The relationship between a PR agency and its client is very similar to any other relationship. To make any relationship work there has to be a mutual understanding, a certain amount of trust and a good amount of friendship.
It’s important to understand that PR isn’t all about wining and dining clients every weekend, but the relationship should be valued the same as a friendship or love interest if it is going to work. To build and maintain a great agency-client relationship, there are a few crucial rules that both agencies and clients should live by.
1. Does my bum look big in this?
We have all been there, your friend wants to know if they look good in an outfit and the immediate answer is no. There are two options, 1. Tell them they look great and let them look back on the photos and realise you lied. 2. Tell them they don’t look awful, but they have looked better in other outfits, then help them choose an alternative so they look great in all the pictures.
The same applies to a PR relationship. Yes, you may think that the next product update or office move is A* news, but unfortunately and more importantly its unlikely to get much or any coverage in the press. Honesty is the best policy.
A good agency will let you know that although this is world changing news for you it might not have the same impact on the journalistic world. However, if you have a customer whose life it has changed we might be onto something.
2. “Ain’t no mountain high enough”
Well, actually there is and sometimes it will be an impossible climb. Don’t forget that PR agencies know the press and they know it well; they know the titles you want to get into and they know what content they are likely to take. Sometimes it will be very difficult and occasionally ‘impossible’ to get into the titles that you dream of.
But that’s ok. Just because you aren’t on the front page of the Guardian doesn’t mean your stories won’t get read. It is important that you work with your agency to form a list of titles that will be beneficial to your business and reach your target audience. After all, relationships are all about compromise.
3. What am I getting out of this?
It’s an age-old question, how do I measure ROI? The honest and shortest answer is that the relationship between PR output and outcomes relies heavily on how you measure the success.
PR is very similar to marketing in the sense that yes, you know it works but actually you might not be able to correlate exactly how, why, or which bit of it works. But a good agency will be transparent about this at the outset and they should give you statistics on circulation, in some cases even analytics on how many people read your article, but don’t expect every piece of coverage to result in a converted customer!
Yes, clients do win customers directly from PR regularly and it does generate uplift in SEO and resultant website traffic and social media engagement. But, you do need really examine your inbound enquires and Google Analytics thoroughly.
Ask your customers where they heard about you; what made them pick up the phone, why did they Google your services? If the answer is the result of an article or an advert, it is likely they found you via the result of PR activity.
4. Keep those skeletons out of the closet
In order for the relationship to work you must be honest about your past, present and future skeletons, especially when it comes to crisis management.
A PR agency should be treated as an extension of the internal team and should always be kept up to date, especially when things go wrong. This way the agency will be better placed to guide you when your not so good news might make it into the press, even better they can stop it getting there at all.
5. Make time for each other
Most successful PR agencies will become pretty self-sufficient very quickly and won’t take up as much of your time as you may initially expect. However, it is still vital to make time to have calls, meetings and even a good chat over a nice meal. After all ‘date night’ is important!
All relationships need time spent on both parties and PR is no exception. Quite simply, the more time you put into the relationship with your agency, the more you will get out of it, and the quicker you will start seeing the results promised by the agency in the first pitch.
By Gemma Farmer, Account Director at Neo PR.
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