Company founders or owners, or in-house marketers within an organisation, might want to know when it’s the right time to use a PR agency.
Hiring an agency is an investment but ultimately, PR support can help to grow your business.
Here are just some ways it can help:
- To build awareness: the aim of any PR agency is to drive awareness around your business. This is done by securing visibility in places (e.g. media outlets and influencers) that will reach your target audience.
- To grow your customer base: building the awareness / visibility around your brand ultimately means you will have more exposure in front of your target audience. As a result of this should grow your customer base.
- To improve reputation and / or change brand positioning: the PR activity to support your brand can shape or improve the reputation and / or the brand’s positioning through a strategic use of communication – whether that’s the messaging used, the channels, or so on.
- Increase traffic to your company’s website / boost SEO: PR agency support can increase traffic to your website, as well as boost your site’s SEO. Much of our support for clients does this as we will run campaigns that look to secure coverage on high-ranking websites (e.g. national news outlets) with a link through to your site.
Some questions to ask yourself before hiring a PR agency:
- Are you ready? Is your business (whether it offers a product or a service) ready to be shown to the world? We speak to all sorts of companies and sometimes they’re not quite ready for PR (e.g. still developing the product/business model or have absolutely no call to action – like not yet even having a website). Though that’s not to say that if your business hasn’t launched yet we can’t help – quite often we will support clients just before a launch to make everything is ready when it does!
- Do you have something interesting to say? If you believe in your business, you probably will think you have something interesting to say. A PR agency can help you to drill down to what bit of your company will be of interest to the media and your audience.
- What’s your budget? Obviously, if you hire an agency it will cost money but it is an investment in your business to support it’s growth. Be realistic about what you can really afford and share this with the agency you’re speaking to.
If you’re interested in what other questions you should be asking before hiring a public relations consultancy – take a look at this blog post.
Want to know how we could support your business? We’d love to hear from you, so please get in touch!