This is a question that frequently arises as companies grow. We have 25 years’ corporate communications experience to draw on in being able to advise on this. We have worked with hundreds of companies at different points in their development, from seed funded start-ups to listed multinationals looking for a reputational reboot or an image refresh. There are probably just 2 key questions that you need to ask yourself when thinking about whether it is the right time to work with a PR agency regardless of size and life stage of organisation.

1.  Are you clear on what you want PR to deliver?

2. Do you have enough time and resource to work with a PR agency?

This article addresses question one, with part two to follow next week.

1. ARE YOU CLEAR ON WHAT YOU WANT PR TO DELIVER?

This might seem like an obvious question, but it is more complicated than it may appear. PR is just one discipline in a big bag of ever blurring marketing competencies. If you asked most people to describe what PR means to them, most would say ‘press coverage’, but media relations (or some call it publicity) is just one of the ways in which PR does the job of building awareness, preference and influence with different groups of stakeholders.

Public relations, to give it its full name, can be relevant for all the different audiences that matter to organisations, from perhaps the most obvious one – customers, to others including investors, commercial partners, trade and industry groups, regulators, NGOs and even internal audiences like staff and other companies in a group.

With these potential audiences there are naturally different ways to reach them. The media is certainly one route, but it is by no means the only one. Social media channels are what we PR firms class as ‘owned’ rather than ‘earned’ media and they need content strategies and pro-active management in order to do their work of engaging with relevant audiences.  Speaking at conferences and events, organising your own events from attention grabbing stunts, to product sampling, round tables and panel discussions, winning awards, publishing research and white papers, making a podcast or a video, holding a staff townhall – all of these are valid ways of reaching an audience and PR firms get involved in delivering all of them to a greater or lesser degree, depending on client needs.

So, if you know the who? (audience) and the how? (the channel you are going to use to reach them), then you need to figure out the what? Or rather, the content, what you are going to say – your messaging. This is also a very typical part of a PR firm’s mandate, to help clients figure out what they want to communicate when they stand on platforms or give press interviews to make the desired impression. All this may appear to be achingly obvious, but ask anyone who has experienced the messaging inconsistency of a fast-growing company’s leadership team who are all going off in different directions with their own agenda and they will tell you that projecting a consistent and clear message doesn’t happen without some professional intervention. The other classic is the untrained spokesperson who lets slip some information before they should to a journalist, either because they are nervous, distracted or pressured into it.

Let’s assume for the sake of brevity, that you have figured out your messaging, (naturally it flows from your vision and mission), and you have a clear comms plan in place that is going to get your story in front of the people that matter, the only thing left to figure out is how you will know what success looks like?

There are plenty of people who think PR is an expensive waste of time. There are others, like Bill Gates who share the opinion, “If I was down to my last dollar, I would spend it on public relations.” I would put money on the fact that the main difference in their experience is that those in the Gates camp were clear from the outset what they wanted their PR to deliver and they agreed with their PR team how it would be measured, evaluated and reported on.

Too often, inexperienced people – on both the client and agency side – fail to do this part well enough at the outset. The result is that they discover too late that their expectations were never aligned, or that their understanding of the impact of the outcomes was not the same.

In its broadest definition, (that of attention that has been earned because something was clever,  entertaining or thought provoking rather than paid for through advertising or sponsorship) PR can deliver an outsize return on investment.

But it is important to be realistic. One press release about a product upgrade isn’t going to set the world on fire. Generally speaking, to get attention, you need to invest careful thought and realistic amounts of money, but that’s not to say that an unusually creative idea, or a brilliantly charismatic spokesperson won’t generate a huge return on investment (ROI). That’s the holy grail that every client and every PR person is always chasing.

NEXT TIME:

2. Do you have enough time and resource to work with a PR agency?