking five years back to the market trends, there are many changes observed in both consumer behavior and modus operandi of the businesses.

Brands are going digital

The spillover of digital marketing replaced every other form of marketing. Be it TV commercials, or promotional events, brands opted for digital marketing every time which comes within their budget. Unlike the bygone decade, brands are now turning up to digital platforms to tap into the right audience. Today, the audience base of TV is 3x fewer than that of social media channels. And the motive of brands is to be wherever the audience base is strong to increase their visibility amongst the audience. Hence, no more ads are being displayed on TVs and instead, they are shown to the viewers on Facebook, Instagram, etc. Also, products are more stocked online and in-stores.

Organic products are replacing the chemical-based products

Apart from the change in the mode of marketing the services and products, modus operandi has also experienced a great shift. Earlier the cosmetic brands, for instance, used to process the products refined with latest technologies for a complete skin care. And the consumers, specifically women, were obsessed with the products and drove large revenue for tech-savvy brands. Today, the tables have turned! Consumers, no more, want the products manufactured using chemicals and technologies. The survey reports have shown that consumers are now looking for sustainable and organic products and beverages free from any chemical.

Ethical values appeal more than the commercial ads

The brands and companies have seen a steep rise in their sales whenever they raised the curtains off behind the scenes. When the consumers see the ethical practices and policies followed by a business in production, they voluntarily research more on the product costs and availability. This has brought another change in the strategies of several businesses. They no more shoot stilted ad commercials but record a short clip of what actually goes in their company or manufacturing unit which builds more trust in their brands. After all, any business would want to obtain good returns on the amount spent on ads.

What is brand salience and how Public Relations enforce it?

Every business, today, is trying to become a brand that people instantly recall and prefer whenever it comes to buy a particular product. For instance, if you have to buy a pretty casual skirt, the first brand that would come to your mind would be “Zara” or “Forever21”. So, you would go to any of these stores and buy the dress driving revenue for the brand. Such is the power of brand salience.

Understanding Brand Salience

Brand salience is usually the term we use for brand’s propensity to be recalled whenever something related to it crosses the consumer’s mind. Similar to brand awareness, consumers remember the brand, know it completely (or partially), and can easily recall when prompted. But, the effect of brand recall is what makes brand salience different from brand awareness. In simple words, brand awareness determines how many consumers remember or know the brand either for positive (or negative) reasons. And brand salience is all about how many consumers know, recall, and prefer a particular brand over the rest. To what extent consumers likely to purchase products of a particular brand is what brand salience finds out.

The author of “How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know,” Byron Sharp, puts rightly the concern of brands as “creating memorable and consistent brand assets that trigger an instinctive response when they’re seen or heard at critical purchase moments—in other words, they should focus on brand salience.”

How to create brand salience?

Such brand salience can be efficiently enforced through public relations because public relations practitioners create, enhance, and consistently improve brand’s image amongst pals using media. Since no arena is left untouched by the media, consumers are always profoundly immersed in media and technology. Public relations companies reach the right audience who are in the process of making a buying decision and influence their behavior using the positive attributes of the brand.

Here’s how:

1.    Positions brand in a competitive market

Public relations agencies position a brand and its products on the minds of target consumers. How a brand wants to portray itself in the eyes of consumers, in which category of products or services a brand wants to be strongly identified, what makes the brand distinct and worth recalling etc., is all that public relations manage operating on earned media. Newspaper articles, press releases, and brand profiles are the primary modes of operation which helps establish brand salience.

2.    Build relationships with customers

PR bridges the gap between a brand, consumers, and journalists. The PR strategies mainly focus on communicating well with the global audience in local ways so that the brand values, ideas, and ethics can be highlighted. When consumers know the complete inside-story of the brand for all good reasons, they remember, recall and favor the brand. Therefore, PR acts as a relationship-builder for the brands working with the goal of achieving brand salience.

3.    Create Brand Awareness

For brand salience enforcement, PR does not rely on marketing strategies. Instead, they make people aware of the brand, first by building the brand’s image and message through earned media. For this, they make a brand image meaningful and deliver the brand message impressively to win the trust of the audience or consumers that brand is bringing innovation and benefits to their lives. It ultimately results in brand salience.

Basic Guide to PR for Startups

A startup firm sets in the market with new brand name, varying products and services only to bear belligerent competition at first. Observations revealed that every 91 out of 100 startups fail to foster a strong public and media relation which leads to the early downfall. Many startups rely on digital advertising and marketing campaign only to earn the leads while neglecting the power of public relations.

Al Reis, author of ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding’, talks about the anomalous position in marketing that Public Relations hold for building a quintessential brand.  He believes that earned publicity creates an honest brand image than advertising. What general public says about your brand and business is a big matter of concern than what you say about yourself through advertising.

Therefore, what businesses really need today is a strong brand presence along with the increasing number of sales. For this, a lot of startups club public relations and other marketing techniques altogether to earn reputation and generate great revenue.

You may opt for professional PR services or can take up the charge to manage public relations yourself. In the latter case, following tips will surely help you a great deal:

•    Prepare content for coverage

Whether it is a press release, article or a startup story, it should convey the information of your products & services, justify the purpose of business’s existence and the passion of its workforce.  Identify the pain of your customers, and decipher how your products or services provide relief to the customers. Do not forget to write it all with passion. You may also write content on the social media topics that your customers care about. And then, you may proceed to pitch the journalists for covering your story. Use tools and software to find and connect to the right journalists.

•    Create a media list

A media list is one of the cornerstones of any PR campaign. Once you have prepared content for release, it’s time to look for the right media influencers and journalists for earning the coverage. Find the contact details of the various journalists, read their writing, identify their interest areas and proficiency and organize them comprehensively in a list. Based on the context of your story, you can approach a journalist for coverage with a creative and appealing pitch.

•    Pitch the right way

Avoid writing cold pitches that do not interest anyone. Do some newsjacking with your story and write it impressively while maintaining a professional tone. Through your pitch, inform the journalist why your company is worth writing on. What is distinctive about your products, services, and company? If you have news, make it ground-breaking. If you are launching a new array of products and service, discuss how the public will be a direct beneficiary. Also, do not send same pitch to hundreds of journalists. Instead, try to pitch fewer, and pitch smarter. Your story should be relevant, novel, and fresh. It should not be anachronistic.

•    Foster relations with public early

Many a time, people start engaging with media and audience all in a sudden when they require coverage. Therefore, you should start engaging and interacting with them a little early. Do not approach a journalist all in a sudden saying, “I have a brand new story which will interest your audience or can you please cover my launch event because it was amazing?” Such are the examples of poor approach which will leave journalist with a not-so-good impression. Therefore, it’s important that you stay relationship-focused and not coverage-centric.

PR converts more because people trust earned media more than the traditional earned media. To get enough exposure and coverage, you must work hard on all above strategies.