Paying a PR agency to promote your brand sounds appealing but expensive. Learn the better way to do PR.
What Should A PR Agency Do?
PR agencies have one job, to raise your company’s profile. This allows you to reach new audiences and drive traffic to your offers. If you are considering using a PR agency to spread brand awareness, think again. Unless you’re already visible, successful and have a great story to tell, hiring a PR agency is expensive and inefficient.
Here are three reasons why an agency might not work for you (and what you should do instead).
You become dependent and hooked on spending money.
Can you get publicity by working with an agency? Probably. But it usually comes with a low return on investment, particularly for small businesses. Plus, using the services of a PR agency means you are relying on them for all your media coverage. So, when you terminate the contract (which you will at some point), any potential for coverage is immediately lost, and the only option is to ask for their services again. And on goes the cycle. Using an agency puts a third party between you, the passionate expert, and the potential audience. Trust me; there’s no one better to PR your business than you.
As a journalist, I can tell you that journos have a love-hate relationship with PR agencies; depending on their sector, this can be more hate than love.
PR agencies are not always selective in their approach
If you’re considering using a PR agency, you need to know that they often work for large businesses – some very large. So, when they contact the media, they want to ‘sell’ the business they represent. Their bottom line depends on it. But if the communication between agencies and journalists (which is usually done by email) isn’t suitable for the journalist’s magazine or website, they get deleted, most without even being opened.
This happens as PR agencies very often send the same press release or story pitch to many media outlets in a scattergun approach, which is a big no-no when it comes to working with the media. They want to know you are only sending it to them so they don’t have to compete for the best stories. You will reap the benefits when you make it easy for the media to feature you. The scattergun approach is the opposite of this, which is why the journalist/PR agency relationship can be strained.
Don’t assume they have high-quality connections.
PR agencies can be helpful if a journalist is looking for a quick story to fill some space, and occasionally it might bring the opportunity to interview an otherwise inaccessible celebrity, in which case we might respond.
However, some don’t have a relationship with the journalists they are approaching, and the most essential thing to have when working with any media outlet is good, trusting relationships. Instead, they buy media databases and use the contact details on there, and don’t worry about where they are sending the email. The journalist might not even cover the type of stories the agency sends press releases about. They don’t have time to research each one to make sure. If you’ve looked at any of my content, you know that doing research is a big part of a media strategy.
Here’s what you’ll need to do instead.
It’s simple, really.
Journalists are much more likely to open an email from the business owner rather than a PR agency, especially if that person understands the secrets to producing a successful story pitch. So, the answer is learning to do the PR work yourself and creating a manageable media strategy. A strategy that doesn’t take up all your precious time. Yes, it will take energy to get everything you need in place. Still, once you’ve done this, you’ll be in a great position to start using media coverage to quickly grow your business, build relationships with key connections in the media, and have more control over who you offer your brand to.
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