10 tips for building a successful relationship with your PR agency

Imagine if you had the ten most important tips for building a successful relationship with your PR agency handy at a very early stage. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful? You would have avoided a lot of mistakes and misunderstandings that happened all the way. A playbook would have made your life much easier. 

Building relationships with your PR team can be challenging at times, but there are ways to make the relationship a lot easier and more productive. That is why we’re bringing you simple 10 tips for building a successful relationship with your PR agency. 

1. Define clear goals and expectations

It’s important to set goals for both yourself and your PR agency at the beginning of your relationship. This is the first and most important tip for building a successful relationship with your PR agency. However, it is equally important to be realistic about what you expect from the agency. Make sure the roles are clearly defined on both sides. Remember that too many tasks may lead to inefficiencies and problems delivering the main outcomes.

Start with listening to your PR team’s objections carefully. For instance, there may be times they are not able to get you enough coverage. Now, you need to understand the reason behind it. Interestingly, they may not be always at the fault. Maybe, they don’t have enough information from your internal stakeholders to pitch more effectively.

Secondly, you can’t expect a creative agency to be a magic wand. They are not fortune tellers or miracle workers. They are not a one-size-fits-all solution for your problems and challenges, and they are definitely not replacements for your internal team.

Thirdly, in order to make this relationship work, agencies must also do their part by being honest with you about their limitations and capabilities so that both parties can create realistic expectations from the get-go.

2. Clarity on your business objectives

When you are considering hiring a PR agency, make sure it understands what you want to accomplish as a business. It’s important to have aspirational goals, but a PR professional’s job is to listen to your challenges and create a plan that will help you meet those goals in new, measurable ways. Hence, ensure they clearly understand your business objectives.

3. Discuss the values of trust and transparency

The one thing that your relationship with your PR agency has in common with any other relationship, is that it’s built on trust. In order to create lasting and successful relationships with others, you need to first be able, to be honest, open, and transparent. Similarly, the PR agency has to come true to the reality on the ground and refrain from giving false commitments. Both parties should be able to communicate with you as equal partners in the business. Building a successful relationship with a PR agency largely depends on having the same values of trust and transparency.

4. Have a long-term approach

PR is a long-term relationship, which involves trust and genuine communication. In fact, the PR agency should be an extension of your internal team. In our experience, a lot of brands and agencies don’t have this. They often come in with short-term goals and are not thinking about the long term. You need to think about where you want your brand to be five years from now and which campaigns will get them there.

A way your can develop their long-term vision is by asking three questions:

What does your business look like in 5 years’ time?

How would you describe it?

What are your competitors doing differently than what they were doing 5 years ago, who are the key players in this space now? Then we ask how we can differentiate ourselves from those competitors, who will still be around 5 years from now.

5. Be patient

Being patient is a virtue, necessity, and skill. It’s a choice that we all make every day. Some people find it easy while others struggle with it. Patience is not something you’re born with—it’s something you learn over time through practice and experience, just like any other skill (e.g., patience is an art!). This is especially true in the case of PR agencies. In reality, it takes time for an agency to understand your vision and get you those key media coverages.

6. Assign a PR person to liaise with your PR agency

A PR person can serve as the critical link between you and the agency. We recommend that at least one person from each company be involved with the assignment of tasks and communication, in order to maintain direct oversight of the project.

7. Proactively communicate with your PR agency

Proactive communication with your PR agency will keep you in the loop, and informed about all of the exciting opportunities that are available for your business. You’ll know about new opportunities and successes as they happen, so you can be ready to seize them when they arise.

7. Share the workload and get involved

One of the biggest mistakes we see agencies make is not involving their clients in the process. They think you are buying a product and therefore do not need to be involved with the project manager or have any involvement at all. This is not true, as you are paying for a service and that means you should be informed about what is happening during each stage of your campaign.

To avoid this pitfall, make sure your agency sends you reports on the work they are doing throughout the project, even if it doesn’t directly involve you at that moment. You should also be encouraged to provide feedback on these updates so that your agency has an idea of what direction it should take next.  Create an open dialogue about what works, what doesn’t, and how you can maximize your budget by understanding their process.

Your PR agency is your partner, working with you to develop a successful campaign. That means they should be able to easily access the information they need to do their job—and you should be able to reach them when needed. A partner agency will come prepared with creative ideas and plans of action, and an understanding of your organization’s goals.

8. Conduct workshops and team-building sessions

One of the best ways to build a successful PR agency is to conduct workshops and team-building exercises. It’s best to learn about your agency by asking them questions via fun activities. Through these workshops, both parties can discuss common areas of concern openly and honestly.

 9. Allow room for new ideas

Let your PR agency be creative and use their skills, they know best how to communicate with media and target audiences. If you allow the agency to do its job, it’ll be able to give you some of the best work possible. This means allowing them to make mistakes, fail, learn and be creative.

If you let your agency take risks then they will deliver better work for you in the long run. They won’t be afraid of being innovative and thinking outside of the box about how best to communicate with your audience!

10. Allow time to implement the existing plan

Your PR agency is not a one-trick pony. Don’t ask your PR agency for a new strategy every week from your PR agency; give them time to implement the existing plan. Don’t ask for a new plan or campaign every time you get depressed about your current performance.

11. Update the PR agency on current developments, milestones

 It’s important to keep your PR team in the loop on company milestones and developments. Often, they can come up with stories that would never occur to you as an internal employee because you don’t have the same level of perspective on what’s happening. 

Conclusion

We hope that this article has given you some new insights on how to make your PR agency relationship better. The key takeaway here is that the relationship between agencies and brands should be a partnership, not a master-servant relationship. It takes effort from both sides, but when you work together it can be mutually beneficial for both parties.