What is the role of a PR agency?
“Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad.” – Richard Branson, in his 2013 book “Virgin Rebel: Richard Branson In His Own Words”.
For business owners and marketers, it helps to understand what the role of a PR agency is.
Look no further – here some key points to explain this:
- A (good) PR agency is essentially a consultancy that gives its client (the brand, the business or the person – if it’s personal PR) sound communications advice. Any company that hires a PR agency should be open to recommendations and having their ideas challenged – as that is what the best consultancies do. It’s important for the client and the PR firm to work together to achieve the best results!
A PR agency acts as a communications consultancy for your business. - The marketing team/person within your company will tend to manage the PR agency and the agency will act as an extension of the marketing team. For many companies, it’s a very useful resource, one that sits outside of your business and this helps with seeing the ‘bigger picture’ – something that can be challenging when you’re in-house and ‘in the thick of it’.
- Your business offer, audience, objectives and strategy can all be developed by a PR consultancy. In layman’s terms, this means defining what is it you do, who you want to reach, what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. An agency will work with you to drill down to what you want to gain from its support, before planning and delivering work that does just that!
- A PR agency will manage your brand’s reputation – through a mix of communications tools. This might be through earned media (e.g. articles and reviews), paid media (e.g. advertorials and sponsored articles), influencer engagement and speaker platforms. Some agencies might also include social media and other digital marketing services, like SEO, PPC, email marketing and so on. Learn more about the services we offer here.
- An agency will work on delivering great results, which will aim to fulfil its client’s objectives. Typically, PR consultancy results will be what we describe as ‘outputs’; the amount of earned pieces of coverage, coverage views and social media shares of said coverage. A good PR agency will measure in terms of ‘outcomes’ too, which are things like increase of traffic to a website through PR (through linked content) and a broad spread of links from high-ranking websites through to client sites. At Radioactive PR, we of course love the more traditional ‘outputs’ but for us ‘outcomes’ are a much meaningful and beneficial measure of success. See one of our PR campaign case studies and how we measured it here.
If you want to know more about how we could help you, please get in touch!