How to avoid the three common PR pitfalls agencies face

A lot of you will have experienced what we call “PR envy”. You’ve picked up a copy The Drum magazine and seen your competitor in there. Front and centre. Ping! A WhatsApp arrives from your boss with a photo of the article reading: “Why aren’t we in here?” Gulp.

80% of business service decision-makers prefer to find information about companies via articles rather than adverts, so a well placed article can make all the difference for creating inbound leads to your agency. However, getting your agency’s PR function set up is tricky; we’ve heard stories of agencies that have spent tens of thousands of pounds on PR agency fees, without getting a single piece of coverage.

What many companies don’t realise is that you don’t need a PR agency to get coverage – you can handle PR all in-house, no problem.

Learning from our own mistakes (there have been a few along the road), here are three pitfalls to avoid when setting up your agency’s PR function:

Procrastination kills

Don’t worry too much about the exact wording of your positioning or key messages. Quite often, PR is prioritised after someone writes a vision and mission statement, and agonises over every detail of it.

Wanting a perfect script is natural, we work in a creative world. But the media won’t report on your news word-for-word to match the exact story of your message – you can use advertising for that.

There are only three things that a decent piece of coverage needs to communicate:

• What you do
• A reason to believe (e.g. a case study, or an interesting perspective on things)
• A key point that differentiates you

If you only hit off the first two, you’re not doing a bad job. Also, a link to your website helps with SEO, so don’t be afraid to ask.

The main point here is to avoid over-thinking the precise wording of your proposition; in our experience, this can be a bottleneck route to getting results.

The media are not interested in you

This sounds harsh, but let me explain. If you look at the typical media profile of a big agency, you’ll see a fair amount of coverage consistently published throughout the year. But if you do a deep dive into the topics of these articles, you’ll find that the majority are about the agency’s clients, not their corporate news.

The key to success here is to get the account handlers bought into the PR process, and ‘sell it’ to clients in a way that celebrates joint success.

Sync up

90% of companies that win a sale are included for consideration at ‘front of mind’ stage, so creating a broad level of awareness of your agency is important for effective PR.

You’ll probably be working on a content programme and a conference schedule, and a typical decision making unit for your agency’s services will consist of around three to four people – if you can hit each one with the same message, you’re much more likely to convert business.

Adrian Ma is managing director of Fanclub PR.