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Like many organizations, you might find it difficult to promote your services as a public relations agency. You must stand out from the crowd and garner attention for your organization. This is a challenging task for most companies, but it can be accomplished by applying the curated PR agency marketing tactics detailed in this post.
We are going to explore the secrets behind the success of some of the world’s top public relations agencies. These strategies have enabled these companies to constantly secure impressive clients and grow exponentially in terms of revenue and profits.
Why Public-Relations Agency is a Unique Business
Client base
A good public relations agency will have some clients already lined up to bring in revenue once it’s started. Developing a client base takes time and resources — two things that are hard to come by in the early stages of creating your own company. It can be helpful to start working with clients while creating the firm so you can secure enough customers to keep the business afloat while creating a growth plan.
Building a strong network
When you’re running your PR agency, you have ample opportunities to meet new people and interact with them. It makes networking easy for you and this could help you in future endeavors too.
Flexibility in choosing clients
You’re not bound by location, so you can easily choose clients from anywhere in the city or from other countries if you want to expand your business.
Freedom to choose the best tools for your work
You can decide which computer programs to use, how many employees to hire, how much money to spend on advertising and so on.
Flexibility in pricing and payment methods
You can offer different discounts and payment options according to each client’s preferences and financial abilities.
The ability to decide what projects you want to take on or reject at any given time
If you don’t want to deal with a certain company anymore or if a certain project isn’t interesting enough for you, you can just refuse it without any consequences at all.
You can control the direction of your company
As an employee, you follow orders from supervisors and senior-level managers (and above). In an agency environment, the buck stops with you. That means that if someone doesn’t like the campaign ideas that your team comes up with, they have to come directly to you and tell you why they’re wrong — or at least convince you why they should be ignored.
Charting your career path
When you start up an independent business like this, you get to decide your future from scratch. You get to chart out what kind of courses you want to take and where you want your career to go. This is because no one is going to dictate what needs to be done as long as they get their paycheck!
Loyal customers
With proper marketing and PR, your business will become popular among customers who are likely to stick with you for long.
Work with high-profile clients
Public relations specialists typically work with an array of different companies and organizations that are well-known in their industries. Public relations professionals who run their agencies can expand this circle by creating a client roster that includes smaller companies and local businesses as well as larger firms and national brands.
There will always be something new
As soon as one project is finished, another will be waiting in the wings. This means that there’s no time for boredom in the world of PR; you’ll always have something interesting to do!
Main Public-Relations Agency Business Challenges
Staff concerns
If you’ve ever worked in an office setting, you know that your employees can be a source of stress for you. That’s especially true for larger companies with more than 50 employees. Many employers find that the key to keeping staff happy is to provide perks such as gym memberships and company picnics. Even if your company doesn’t offer such benefits, you can make sure your employees are happy by giving them room to grow in their careers and allowing them to work from home on occasion.
Client concerns
One common problem among agencies is losing major clients if they don’t meet deadlines or expectations. This is why it’s so critical to stay on top of schedules and keep track of all the details involved in each project, no matter how large or small it may be.
You’ll wear many hats
The person who takes telephone interview requests is also the person most likely to spend the night on deadline putting together press kits and spreadsheets, which means you won’t be delegating much work. You’ll need to be flexible enough to wear several different hats throughout your day while still coming up with creative ideas.
It can be lonely at the top
Managing an entire company on your own can get lonely at times, but having too many people around means lots of meetings and conference calls that keep you away from actually doing any work. Finding the right balance between solitude and collaboration is key to keeping your sanity in check.
Pros and Cons of Public-Relations Agency Business
Pros
- Ability to control your working hours.
- It is rewarding and helps you build relationships with people all over the country.
- You get to meet new people every day, expand your network and promote causes you believe in.
Cons
- Clients have a variety of needs and have become accustomed to getting instant results.
- Convincing clients to let you help them.
Best Public-Relations Agency Marketing Strategies
Telling a Story
The most effective public-relations agency marketing strategies are framed around a story. A story is more memorable than facts and figures and usually allows you to get your message across in much less time.
Stories also help build interest by creating suspense, which forces the audience to keep listening until they reach the “happy ending,” or the point where they can apply the information to their lives without feeling any sense of pressure or obligation.
To create stories, public-relations professionals often rely on narrative elements such as characters, settings, and conflict. By using these tools, you can appealingly present information about your client and make it easy for listeners to remember your message. Other narrative elements include plotlines, themes, and motifs.
Here are the steps to writing a successful public-relations campaign:
Step 1: Identify your audience. What do they care about and how do they think? What are their hopes and fears? What do they worry about in their everyday lives? Figure out what matters to them and use that as the foundation of your story.
Step 2: Build a framework by establishing your proposition, setting the stage and your characters. Make sure there’s enough detail to give substance to your story, but not so much that you lose the reader’s attention. Then describe the context in which your story takes place, the important events that take place, and finally, connect those events together into a conclusion that delivers a powerful call-to-action for your audience.
Step 3: Start with the basics. Begin by figuring out exactly what kind of story you want to tell, something that will resonate with your target audience. It might be a success story where you highlight how your product or service solved a major problem for someone, or it could be an entertaining anecdote that shows how someone used your service in an unexpected way.
Step 4: Make it personal. Find a real person to use as your main character in the story — this could be someone who got rich quickly thanks to your stock-picking skills or someone who was able to quit his job because of an invention he created with one of your products. Use real quotes from people in the story.
Social media outreach
For public-relations agency marketing strategies, you can build a good reputation by providing people with the latest news, trends, and updates on your company’s services. Social media is a great way to stay in touch with current and potential customers and clients.
The following tips will help you utilize social media for your public-relations agency marketing;
Focus on social media channels that potential clients use. If you want to reach a younger demographic, focus on Twitter and Instagram. If you want to reach business owners, focus on LinkedIn. Choose the channel your audience uses most and then focus on becoming the authority in your field by presenting useful information that isn’t available elsewhere.
Focus on content creation. Rather than just pushing out press releases, try creating original content for your social media channels. Create reports or infographics about industry trends and then share them with your followers. Repurpose blog posts into tweets and Facebook posts that increase your visibility and gain more followers.
Offer free advice or discounts. Ask your social media followers what their biggest problems are and then offer free advice to help solve them. Or offer a discount code for a product if people leave comments about an issue they’re having with it. This is a great way to drive engagement with your followers and get them more involved in your brand’s social media outreach campaign.
SEO
When it comes to marketing an agency, it’s essential to be known online. The Internet offers several ways to create a strong online presence and establish credibility. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most effective public-relations agency marketing strategies that can boost your visibility on search engines such as Google and Bing.
Tapping into the power of SEO involves optimizing your content for search engines. This means writing articles filled with relevant keywords, strategically placing keywords in your page titles, using meta descriptions, and publishing your articles on reputable sites.
The more you optimize your content for search engines, the greater the chances that you’ll achieve high rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). When potential customers conduct searches using terms related to your business, you want to show up on the first page of results.
Here are some tips to help you get started with SEO as a public-relations agency marketing strategy:
Research your audience. Take some time to research what people are searching for online. A variety of tools are available, including Google’s Keyword Planner tool, which allows you to identify how many people are searching for certain keywords on Google each month in your geographic area or across the globe.
Build links. To start out with, you will want to create links back to your website using PR as an agency marketing strategy. The most important thing is finding good quality content for these links.
Create a blog on your site. Blogs are important because they give search engines something fresh to index. Remember, search engines like fresh content. By blogging about topics related to your niche and posting new content on a regular basis, you will keep your site in front of the search engines. This is especially important if you have a lot of outdated content on your site.
Write press releases. Press releases are also very important for SEO because they share valuable information with the media about what’s happening in your field.
Tailored service
A good agency should be able to tailor its services to fit your individual needs. It should be able to provide a range of services from social media management to strategic planning to crisis communications, depending on what strengths are needed for each individual customer.
You can provide tailored service by having regular communication with your clients by:
Asking open-ended questions. A good way of getting information from your client is by asking him or her questions about his business. This will help you get answers that are useful for the company’s marketing campaign. Asking open-ended questions will help you gain more information about the client’s business.
Asking the client to describe their products and services in detail helps you understand what the company does better and this could be useful when writing press releases or other forms of content for them. For example, if a company sells video game consoles, ask them how the console works and what are some of the games available for it and so on. Get as much detail as possible from your client so that you can create content that will impress their target audience.
Responding to client needs. As a PR agency marketing strategy, responding to your client’s needs is key. You’ll want to learn about their business and what they need from the media coverage they receive. This will help you tailor your approach to what will work best for them. You should also be aware of any potential problems that may arise for your clients in the future. For example, if you’re working with a small technology company, you may want to start reaching out to reporters at major technology websites before you make big announcements so that they’re more receptive once your client makes those announcements.
Flexible pricing model
There are many different ways PR firms charge for their services, and some will give you more flexibility and control over what they charge than others. For example, if you’ve got a budget in mind, look for firms that will work within it.
Here are some tips for building flexible pricing into your agency marketing:
1. Think about the value of different services and tie them directly to specific results. For example, if you like to have an employee in place when working with a client, then charge a flat monthly fee plus a bonus for having an intern on staff.
2. Keep overhead low by working from home or within the office of another company in exchange for lower rent costs. If you pay someone $3,000 annually in rent, that can cut into your ability to offer valuable services at low rates. The more overhead you have, the less money you have to invest in future clients.
3. Don’t be afraid to pass on certain projects that are too small or don’t align with your goals as an agency.
Build Relationships
A successful PR agency will have strong relationships with the target audience. A PR expert or agency can help your company reach out in different ways and to a targeted audience.
A good PR campaign can help you gain visibility, enhance the reputation and increase demand for your products or service. The key to an effective relationship is trust and respect.
Establishing a relationship with a PR expert or agency involves building trust and respect.
Here are some tips on how to build relationships as a PR expert or agency:
Develop a relationship-centered campaign. You need to know your client, their business, and industry well before you develop a public relations campaign for them. Each campaign should be centered around the client’s business objectives, not on your goals. Be sure you understand the client’s products, services, and target market before designing a PR campaign for them. Doing this will help you create better content for the public.
Develop a good rapport with your clients. A positive relationship helps smooth out any problems that may occur during the course of an ongoing public relations campaign. It helps you present potential problems in an open manner so that both parties can work together to resolve them. Be honest about the challenges you face during campaign management, but also be mindful of how much information to share with your client.
Diversify your news sources. Public-relations professionals spend tons of time building relationships so they’ll have plenty of people on hand to help distribute their stories when the time is right — but if you don’t have an existing web of contacts that you can tap into when necessary, you need to start building one now.
Prepare a media kit
Prepare a media kit that includes everything anyone could want to know about your company, products, and services. Send out press releases, hold events and make sure that there is always something new for people to read about you available online. The more information there is available about your company, the easier it will be for people to recognize it as an expert in its field.
A good media kit can make all the difference when pitching a story. It can also be the difference between getting the story and not getting it. A lot of PR professionals struggle with how to put together a successful media kit, so I’ve compiled some tips that you can use as you put your PR agency’s marketing strategy into action.
Keep it simple. Don’t include anything in your media kit that you don’t really need or use. You’ll have plenty of time to talk about other things later in the process.
Think about the audience. A media kit for a consumer products company should look different than one for an oil and gas company, for instance. On top of that, think about who you’re selling to within each company, and make sure you tailor the contents accordingly.
Organize it logically. Include sections on who you are and what your company does, along with client lists and case studies to back up those claims. As you get more experienced, you may want to consider adding sections on pricing and methodology but start with a short, simple media kit first.
Be bold. You want your media kit to stand out from all of the others that land on an editor’s desk every day. Be sure to use colors that make your materials pop off of the page and include interesting graphics whenever possible. Also, include a bold call-to-action that encourages editors to contact you right away with any questions they may have about your business.
Don’t be afraid to print it out. While there are many great ways to distribute a media kit electronically these days, nothing beats the effectiveness of a printed copy.
The contents of the media kit should include information about the following:
1. The organization’s logo.
2. A list of all contact details including telephone numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, and website addresses.
3. The contact person responsible for handling inquiries from clients or customers.
4. A list of company personnel with their titles and positions in the organization.
5. A brief description of the organization’s services.
6. Company history including any recent developments or achievements.
7. Examples of published news articles written by the company’s personnel regarding their work experience with past clients or customers so as to give a glimpse of the kind of work being done at the organization.
8. Photo examples of previous projects done by the company in order to give potential clients an idea of what kind of work can be expected from them upon hiring them.
Final Thoughts
The best public-relations agency marketing strategies are simply the ones that work best for your business.
They’re the latest tactics, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use older tactics to promote your company well. It just depends on what works for you and how you market your business.
