Tag: PR agency

PR Agency Relationship-Builders for the New Year

Posted on by Marijane Funess

The New Year is an ideal time for PR agencies to re-evaluate and perhaps improve relationships with clients and contacts. Relationship-building is also a great habit to form for the New Year. Here are some pointers all successful PR firms can employ.

Make introductions. Chances are, you know a mid-career executive who’s out of work, or a recent grad who’s trying to break into communications. Get into the habit of introducing people who need a boost to others in the biz. It doesn’t need to be about an available spot, since those are likely to be few and far between. But a simple introduction to someone with helpful contacts or knowledge can go a long way.

Get face-to-face. Is your client speaking on a panel? Go hear her. Does the CEO need briefing prior to a media interview? Get there. Any excuse to get face-to-face to your clients and the entire marketing team is a great way to be indispensable and demonstrate your commitment to the business.

Revive dormant contacts. Lost touch over the years? The end of the year/beginning of a new one is an ideal time to recharge old contacts. Link In, follow, or make a date to get together to catch up.

Set a goal for new relationships. Maybe you want to create three new contacts a month through social media. Whatever the goal, make it manageable, and start slowly, by Linking In or RT-ing a Twitter update. Social media can give you some insight into job history, friends in common, interests and even where they grew up, information that can be helpful in building a relationship. Just take care not to appear to be stalking.

“How about those [insert sports team name]”. Communicate about non-work interests from sports to vacations and family. Creating a well-rounded relationship makes all communication easier and more comfortable. It also engenders deeper trust in your client when confiding useful information that will benefit your relationship and your work.

Do something sociable, not just social. We are all busy and it’s hard to make time to do one more “work” thing. But taking a client to lunch or having the team go out for drinks reaps untold benefits as your relationship grows. In addition to the aforementioned increase in trust and comfort, these outings offer a relaxed atmosphere where you may discover how much you genuinely like the people you do business with. A side benefit indeed!

So You Want To Hire A PR Firm? Eliminate These Roadblocks

Posted on by Marijane Funess

As senior level communicators or marketers look to enhance their capabilities with outside talent, one consideration should be retaining a public relations agency. Marketing execs are often the keepers of brand image and sometimes the corporate image as well. Who wouldn’t benefit from competent, connected and creative PR thinking?

And yet. Some companies plunge into PR without thinking through their goals or a partnership’s requirements. Before beginning the search for the best PR agency, take a step back and eliminate the following roadblocks.

We need to be in The New York Times…as soon as possible! Sometimes the C-suite issues an edict like this, but before your knee jerks, determine what the company should really seek to achieve through public relations. Think about the long-term goals. Do your goals include generating trade buy-in for a new product? Consumer awareness? Does the CEO want to build an industry profile? It’s fundamental to set communications objectives to help narrow the type of PR agency needed. Forcing the exercise may demonstrate completely different needs than first surmised.

There’s no budget. Thinking you might just carve out a little from the marketing budget? Think again. Public relations is a distinct discipline that requires its own set of goals, and, yes, its own budget. Once needs are established, research what different agencies charge for PR strategy development and implementation. See how that matches up with available budgets, and have it in mind when meeting with firms. A PR agency is far better able to create a plan for a company when an actual budget is quoted; otherwise, everyone’s time may be wasted.

We need to outsource because we have NO time for PR. Hold on. Yes, companies often bring on a PR partner because they lack the staff to develop and run a robust communications program. But know that managing an agency takes time. There will be questions, meetings, materials review, separate sessions for message and media preparation, – and that’s just the beginning. The more time you commit to your agency, the more you’re likely to get back in the form of ROI.

We don’t know what to expect. Have the key execs had experience with an external PR agency or similar relationships? Is the organization aligned on brand messages and communications needs? Is there a process in place for approval of strategies and content? If the answer to any of these is “no,” you have some advance work to do, priming senior management on “PR Agency 101”before selling in services. The best environment for maintaining a successful, results-oriented PR agency relationship is one of communications and collaboration.

Managing Multiple Agency Relationships

Posted on by Jackie Hafner

Being a successful PR pro goes hand-in-hand with successfully navigating multiple relationships around you: getting the media what they need, on deadline; answering to multiple supervisors who oversee different accounts; and of course, making all your clients happy.

If the juggling act among media, supervisors, colleagues, and clients weren’t enough, now throw more agencies into the mix.  This might include PR firms that focus on another region or vertical than yours, or a group with a completely different function, like an ad or event agency.  Relationships with other teams can be challenging. We rarely have any say in the selection of these other agencies or the work they do, and it’s easy to become competitive when your skills or services overlap. Here are some tips to achieve and maintain a successful multi-agency relationship.

Get personal.   Have you ever met someone whose “email personality” was so different from their actual nature that you misjudged them?  It’s easy to misinterpret something in writing, or to form inaccurate opinions about someone with whom you’ve only communicated online.  Avoid this by getting to know the other agency staffers on a more personal level.  Instead of having your introductory meeting over the phone, suggest doing it in-person or via video.  If possible, hold in-person meetings every quarter (rotating who hosts is a good way to minimize travel and inconvenience) and even consider annual team-building events.  Bottom line – if you know the other agencies personally, your working relationship will be better.

Become allies. You’re all working towards the same goal – your client’s success – so instead of letting your competitive side take over, think of the other teams as an extended support system.  Next time you’re in a creative bind, consider bouncing your idea off a partner agency instead of the person in the cube next to you.  Besides, who’s better to brainstorm with than someone else that lives and breathes the account like you do?

Define roles and goals.  Never assume (you know what they say about assuming…) that partner agencies will have the same vision as you when it comes to dividing and conquering.  If your roles aren’t clearly delineated, or if there are potential areas of overlap, tackle them at the start of your relationship.
Being a good partner will make your job – and life – easier, and the client will appreciate your professionalism. Then, too, you never know where new relationships can lead; it’s no secret that many business opportunities come from other agencies, and the communications world is a small one.

The Case For The Independent Agency

Posted on by Dorothy Crenshaw

Smaller and independent ad and PR agencies like to tout their size and status as a competitive advantage. The problem with some of those claims is that they can boil down to cost, and the message too easily becomes, “Hire us and pay less for essentially the same creative service, or a better publicity result.”

Depending on the client and its needs, these can be valid claims. In the PR world, if your budget is less than half a million annually, you’ll probably be better off with a smaller, independent firm. But I’d like to think there are other reasons for bringing on an agency that’s not owned by an ad conglomerate, a holding company, or a marketing network.

Value. Yes, the typical structure of the independent firm is likely to maximize service for the investment. A large-firm structure is usually a triangle, with a few highly compensated and experienced practitioners at the top and a wide base of junior staffers at the bottom. Which means the typical account team blended billing rate is that of an Account Executive, usually someone with a year or two of experience. By contrast, an independent agency is more likely to have more experienced staffers running accounts, if only by virtue of having fewer layers.

Senior talent. The account team triangle isn’t necessarily a bad bet for clients. That depends on the allocation of senior-level time and attention. After all, it doesn’t make sense for someone with a 30-year track record to be doing media monitoring or compiling lists. But the problem with highly layered firms is that big overhead adds up to constant pressure to “feed the beast.” Most senior officers are consumed with chasing new business, not servicing clients.

Personalized service. This is where I’ve most often experienced the difference between a multinational firm with hundreds of clients and a small or midsize owner-operated agency.  Some say larger firms are more likely to offer off-the-shelf or template-based programs, simply because they have to. I’m not sure about that, but in my experience, it’s after the contract is signed that the personal touch disappears. The economics of a multi-faceted agency simply mitigate against deep senior-level involvement, and turnover among less experienced staff hinders continuity at other levels. Independent agencies have greater control over their operations, by definition.

Independent thinking. This is another way of saying “autonomy,” and it can be a subtle advantage. Yet in many ways it’s the most critical, since the most valuable creative offering of any agency is its talent and depth of thinking. After more than 20 years in PR, including a stint at the PR unit of a large ad agency, it’s my belief that ad and marketing teams don’t understand PR programming beyond the lowest-common-denominator of publicity results or the urgency of crisis response. There are exceptions to this, however. The lines continue to blur among digital marketing, social media, advertising, and PR companies. Yet the most successful PR campaigns depend on an innate understanding of  the practice.

A great idea can come from anywhere, of course. And the lines are blurring, to the benefit of everyone in the marketing picture. But the starkly different economics among the paid and earned media models usually mean the paid-media guys control the bigger budgets, and he who has the larger pocketbook usually prevails when it comes to pushing creative product on a client.

Of course, the challenge for independent firms in the PR industry lies in pressing our advantage. Too often, we rely on the value proposition to win clients, or we fail to leverage our more powerful tools and talents to benefit clients and our own teams. I’d like to think that for an independent PR agency, at least, the cost-value relationship is only the beginning of the case we make to clients, employees, and ourselves.