Blog courtesy of Bridge Global Strategies

Getting the word out about your startup business can be challenging. That’s where the PR professionals come in. If you’ve decided to hire a PR firm, here are five things you should expect from your newest brand advocates.

Counseling and Pushback
Entrepreneurs face enormous pressure to oversee everything, if not to do it themselves. PR agencies can take a big burden off your shoulders by advising you on what to focus on and what to forgo, what works and what doesn’t. As a founder, CEO, or chief marketing officer of a fledgling startup, you can get the best value from hiring a public relations agency by asking for input and advice on your marketing and communications activities rather than deciding how to meet your needs on your own. Don’t only use your PR team as foot soldiers in your battle for visibility. You need to look for a firm that can provide a senior team leader who can act as a five-star general in advising you, the commander in chief. You should fully expect pushback from PR professionals on your own ideas about what strategies your company should pursue and when. You won’t always agree with the agency, but it’s to your benefit to keep an open mind and seriously consider the advice you get; after all, you’re paying for their expertise.

Upfront Planning
Ultimately, you are the person who knows your brand and your target audience better than anyone else, and this is one of the first things you should articulate to your PR firm.  You know what you have to offer and what you’re trying to achieve, but you may not be as clear on the specifics of which audiences you should target and what the key messages are that you need to convey to them.  You may not know how to achieve the goals or what it will cost. Ask the agency for a practical and affordable plan to meet your goals. Don’t expect to get one for free as part of a proposal – strategic planning and counselling are professional services that comes at a cost. If you ask for a PR plan as part of a proposal, you rarely get a plan that is practical and detailed enough to help you much. At the proposal stage, the agency doesn’t know you or your company well enough to give you a spot-on proposal.

The first step in starting any agency-client relationship is a briefing and planning session. During this session, which lasts a half-day to a whole day, our agency always asks for a thorough briefing on the client’s plans, what the client sees as the company’s or product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and how this ensuing “SWOT” chart compares with the competition’s SWOT chart. This discussion leads to a positioning statement – how the client’s company or product should be positioned in the marketplace. In turn, this leads to refining the best audiences for the company, as well as developing key messages aimed at those audiences. These are the foundations for any communications plan. You may feel you’ve already determined all of this and don’t need a PR agency to help with it. However, any good agency will want to walk you through these steps to make sure they agree with the conclusions you’ve come to and help you tweak the outcomes so they’ll be most effective when used in public relations.

Budgeting 
Another planning essential is to enter the conversation with an agency with an idea of what you can afford to pay. Find out at the start what services you could receive with your proposed budget. Most importantly, don’t make the agency try and guess your budget.
Many people are afraid that if they tell agencies what their budgets are, the agencies will come back with proposals that use every cent just because it’s in the budget. This isn’t a fruitful way to approach a budgeting discussion with an agency. Anyone can come up with a wonderful, creative plan if the budget is very generous. But what use is that if you can’t afford the budget? By the same token, if the agency underestimates what you can spend, the budget will be lower but won’t give you the momentum you could get with a larger budget. It’s a waste of both your time and the agency’s time to pussyfoot around on the question of what your budget actually is.

Goal Setting
It’s paramount to keep your goals realistic.  Hiring a PR firm doesn’t translate to a spike in leads in the first two weeks and rarely results in a feature in the New York Times after a month. That being said, the savvy startup CEO should come to a PR firm with concrete, quantifiable objectives. Often, these objectives consist of increasing key performance indicators such as page views per month, increases in sales leads, or social media interactions (such as comments on Facebook and on Linkedin group postings, new followers, retweets on Twitter, etc).The agency and the client should work together to decide on what the goals should be.

Reporting and Measurement
You and your agency must agree on a way to measure whatever goals you end up setting for your business. Web analytics will be helpful, and for budget-conscious startups, Google Analytics is a free tool that makes analyzing these trends easy. The agency can provide regular statistics on your social media audience. Furthermore, you should have a way to measure sales leads and see if they spike after the publication of any article that mentions your company or products.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

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