Nata PR School (EN)

Today is an exceptional episode, and I have an amazing guest with me: Francis Parent-Valiquette, President and Founder of VARMEDIA.

Francis is a podcast professional, a coaching fan like myself, for whom I have a great admiration.

We started our professional relationship several months ago, and, as is often the case, we got to know each other and created real bonds of friendship.

In this episode, we reveal the secrets of the Podcast and why it is an exceptional tool to increase your SEO.

To reach Francis: www.varmedia.com

The SanTroShow: https://santro.show/

You’re getting to know me and noticing that I like it when things are simple and easy to understand, and that I love to use formulas (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and percentage).

So, here’s my new formula: PR = EASY

Whatever could this mean?

Simply put, over the next 12 months, if you stir a few public relations ingredients into your marketing plan, you’ll see the impact on your SEO shoot upward.

So, what are these ingredients?

1-  Write three to six stories – short pieces about you, your business, and your products.

2-  Come up with a list of the top 10 media, websites, and influencers you want to approach – if you add five new contacts each month, in a year you’ll have a list of more than 70 contacts.

3-  Get to know them – do Google searches to read about, see, and follow what they’re doing.

4- Do your homework on the competition: What are they up to?

5- Create a PR publications – social media plan and try to notify your Top 10 before revealing your news on social media.

If you’re ready for a deep dive into these techniques, contact us. Add your name to our lists, and you’ll be notified about our free webinars and upcoming training sessions. Get on our list : www.natapr.com

My partner David Tremblay and I talk every week, and the question that often comes up is: “How can we raise our clients’ profiles?” In other words, what else can we do to get our clients the best articles, the best interviews, and the most social media buzz?

Every month, I meet with each of my employees and ask them a few questions, including: “What have you learned this month?” One of our new employees, who’s starting her career with us, shared her lesson of the month with me: “I’ve realized how highly strategic PR is when it’s combined with social media, like we do at the agency.”

In practical terms, what’s the purpose of combining a public relations plan with social media?

1- To tell your clients about your products

2- To get your consumers excited about your new products and what you’re doing

3- To share who’s behind your brand and your products. Today, consumers want to know about a product’s background.

These days, I am genuinely concerned about regional media. You know, the local newspaper that probably still lands on your doorstep on a regular basis. Although most of my clients have completely forgotten about this paper, they do still enjoy keeping up with the news about their district or community. So why are we neglecting this affordable medium that we can easily support at minimal cost? In fact, your local paper is also online.

So, what is PR for? Communicating.

You may have invested a lot of energy and resources to develop the best product – one that clearly stands out from the competition – but unless you’ve got the budget to get the news out, all your work may go to waste!

Are you ready to find out more and learn how we promote the brands we work with? Contact me at [email protected]. I want to hear about your plans!

Clients have told us that trendy young agencies no longer use press releases to reach journalists or influencers. I was obviously very surprised and, I admit, worried. Certainly, the press release – like everything around us – has gone digital. Sent out by e-mail, it’s still the agency's #1 tool. We send out several products during the year, and to me it would be unthinkable to do so without a press release!

So, I continued my research and consulted the annual publication from CISION: The State of the Media Report.

It states that 63% of respondents said they wanted a press release from public relations professionals. This figure was more than 70% in some European countries.

Journalists love the press release. Media professionals have ranked it the most valuable type of content they receive from their PR contacts. They’ve chosen the press release as their top source. This is nearly universal, with journalists from around the world citing press releases as their most trusted source of information.

So here are a few suggestions from the CISON report to make your press release as effective as possible:

45%: Use a clearly stated news hook (often the title)

27%: Tell a story conversationally: avoid technical jargon

17%: Fit in some quality quotes that add depth to the story

More than 27% are looking for great images, compared to 13% for video. Use some great pictures, and you’ll maximize your chances of a feature!

In short, the press release is the number-one tool you need to develop. We have our own techniques at the agency, and we’ll teach you our tips for creating simple, effective press releases that get straight to the point.

So yes, the press release is alive and well!

Contact us! We’ll be happy to advise you. Most importantly, get on our mailing lists so you don’t miss a thing: www.natapr.com.

I like taking inspiration from the success stories of major companies and figuring out what they did to succeed. As Stacey Boehman, a coach who delivers exceptional training in sales (Make Money as a Life Coach), says, “success leaves a trail.”

It’s up to us to follow this advice and adapt it to the reality of our own business.

So what are these big companies doing to make themselves so successful? What are they doing to stay connected to their customers? Clearly, they all have solid public relations strategies built into their marketing plans.

It’s terrific – and easy – to be able to draw inspiration from these big companies, simply by fitting their actions to our own scale.

To learn more about our free webinars and training, get on our list: www.natapr.com

A client who was already interested in our services asked me if public relations really worked. I took the opportunity to ask them what they wanted: To make themselves known? To build their brand identity? “If that’s what you’re looking for, you won’t be disappointed by public relations. After 20 years in the business, I can assure you that our clients aren’t paying our fees out of a sense of charity.”

But after more than 30 years, including 20 at the agency, I can confirm without a shadow of a doubt that PR works.

1-The metrics of raising your profile

a. Increasing the number of visitors to your website, subscribers to your newsletter, and a growing number of followers on Facebook

2-Public relations results can be measured and compared.

So why should I use PR?

1- To tell your story

2- To make yourself known

3- PR means credibility and recognition

4- PR lets you speak

5- You become a known entity through the eyes of others (influencers)

6- PR professionals know the right moment to present your product or story

7- They also know how to sell your story

When should I use PR?

1- Rule number one: When your product or service is available for sale

2- These days, you need online points of sale

3- You have a good story to tell

4- Your product stands out

Don’t miss anything get on our list : www.natapr.com

At NATA PR we enjoy working for big companies, but we are also passionate about smaller brands that can greatly benefit from our services.` Over the past year, we developed an accessible 6-month formula for SMEs, to show them the kind of results that we can achieve. These small and medium-sized companies sometimes market very innovative products that deserve to be better known by media and by their target customers.

I was surprised to see that despite exceptional results, many have completely stopped their PR activities. The reason they give: PR does not generate enough sales.

Dear SME, please consider that a brand does not become known to its target audience overnight and that 6 months is a very short time to gain the notice of media and bloggers.

Not to mention that generating pure, hard sales is not the primary role of public relations, but rather of the sales department. The main role of public relations is to publicize a product, a company or a service among media and influencers and to reach a target audience.

What we say

What we do

What we think

I like the simplicity of this trio – but this kind of balance isn’t easily achieved.

Easier said than done, as my mother would say.

At the end of the day, we are still all deeply human, with spontaneous reactions we sometimes regret.

The good news is that you can train yourself to choose and use the right words, the right actions, and the right thoughts.

In fact, public relations teach us how to seek this balance, due to the impact of our messages (email or phone), actions, and thoughts.

Let me give you an example:

Cause (C): An employee makes a mistake

Thought (T): I'd better have a talk with that employee now

Feeling (F): Annoyed

Action (A): I don’t beat around the bush – I tell them directly what they did wrong

Result (R): The employee reacts badly to my comment

Here’s how I transform these situations today. I choose a different thought – one I believe sincerely, of course.

Cause (C): An employee makes a mistake

Thought (T): We all make mistakes. I’m going to ask this employee if they can think of a solution

Feeling (F): Empathy

Action (A): I ask questions. I ask the employee how they propose to fix things

Result (R): The employee looks for solutions, the mistake is not made again, and harmony is restored

What a revelation to see such a change just by working on my thought process.

I wanted to share this discovery with you, which I now apply routinely:

Every day, I examine what I’m thinking.

1-  I choose what I think

2-  My thoughts have an impact on what I say

3-  My thoughts have an impact on what I do

Today I've shared with you a simple but revolutionary tool: the model according to The Life Coach School, founded by Brooke Castillo.

This approach has transformed my life and helps me in my day-to-day.

So contact me if you want to find out more about our training through the NATA PR SCHOOL or if you’re looking for one-on-one professional coaching.

Follow us on Instagram. Sign up for our mailing list at [email protected] to keep up with what we’re doing.

After finding your key words (why people want to talk about you), writing your press release, and identifying the journalists and bloggers that you need to reach, what is your next tactic?

The next tactic, one that is too often ignored, is really quite simple: follow-ups and reminders. In other words, the sales pitch.

How many times have we heard companies tell us: "We sent them a press release but got no response: PR doesn’t work."

Reducing our profession to sending out press releases is simplistic, to say the least. Public relations for consumer products are like sales. To reach a journalist or a blogger, you need to develop sales techniques.

At NATA PR, we like to say that we use soft-sell techniques. There is no point in repeatedly harassing a targeted journalist. Don’t reveal everything in the first email you send. Keep key information for your next mailing, such as: Did you know that Product X is an innovation in its industry, that it has garnered awards, etc. You have to be creative with your reminders, keeping in mind that journalists can receive hundreds of emails a day. Your press release could be completely unnoticed and might not catch the attention of journalists simply because the subject of your email is too long or not clear enough.

We all receive a lot of emails, so we need to figure out what will catch the eye in a fraction of a second. For example, if vitamin C is a topic of interest to beauty journalists, your release will be ignored if the subject line doesn’t mention that ingredient.

So it is clear that a single mailing may not generate the expected results. Do not hesitate to schedule several mailings, but using a different subject line, for example.

You need to be creative and resend to the journalists and influencers that you want to reach. And if emails are not doing the trick, there’s always the telephone...

Public relations and social media are not exact sciences. It can seem pointless to try to measure them solely by the number of subscribers, readers, or fans.

At the agency, we’re still somewhat resistant to citing figures and especially making projections. It’s hard to tell exactly who will or won’t choose to talk about a product. However, we’ve developed our own methods of analysis, which are based on the highest standards in our profession and on our own statistics. With our combined experience in the field, we can make predictions that are quite close to the mark.

Yet this part of our business is always changing, particularly with the growth of social media, which has a major impact on our day-to-day work.

We generally don't have the budget to purchase advertising space. The nature of our work is to score articles, mentions, and interviews without any money changing hands.