Journalists are bombarded with story pitches and news events. Attracting news coverage, or earned media, now starts with the savvy use of owned and paid media. Like all media consumers, journalists actively use online sources to develop and research story ideas. We extend that reach by presenting reporters and producers with strong story ideas and angles that respect a journalist’s time and interest. This approach is underpinned by carefully researching influential journalists and maintaining excellent media relationships with the most respected news companies. Purpose Brand also has the internal skills to amplify media through social networks–capturing shares, retweets and followers.
Websites, blogs, white papers, email, ebooks and case studies are powerful communication tools under your direct control. We carefully research approaches for these channels that achieve relevance, differentiation and engagement. Owned media are your most authoritative sources of information. Our content strategists and creators excel at producing engaging, persuasive content–and analyzing the audience response. It goes without saying that we are astute interpreters of the buyer’s journey, and that at every stage we design searchable content that engages a target audience.
Sponsored content and social media engagement have blurred the lines between paid and earned media. The Purpose Brand creative team knows how to use paid placements to amplify and reinforce your brand story in an authentic way. Although many view paid media as unaffordable, Purpose Brand purpose creates effective marketing investments for every budget.
Strategy and research are at the heart of everything we do. Great message development is built on clear insight as to why you are the best at what you do, and how to best showcase your story. We think about engagement early in our process. All content should have an overarching purpose–to inform, persuade, inspire, instruct, confirm or amuse. Our expertise in the use of research is equally outstanding. Not only do we execute corporate qualitative and quantitative research, but also have a handle on opinion research designed, collected and analyzed for political reporting.
Over the years, we’ve developed great relationships with editors, reporters and producers. But Purpose Brand is more than the sum of its contacts. We can find a story in any situation, and bring out the elements that media people find compelling. Our media relations experts know the habits of highly effective journalists. This may mean contacting broadcasters at 2 or 3 a.m. in the morning, carefully orchestrating desksides with print journalists, or simply reaching out on Twitter. We are experts at crafting messages that reporters and producers know to be important to their audience. In addition, it’s important not to overlook influentials bloggers and podcasters, who assemble the perfect audience for many a company’s product or service. Your content strategy should identify and reach out to these top influencers and their devoted fans.
All employees, including your sales force, executives and customer service representatives, need to communicate with one voice. Purpose Brand works with executives to master message discipline in their media interviews. We keep everyone on the same page, literally, with a message map that helps your team use the same language and telling the same story consistently–a powerful content and social tool for all employees and content storytellers.
Giving your brand an authentic voice means positioning your executives as thought leaders. We are the authority on executive positioning, having developed a proprietary methodology on executive branding through Brandslate TM. As the voice of the company, the CEO symbolizes its values, purpose and positioning. Purpose Brand develops a solid brand platform to carefully align with corporate strategy and create additional brand resilience to weather a corporation’s most difficult moments.
Companies or organizations are linked to their stakeholders in a network of relationships, not just a single engagement. This network is extensive but may succeed or fail based on a company’s strategic and executional ability to engage the community. This engagement matrix is often complex. The issues may be political but also fundamental to what communities value and how they live. Purpose Brand‘s understanding of this important network is based on both experience and proprietary research. Community engagement and community outreach is now essential to most brand strategies. The careful execution of both community engagement and outreach is now a consistent part of purpose branding and core to many professional industries like real estate, healthcare and regulated businesses like telecom and gas, water or electric utilities. Bottom line: We help you think through your objectives to design a community relations and government affairs strategy that draws out new ideas and a better understanding of what success looks like for everyone involved.
Influence management affects sales and the buying process. It can help build social capital with stakeholders, whether they’re presenting plans to an entire community or feeling out key stakeholders, and it can equally spur sales or accelerate the closure of a high-value deal. For professional businesses, we can help build out a influencer map and an engagement strategy. For consumer businesses, we can strategize on which macro, micro and nano influencers to use. What we don’t know we admit, and we collaborate to create your best sales strategy. In truth, influence management is significantly different in the B2B (vs. B2C) business world and must be executed with greater care. Political leaders, social and religious organizations, suppliers and customers all have specific concerns. Listening for and getting stakeholder input will build stronger bonds with each group will reduce the misunderstandings that can derail a project, and produce a more informed project with more productive results.
Every company needs a crisis communication plan. With consumer values like environmental stewardship, gender equality and healthcare becoming more political, a company’s actions are more likely to be in conflict with emerging cultural norms. This means corporations are more likely to become targets for activists, Purpose Brand can help companies either design a basic crisis management plan, which many Fortune 500 companies have. Or, we can create a purpose crisis management plan. Our team can help define a structure and a methodology when an internal or external initiative, action or event is in conflict with your purpose. The corporate move to purpose has heightened the uncertainties of public perception. This is no time for analysis paralysis. Purpose Brand will develop a crisis communications framework to anticipate crisis scenarios, respond to unexpected events and share information with stakeholders.
Being responsive to news media, and getting through to their audience, requires forethought. Purpose Brand will help you anticipate potential issues, identify stakeholders’ concerns, and think through how to answer them in ways that meet your objectives. Then our team follows the news and looks for ways to bring our clients into the discussion. We have adopted an evidence-based methodology, FACT:
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