Tips for Getting the Most Value from Your PR Agency
So you’re considering hiring a public relations agency or maybe you recently hired a firm and are just beginning your new relationship with the company. Adding public relations to your integrated marketing plan can be a valuable strategy to increase the visibility of your organization and its offerings among target audiences, add credibility through third-party endorsements via the media, and protect and enhance your brand reputation (among many other benefits).
In order to achieve these and other organization-specific goals, however, it’s imperative that clients play an active role and adhere to the following recommendations to get the most value out of their partnerships with PR agencies…
Communicate Regularly
Ongoing communication with your PR agency is crucial for assuring your organization builds and maintains a positive brand image among target audiences and has a regular presence in the media. To be most effective at what we do best, we need to be kept in the loop about what’s happening at your organization as much as possible. We’ll schedule regular meetings and calls to strategize, but we also need clients to provide valuable information and feedback on our ideas.
At Brossman Communications, we think of ourselves as an extension of our clients’ teams and for optimal results, we ask that clients treat our partnership in the same way. Keeping us up-to-date allows us to get ahead of potential PR crises, capitalize on future opportunities and strategize new approaches for reaching clients’ short-term objectives and long-term goals.
Heed Our Advice
Having worked with the media and on high-profile projects for nearly two decades, we understand the multiple nuances that must be considered when working with journalists, community members, elected officials and other key target audiences.
Media, for instance, have specific criteria for what they consider to be newsworthy, preferences for receiving information, protocols for exclusives and opinion pieces, tight deadlines and more. We’re experts at working with this valuable target audience and ask our clients to trust our advice when it comes to interacting with them.
If we tell you something isn’t newsworthy, please believe us and heed our advice to not approach journalists with the information. Sending valueless announcements to journalists can hurt not only our relationships with the reporters, but also yours, and prevent reporters from considering opening future emails or answering future calls about news that truly should be front page.
Trust the Process
While some results can be immediate with public relations strategies, others can take time. Brossman Communications has secured positive earned coverage for clients in widely-read and respected outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Reuters, The Associated Press, Men’s Journal, Wired, The Drum and more, but these placements did not happen overnight. This coverage involved developing relationships with target journalists, understanding their coverage, crafting compelling pitches, going back-and-forth with reporters to fine-tune story ideas to align with their current or future needs, etc.
Likewise, we have developed comprehensive, effective and award-winning community outreach campaigns for a variety of public projects, including water-efficiency programs, transportation pilots projects, water-reuse facilities and more. But the process for researching, developing, implementing, monitoring and sometimes adjusting these campaigns took months, and in some cases, years. As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” and that’s a great way to think about the benefits of trusting the process, and sometimes time, that goes into effective PR.
Interested in adding PR to your marketing mix? Drop us a line to discuss partnership opportunities.
