How to successfully work with your PR agency

You’ve found the right PR agency to work with, now what can you expect of them? As an experienced PR agency, we’ve got a few ideas to share with you. 

Define the work

As part of your onboarding process, make sure you and the agency have a clear understanding of the basics of the partnership will run. This should include:

• Who is in your team and who is responsible for what? 

You may not be working with the people who pitched to you, so ask for a team overview and an introductory meeting to establish working relationships.

• Have clear objectives and targets. 

As well as getting the brief right for the PR agency, objectives are absolutely essential too. Ask the agency to run a kick-off meeting to help set these together and to give them the opportunity to dig deeper into your business. 

An agency should understand who you are as a business, your strengths and weaknesses, what you want to achieve, and how you’re going to get there. Their strategy and tactics should support your aims.  

When we asked some of our clients for feedback, the importance of understanding business objectives was a high priority: “AMBITIOUS is a fantastic agency to work with. They take the time to understand your business objectives and work with you to keep focus and to achieve those objectives.”

• Regular measuring and reporting. 

How will you measure the agency’s success? Again, if your objectives are clear then the measurements should naturally come out of that. For example, are you looking to raise your profile in trade press and events? Or maybe you want to run a campaign to grow your social media accounts?

Decide your goals, base your measurements on these, set achievable targets, and agree on how regularly the agency will report back on progress. It’s also a good idea to agree on how often you will have meetings/phone catch-ups and who will be responsible for scheduling them into everyone’s diaries, or these can often slip.

Advice and input from your PR agency 

Make sure you make the most of the knowledge, insight, and connections of the agency. 

• Creative ideas.

One of the benefits of hiring an agency is to get a fresh take on your business or brand. While there will be many creative minds within the company, it’s easy to get stuck in the day-to-day work, leaving little ‘headspace’ to think about creative ideas and campaigns. Your PR agency should help to not only generate ideas for you but to facilitate situations that enable you to contribute your ideas as well.

• A sounding board.

Once the ideas are flowing, they will need to be refined. Use your meetings to discuss your questions and concerns and tap into their knowledge and understanding of your sector and the media landscape.

• A challenge.

Be prepared for the agency to question – and even challenge – you! Try not to take this personally; remember it’s their job to understand your needs and deliver the results you want. They have insight and knowledge as an external agency that can provide clarity or a new way of doing something. 

• Contacts, connections, and introductions.

Again, this is often a big reason why a certain agency is picked over another one. If they promised you contacts or networking opportunities in their pitch, follow up on this and ensure it happens. It could be the key to your success. A good agency will always be networking and looking out for the next opportunity or opening for you too.

• Back-up and support.

If you don’t have an in-house communications department then the PR agency can be a godsend if things go wrong. At AMBITIOUS, we often work with small businesses with no experience in handling the media, so our background can prove vital. 

Working together to achieve great ROI 

Hopefully, there some rapport with the PR agency you selected. This natural ‘fit’ can be key when working with an agency. At the very least, you should expect them to have a professional attitude, to be friendly and positive about your business and the account they are running for you.

Being able to have open and honest conversations about the work and progression can get you better results. The agency knows the media landscape well and can see how your business can make the right headlines. 

If you’re looking to work with a PR agency, talk to us about your next steps hello@ambitiouspr.co.uk.