SERVICES

Positioning and Message Development

The foundation for your PR, media relations, and brand storytelling

During this crucial initial phase, we formulate or update your company positioning, messaging, and brand storytelling roadmap. Our objective is to develop memorable and sustainable messages that distinguish you from your competitors. We work with you to tell your brand story in words that hit home, using a proven methodology that distills the essential truths about your company into a compelling value proposition and elevator pitch, and makes these relevant to your target audiences.

It starts with an initial “deep-dive” onsite or conference call discovery session with your team to become familiar with your brand story, business objectives, target markets, customer personas, and service offerings.

Our strategic messaging framework

We will apply ZingPR’s proprietary discovery and message development methodology to determine:

• Marketing campaign goals

• Company: story, identity, values, personality, strategic goals, industry context

• Product: attributes, problem it solves, benefits, market appeal, competitive landscape

• Customer: targets, demographics, personas by job title, purchase role, purchase criteria and motivations

ZingPR’s proprietary discovery and strategic messaging methodology

• Development of  a positioning and messaging deck

• Brand narrative

• Core positioning statement

• Elevator pitch

• Target customer personas

• Key messages by market

• Competitive positioning

• Timeline for execution

Media relations

Over 20+ years we’ve developed valuable relationships with editors, journalists and bloggers across hundreds of business and trade media outlets

Defining an appropriate media strategy is essential

Media relations is the engine of your PR campaign. ZingPR researches which of the countless publications, magazine, blogs, podcasts and more will reach your target audiences. Then we formulate and implement a rigorous program to engage and connect with the influential journalists and bloggers who command the attention of your customers and partners.

PR media list development

Just as in advertising, precise targeting for your media relations activities is essential for a successful PR campaign. “Who are we targeting?” is in many ways more important “What are we announcing?” ZingPR methodically and meticulously develops detailed media lists that include business, technology and trade media, determines who to target at those organizations, and then defines how best to engage with each of them.

Programs we use in this process include news releases, blog articles, contributed articles and interviews to build your brand's reputation, establish you as a source with key journalists, and drive valuable media coverage about your company, team, products, and customers.

Personalized outreach to the optimum set of media outlets

News program: a sustained media outreach and engagement campaign to secure news and feature stories in median read by your audiences. Includes working with your team to plan and execute announcements, news release development, media outreach and pitching your news to a defined set of strategic target media outlets, podcasts and blogs, and of course loading it on a premium newswire such as Business Wire, PRNewswire, or PRWeb.

Thought-leadership program: identify technology and business publications to target with custom bylined articles from your executive team and in-house experts. These articles will be designed to establish brand reputation, educate target decision makers, showcase expertise, and shape industry discussion. Includes working with your team to determine topics, formulation and pitching article abstract, securing green light from an editor, and assisting with development of the article for submission to the publication.

Creative use of CEO media newsletters for media engagement

Media newsletter: to develop relationships with editors, journalists and bloggers, we need to engage with them in a way that is not just pitching stories about your company and brand, but rather establishes your CEO as an accessible expert. ZingPR creates branded CEO newsletters to foster a connection with pundits and experts who write about your sector.

Proactive media relations techniques to keep your brand in the news

Media monitoring and news hijacking: ZingPR continually monitors various channels to track who is covering your competitors and writing stories relevant to your category. We also monitor special feeds from journalists who are looking for assistance and commentary with their stories.

Brand Storytelling

It’s not enough to have a great product or service

What’s your brand story?

To stand out in today’s noisy marketplace you need to know how to talk about your brand in a way that differentiates you and makes you memorable. That’s why brand storytelling is so important, and why you should add it as a complement to your PR campaign.

As your PR partner, we will become extremely familiar with your brand, your company, your product, your people, and your customers. Which positions us perfectly to add brand storytelling to your outbound communications.

Business storytelling and building a brand story

The process starts with understanding your brand and your customers, and then building a narrative that  connects them. The essential rule is that story must come before selling, because the way to your audience’s heart is through a compelling and memorable story. Instead of throwing facts, statistics, and testimonials at your audience, we must instead focus on making your brand thoughtful, memorable, and real.

Our storytelling skills amplify your brand narrative

We deliver communications programs that raise awareness, educate and persuade your customers and prospects:

• Positioning and messaging

• Identifying your internal experts

• Giving them the right ‘voice’ and identifying platforms for expressing it

• Telling your story through your customers’ successes through customer case studies and success stories

• Brand content development (website, white papers, presentations, blog)

• Customer newsletters

Thought leadership

How do you become a thought leader?

Thought leadership is the foundation for market education

Maybe it’s true that anyone with a blog and a Twitter account can claim to be a thought leader. So what exactly is it and how do you get it? It’s clearly something that has to be earned (i.e. you cannot claim you have it; it has to be bestowed on you), and earned over time.

Perhaps search engines are the best judges of whether somebody is a thought leader, because they apply data science to determine whether a particular person stands out as the one whose thoughts, opinions and expertise are featured on relevant and high-signal websites, and whom others mention and link to when citing specific expertise. So let’s start there.

We’ll develop a thought-leadership strategy optimized for your industry

We formulate thought-leadership programs for many of our clients because they want to rise above the noise in their marketplace, and to position themselves as experts in their respective fields. This program is essentially an extension of our classic media relations program, and involves working closely with you to identify your voice, expertise and point of view, and then orient that into editorial that appeals to the target audiences you need to reach.

How it works

First, we identify which publications, blogs and newsletters are read by your customers. Then, in collaboration with you, we develop an editorial strategy for each. The stories we develop are designed to establish brand reputation, educate target decision makers, showcase your expertise, and shape industry discussion.