At the start of this year, we took on a financial services firm as a retained client. The team wasn’t entirely new to us, as we’d run a few successful campaigns for the organisation before. It was, however, the first time it had retained an agency for B2B and corporate PR, and also the first time it had made any sustained attempt at thought leadership.
From a standing start, we’ve already had three opinion articles published in leading industry publications by key members of the leadership team. We’ve also had their comments included in news features covering developments relevant to their industry.
I’d like to say this was all achieved due to our brilliance (pun intended), but while this is partly true, it was equally thanks to our client viewing its PR agency as a partner, not a service provider.
Forget and regret
Too often, businesses do the opposite. While they rightly recognise it would help their business to initiate some PR activity, they think it involves very little or even no input at their end. Some view it as akin to hiring an accountant; you give them all your invoices/expenses and let them work their magic.
Unfortunately, successful PR campaigns don’t work like that. PR isn’t a service you can just throw money at and then forget about, safe in the knowledge amazing results will flow. Hiring a PR agency and expecting them to secure coverage in leading publications when you’ve provided them with nothing but poorly written marketing materials is unrealistic (and yes, this happens).
To some extent, it’s understandable that company leaders have such ideas. The consumer press is often filled with click-bait style content that has little substance. Even in business publications, the line between paid and earned content has now become so obfuscated that many don’t realise what they’re reading has only been published because someone paid for it.
But if you want earned media, you’ve got to, well, earn it. Publications and journalists want interesting stories about companies doing innovative things. They also want insights that come from people in the know in an industry, not ideas that a copywriter has scraped from the internet or worse, that have been produced by AI.
Getting company buy-in
The good news is that most companies have plenty of people in the know in their ranks. If they didn’t, they probably wouldn’t be in a position to invest in PR. It’s just a matter of engaging such people in the PR project from the beginning.
This is where our new client got it right. Early on, the comms team set up an exploratory call with two members of its C-suite. With the combination of their inside knowledge and my journalistic and PR background, this one-hour session led to numerous opinion article ideas, two of which have already come to fruition.
The value of connecting your leaders to your agency goes far beyond producing thought leadership articles. We regularly have meetings with people from diverse areas of our clients’ businesses – as well as regular calls with the marketing or comms teams – and these often lead to news stories or press releases that we can see value in that perhaps someone internally hadn’t.
The combination of insider insight and media relations expertise is much more valuable than just one of those things alone. Hiring an agency with strong media relations experience is a great first step, but expecting them to run your account unaided is unrealistic.
As a former journalist and editor, my inbox used to be inundated with content that was often well-written but lacked any insight into the industry publications it was targeting. It was clear these were the result of a PR agency’s efforts and that there had been little or no input from the client. Most such content never sees the light of day.
If you really think about it, this approach makes no sense. A feature article written by a journalist doesn’t contain 1,000 of what that particular journalist thinks; it’s typically the result of multiple interviews and in-depth research.
Thus, if you hire a journalist or PR firm to help you with content, you need to feed into that content if it’s going to be good enough to earn a place in today’s highly competitive editorial landscape.
But it takes too much time…
While it’s true such an approach takes up valuable internal resource, it’s also true that the time investment will typically pay off by way of increased media coverage and thus ROI on your PR investment.
The effort required also usually diminishes over time if you continue working with the same agency. The more they get to know how your business works and how your people think, the less back and forth will be needed for content.
Your agency might ask your opinion on a topic once in response to a media request, but the next time it receives a similar request, it should be able to draft your response for approval rather than starting from scratch.
In this way, it’s similar to the time and effort involved in taking on a new member of staff – you need to invest more early on to hopefully reaps the rewards for years to come. This is a fitting comparison because the best client/PR relationships are those where the company views its agency as an extension of its own team.
