Transcript –

JOHNA BURKE: Hello, this is Johna Burke with BurrellesLuce, and we’re here at the PR News Media Relations Summit. And I’m here with Yanique.

Yanique, will you please introduce yourself?

YANIQUE WOODALL: Yes. My name is Yanique Woodall, and I’m the vice president of enterprise public relations at 1800flowers.com.

BURKE: And, Yanique, you’ve led a session that I think is invaluable for communicators and PR professionals especially, talking about how you targeted your audience, and the research and the focus that you used with your existing audience. Can you share how you did that?

WOODALL: Specifically, when I joined 1800flowers.com, it was important for our internal in-house–our internal PR team, as well as our external PR agency, to align ourselves with the marketing partners to really understand our target audience. But for us it was not just about knowing who the target audience is, because 1-800-Flowers services anyone from 18 to 54, basically anyone with a credit card, we wanted to know the sweet spot of the audience, the brand influencers, the ones that were going to move the needle. So we knew that when we put together a PR campaign, it would affect that audience and we could show measurement at the bottom line.

Specifically, it was important for us to be a part of the focus groups, be a part of the surveys, be a part of the opinion polls, to understand the customer. And once we figured out that customer, we understood she was a social media maven and she was in Twitter, she was in Facebook, and she wanted to engage with brands through social media tactics. Specifically, once we found that best media vehicle, which we understood it would be social media tactics, we needed to do some research to understand if that vehicle was going to have an impact on our brand. And through some research, we did find out that social media has a great impact on the brand, and we decided to go about that route.

Looking ahead, we did a case study for Mother’s Day around our Spot a Mom Movement. Basically, we’re encouraging all of our customers, our best customers, to celebrate every mom in their life. In this case, we saw an increase in multiple purchasing and we saw an increase in total transactions, so we knew that that was a success.

BURKE: Fantastic. And where can people follow you in social media?

WOODALL: If anyone has any additional questions in reference to social media, they can follow me on Twitter @woodallpr.

BURKE: Great. Thank you so much.

WOODALL: Thank you.