By Ben Dodson

If you are one of the millions of businesses currently reviewing this year’s sales against your planned objectives, you may be considering how to make these numbers read even better next year. Indeed, perhaps for the first time, you might be wondering whether a PR agency could help.

For many, deciding whether a PR agency is needed, at what level, and then how to implement it, can be a perplexing prospect. Often, and especially for SMEs, the decision to undertake this activity is made by people with minimal experience of it (it’s not their primary business role), who then struggle to know what they want and how to find an agency with the right experience, style and price to match their expectations.

If you’re already employing a PR agency to promote your business, knowing how to assess its performance and when to change agencies can also be a challenge. Of course, it may be obvious if the agency is not meeting the targets that were initially set out, but it may not be clear why it isn’t meeting your expectations. In our experience, this can often come down to a simple question of whether the agency is on the same page in terms of expectations and fit. For example, you may have expanded your sales operations into new territories, but your PR agency may not have the contacts in those countries, or be able to speak the language to communicate effectively and build the relationships required to secure media coverage.

As a rule, PR is most effective when you have a clear strategy and you work with a PR team who understand the market you want to reach, whether that’s the sector, the target countries/regions or having the ability to think laterally about the different audiences you could engage with. There are several key factors you should consider, either when you are briefing a new agency, or assessing your current team:

1. What markets are you currently selling to, and how big is the opportunity there? Is this market growing or shrinking?
2. Do your products/services apply to any other markets, and what is the size of the opportunity there?
3. Based on your response to the previous questions, which of these will be your priority in the coming year? What do you see as the opportunities or challenges for entering these markets?
4. Does your current PR team/agency have experience working in this market? Can they speak the language (for either the country or the industry)? Do they know the relevant media and have existing relationships with key influencers?
5. What is your current Go-To-Market strategy and is your PR strategy aligned with this?

For many, this advice will seem obvious, but when you’re trying to assess the impact of PR, it can be difficult to assess tangible results, unless you go back to your original objectives. We’ll look at measuring PR in another blog post later, but for now we leave you with one final consideration for choosing to work with a PR agency, which is in the DNA of everything that we do at The Bespoke Group.

In addition to its knowledge of the wider industry and target markets, does your existing PR agency, or will your new agency, get under the skin of your business to achieve the best results possible for your budget? Having worked with many of our clients for several years (some for over 30 years!), we know from experience that the best campaigns are developed when the team has a deep understanding of the client’s products, markets and how the business works internally. This allows us to operate as an extension of their own PR and Marketing department, with additional flexibility to expand teams when extra hands are needed. When we meet with a new client, our first job is to ask those simple but searching questions that will help us understand the business, no matter how large or small. The answers to those questions often create some very useful conversations about where the company is heading, (which may not have even been fully realised by the client) and ALWAYS lead to better and more successful campaigns.

So, whilst you’re no doubt living and breathing the business you work for, and know the answers to the earlier questions instinctively, be prepared to question the suitability of the agency in front of you if they don’t try to understand you in a similar way.

Want to learn more about how we approach PR strategy? Contact us now.