Little Voice Public Relations

Category: Voicenotes

  • Your Customers Don’t Buy in Channels. Why Are You Still Marketing That Way?

    Your Customers Don’t Buy in Channels. Why Are You Still Marketing That Way?

    A few weeks ago, I bought a $600 set of suitcases because of an Instagram ad… at least that’s what Meta would like to think.

    The ad wasn’t the reason I bought them. It was simply the invitation.

    Before I clicked “Purchase,” I read the comments, visited the website, and searched for reviews. I saw the brand pop up again. Then I did what I always do – I added it to my cart and let it sit for a while. Every interaction built a little more confidence until buying felt obvious.

    That got me thinking about how we talk about marketing.

    We still organize it in channels: PR. Paid. Social. Affiliate. Influencer. Retail. SEO. Partnerships. Consumers don’t experience brands that way.

    Brands organize marketing in channels, but consumers experience brands as one continuous relationship.

    That realization hit me while reading this month’s Industry Baby column below. Lainey shared something that stuck with me: her generation doesn’t want brands that try harder – they want brands that feel real. They want personality, community, and a reason to care beyond the product itself.

    I actually don’t think that’s unique to Gen Z. I think Gen Z is simply forcing the rest of us to acknowledge what consumer behavior has quietly become.

    Discovery isn’t linear anymore.

    Someone might hear about your brand from a creator, validate it through an earned media article, ask AI what people think, see your founder on LinkedIn, notice a partnership that catches their attention, walk past it at Target, save it for later, and finally buy weeks – or even months – later.

    So who gets credit for the sale? I think that’s where so many brands get stuck: spending too much time debating attribution and not enough time understanding behavior.

    Buying has become about how did someone decided your brand was worth buying in the first place, not which channel drove the connection. 

    My shopping carts are proof. I have products sitting in Amazon, Revolve, Nordstrom, and TikTok Shop that have been there for months, simply waiting for another moment – a recommendation from a friend, a founder video, a press mention, a great review, or even a sale – to remind me why I wanted them in the first place.

    Does your marketing strategy actually reflect that journey?

    Because if your customer moves seamlessly between AI search, social media, retail shelves, earned media, creator recommendations, email, conversations with friends, and in-store experiences, your marketing strategy should too.

    Those that adapt, well those case studies will be the stuff of legends, founders onto their next endeavor after their 8-9 figure acquisition.

    One exercise we’ve been walking clients through lately is mapping every meaningful touchpoint between discovering their brand and making a purchase. The exercise itself isn’t revolutionary – but the answers almost always are.

    If you’ve never looked at your business through your customers’ eyes rather than through your marketing channels, we’d love to help you uncover what you’re missing.

    → Let’s map your customer’s journey together.

    Curiously yours, Ali

  • On Entrepreneurship

    On Entrepreneurship

    One of the biggest things entrepreneurship unlocked in me was realizing I’m wired for it. Not in a “everyone should quit their job and start a business” way, because entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Some people thrive in structure, stability, and clear roles. The world needs those people. I just learned, over time, that I’m not one of them.

    What I didn’t anticipate was how much running a business would reshape the way I think about everything. My brain doesn’t turn off. I’m constantly scanning for opportunities, inefficiencies, connections between things that don’t obviously belong together. I probably come up with a new business idea every three days. That instinct has shaped how LVPR works too. We’ve never approached PR as just “getting press.” I’m always thinking about the bigger ecosystem: affiliate, retail, partnerships, social, AI search, founder storytelling, consumer behavior. How do we take one good idea and make it work harder across every channel? That’s a big part of why, ten years in, we operate as an omnichannel marketing business rather than a straight PR shop. The industry evolved, and we evolved with it.

    But here’s what I think about most on this anniversary: if LVPR went away tomorrow, I’d be okay. Not because I’m cavalier about what we’ve built, but because entrepreneurship gave me something hard to put a price on. It taught me how to find a problem and find a path forward. Whether that means taking equity in an emerging brand, consulting, thought leadership, or building something new entirely. There is always a next move when you’ve trained your brain to think this way.

    That’s the contrast I keep coming back to. Someone who has spent ten or twenty years inside a corporate structure, excelling at one defined role, and then has to start over? That’s a terrifying position. Not because they aren’t talented, but because figuring it out, building from scratch, tolerating uncertainty long enough to find the opportunity inside it, that’s a muscle you only build by using it.

    Entrepreneurship gave me that muscle. Ten years later, that feels like the real gift. Not just that I built a business, but that I built a version of myself that knows how to keep building, whatever comes next.

    And if I’m being honest, the through-line across all of it is this: I’ve learned to trust my gut. I’ve made mistakes, a hundred percent. But I’ve never regretted leading with my instincts, whether that meant believing in myself, leaning on my network, or making a hard call I didn’t want to make but knew I had to. That confidence is something I couldn’t have had at the start, and even when I had flashes of it, it didn’t matter because someone else always had final approval. Entrepreneurship gave me the authority to trust myself. That might be the most valuable thing it’s given me.

    So here’s what I want to know: What has a big risk, a career pivot, or a leap into the unknown taught you about yourself that you never could have learned playing it safe?

  • Your Next Customer Is Asking AI What to Buy

    Your Next Customer Is Asking AI What to Buy

    Is Your Brand Showing Up or Getting Replaced?

    Hi Little Loves,

    Ali here. I’m going to be upfront: this is a service announcement — because the shift is real.

    AI is becoming a product discovery channel. Not someday. Now.

    People are asking tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity what to buy and they’re getting one confident answer, not ten blue links. That answer is shaping decisions before a shopper (or statistically 60% of Americans & counting) ever lands on your website.

    Insert shameless plug for our AI & GEO offerings, helping brands understand if they’re showing up in AI tools, what’s being said, and why competitors might be showing up instead.

    AI-driven shopping behavior is accelerating fast (752% YoY). Whether your brand is being recommended (or skipped) is no longer a mystery,  it’s measurable.

    Is AI Helping or Hurting Your Brand + How to Tell

    As a PR agency, we’ve always believed clarity and credibility matter. It turns out they matter to AI, too. 

    If you’re $500K–$2M (early-stage DTC)

    The issue isn’t your product, it’s proof. AI can’t recommend what it cannot clearly understand. If your PDP, FAQs, and validation aren’t crystal clear, AI defaults to a competitor with stronger signals, even if your product is better.

    If you’re $2M–$15M (scaling DTC)

    The issue isn’t momentum, it’s consistency. AI doesn’t reward growth, but clarity at scale. When messaging shifts, AI struggles to identify what you own and competitors with tighter positioning become the default answer.

    Brands that aren’t clearly understood by AI are both missing traffic and being quietly replaced in recommendations. We help your brand show up in these recommendations with clarity and consistently instead of chasing after the algorithm.

    What We Built at LVPR: 

    AI & GEO Reporting + Immediate Fixes

    We make your brand easier for AI to confidently understand and recommend. 

    We pull a report for you with our platform partner, benchmark you against real competitors, and deliver:

    • a competitive readout (where you’re winning/losing in AI recommendations)
    • immediate fixes (PDP + FAQ language, proof-point hierarchy, validation gaps, content priorities)
    • a clear action plan with 30 / 60 / 90-day expectations so progress is defined, not vague

    Think of it as: AI channel monitoring + competitive intelligence + a practical execution roadmap.

    If you want to know whether AI is sending you customers or sending them to competitors, we’ll show you. 

    [book a call] 

    How it Works

    This isn’t a one-time audit. AI visibility shifts as models update, competitors publish, reviews change, and new signals enter the ecosystem. Over a 6-month period we build momentum, compound trust signals, and show clear measurable lift.

    And you’ll still see wins monthly because the work is  iterative improvements that stack across multiple levers (PDP/FAQ clarity, category positioning, review strategy, PR/media signals, affiliate/editorial alignment, and more).

    All of Your Virtual Ducks, One Neat Row

    Even before AI, most brands had the same issue: they’re doing a lot, but it’s scattered.

    Founders and lean teams are buried in inventory, ops, approvals, fires and pivots, so marketing becomes reactive and channels stop reinforcing each other.

    That’s why we built marketing calendar support: an omnichannel roadmap that aligns:

    • launches + retail moments
    • PR angles + content pillars
    • promos + affiliate + paid pushes
    • brand storytelling + seasonality

    When planning is tight, execution gets easier. Decisions happen faster. Teams stop scrambling. Channels actually work together. Our industry, as we all know, never stops changing, so keeping organized is an absolute MUST.

    Why I’m Sharing This Now

    AI & GEO and marketing calendars aren’t separate initiatives. They’re the same discipline:

    control the narrative + coordinate the system.

    If your brand isn’t actively managing how it’s understood by humans and machines, someone else will.

    Ali

    If this resonates and you want to explore AI & GEO reporting or marketing calendars for your brand, you can learn more and reach out here. We’d love to chat… or even pull your report 😉

  • A Decade of Doing the Darn Thing

    A Decade of Doing the Darn Thing

    2026 is LVPR’s 10th anniversary, which is wild. I never stayed at a job for more than 3 years before I started LVPR, hopping from agency to agency, excited by new clients and opportunities. Little did I know, I was an entrepreneur in waiting. Over the past 10 years, I have worked on some of the coolest brands, met amazing founders, industry peers, and colleagues, and finally fulfilled my entrepreneurial itch by continuously ideating and innovating as our industry evolves, starting multiple side projects, and learning how to fail but not quit.

    Learnings:

    • Operations – Outsource your weaknesses. I like knowing how the platforms work and peeking in on them, but organization isn’t my strength, and my disorganization or procrastination when it comes to things I don’t like hurts the company.
    • Finance – I have always struggled to find the right consultant to successfully manage finances and have been unable to relinquish control, as I would see invoicing, reconciling, cash flow management, forecasting, and consistent reporting on the state of the business fall through the cracks. I still maintain majority control of these functions and have spent way too many hours on them with customer support to navigate them. Send any consultants my way PLEASE!
    • Marketing – I am a marketer at heart, whether it’s my kids sports teams, school merch, my friends new business idea, or clients. But ask me to market myself and I shrink and become paralyzed. We are trained to be behind the camera, not in front of it, and breaking that mindset has been one of the hardest parts of growing brand awareness and sharing successes.
    • Hiring – I usually hire based off energy and how an employee would fit into our small team. I don’t foresee that perspective ever changing but that has also backfired very badly in getting too comfortable with employees and not keeping the boundary between colleague vs friend. I have found that I need to be the last interview vs first – and let my more direct and critical team members vet before me.
    • Legal – I have rewritten client and employee contracts annually, if not more often, due to unforeseen circumstances I would never think could happen. I also have signed many contracts without thoroughly reading them or including protective redlines that have cost me a lot of money. 
    • Trust – I have always been and will always be someone that trust people are good and will do the right thing. But I have been burned by employees and clients by not putting terms in writing or holding people accountable. 
    • Accountability – I am big on karma, and I have had to pay clients back when it wasn’t always necessary, but I felt it was the right thing to do. I also run the business to take accountability personally when I F-up and encourage my team to as well. I have worked at so many agencies where we would never admit fault and always pass the blame and that never works out.

    I could go on and on, but plan to share others throughout the year to reflect and hopefully help others that feel just as lost at times as a business owner. LMK if there are other topics you’d like to hear about. Believe me, I’ve been humbled repeatedly.