Looking into hiring a PR agency? The options can be overwhelming. (We’re a bit biased on this front, so if you just want to cut to the chase, maybe check out our PR agency's service and we can just walk you through what we do.)
Still here? Okay, let’s do this. It seems like big agencies have lots of resources, so they can do a lot of things at the same time (at a higher cost), right?
Then again, specialized boutique PR agencies can offer you exactly what you want (ie. more media coverage for your brand) without complicating things with a lot of extras that might be nice to have, but aren't must-have options.
Which kind of PR agency is actually going to get you the results you want?
Do you want big PR results? Or do you want to hire a big PR agency? (These are not the same things)
There are legitimate reasons for wanting to go with a big PR agency. And then there are… less legitimate reasons.
Need your PR agency always on the clock, on-call for an emergency update at midnight? Or maybe you work at a government agency, bank or other ‘institutional’ organization that wants the ‘gravitas’ that comes from a big PR agency. Maybe you’ve got a ‘nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft’ mindset and think bigger equals better.
Alternatively, maybe you want to outsource all of your marketing efforts under one roof. A giant PR agency with a co-equal advertising department, social media managers, influencer accounts, personnel on multiple continents and other bits and pieces, all under one roof? Do you need simultaneous news coverage in New York, Tokyo and Dubai, with full translation services for all of your announcements? Maybe that’s what you’re looking for?
Fair enough.
That said, in our experience as a boutique PR agency, if you’re happy to plan ahead with your PR team, and collaborate with them, no midnight calls are needed. You can get a lot of media coverage without dozens of staff and big shiny offices in New York and L.A.
For instance, we had a New York-based client who hired a big PR firm to handle the east coast, and Mind Meld PR to handle the west coast. The big east coast agency’s company (and retainer) was more than double our size. But at the end of the engagement, the client saw we tripled the other agency’s results.
And we’ve experienced this multiple times over the years, punching above our weight and eliminating bigger PR agencies (with bigger teams) in a bake-off.
How did we beat them?
The business model at the big agency was like what you’d find at a lot of big agencies. That business model is about maximizing revenue for the company by charging a lot, but not necessarily getting results.
At a big PR agency with many personnel in a big Mad Men-style office, you’ll be assigned a senior person who will be running your account. They’ll attend all of the meetings, and oversee the work done by their team. But the actual day to day of building media lists, pitching clients, and setting up interviews? That will be handled by a team of junior staff or interns.
Now, junior people are great. It’s… possible. And interns absolutely can work out. But when the least experienced people are doing the actual work, you tend to get problems, whatever the industry.
Small, but nimble. A boutique PR agency can give you the best earned media coverage
Our PR agency does public relations for a lot of startups. These clients often take a bootstrapped, nimble, data-driven approach to building their business. As a small PR agency, we operate in the same way. We bring talented, seasoned PR professionals into the effort, with a highly targeted and creative approach that gets results every month.
Boutique PR agencies don’t have to go through layers of bureaucracy before making small decisions. They can often move from the creative stage to execution a lot faster. This streamlined approach means you get more value for your retainer.
In our day to day, if we find a great angle for your company in the morning, we can write a pitch, build a media list, and start personalized outreach to journalists by the afternoon. This means that you’ll have the opportunity to be an expert commentator on what’s going on in your industry.
What should you look for in a boutique PR agency? Media coverage, of course.
On our first day of working with a new PR client, they still weren’t over their bad experience they had with their old PR agency. Usually, a PR kickoff is a fun time, with lots of ideas bouncing around and high-octane enthusiasm for what’s about to happen. In this case, the PR client kicked off the meeting with some finger-wagging and stern looks.
“Our last PR agency, a big agency out of New York, would give us a spreadsheet with 100-plus line items of activity tracked in 15-minute increments. They’d say they put 380 hours into our account this month, reached out to 400 journalists, made 160 phone calls. To be honest none of that mattered to us. We wanted media coverage and that’s what they couldn’t report on, because they had very little to give us, aside from a couple of blog posts and a news article in some outlet no one had ever heard of. Is that what we can expect from you?”
Nope. That’s not what a client should expect from a boutique PR agency that knows how to get results.
The truth is that many of the bigger agencies define themselves with input. The amount of hours worked, journalists pitched, or the number of staff on the account.
I can’t speak for all boutique PR agencies, but we tend to be more concerned with actual PR results, not input. In other words, how many times does your company get into the news?
For instance, we worked recently with a cloud optimization company that told us that their big old PR agency just waited until they thought they had news so they could write a press release. The problem? The company (our future client) didn’t actually know when they had news. And the big old PR agency they hired was just waiting for the company to spoon-feed them ideas.
It didn’t work out for either side. So the client came to us…
Our boutique PR agency took a more nimble, proactive approach. We booked some briefings, investigated the company’s own white papers and discovered their service was saving their clients as much as 50 percent on their type of services. The company had grown by over 1000 percent in the past 12 months. But they hadn’t told anyone, including their old PR agency, or us! They were sitting on a PR goldmine and didn’t know it until we did some digging. And once we started pitching, we started getting media coverage for them the same week.
What about ‘pay to play’ PR agencies (that offer paid media instead of earned media)
Lately, we’ve seen a bumper crop of AI-driven, super-cheap pay-to-play media agencies offering guaranteed, paid media coverage. It’s not a boutique PR agency. It’s a whole other kind of PR agency, almost like paid-media coverage as a service.
Thanks to a boom in AI tech, brazen promises and cut-rate pricing, this PR model is starting to take off… and leave a whole lot of people very disappointed.
(We’ve experienced the flip-side of that: sad, disgruntled CEOs and heads of marketing who come to us as a kind of rescue squad to clean up the mess left by these new AI-fuelled PR sweatshops. More about that, later.)
What’s the problem? These relatively low-cost, pay-to-play PR agencies say they’ll work with clients to write articles (or more honestly, just let ChatGPT do the work), and then pay an outlet to publish it. Sounds easy, right?
Almost too good to be true? Yeah, about that…
The downside of working with ‘pay to play’ agencies is that the coverage you get doesn’t enhance your brand’s reputation. Kind of defeats the purpose of paying for PR, no?
Everyone reading the glowing article about your company sees the ‘sponsored’ banner up top, and they dismiss it as advertising.
If you want real journalists to write earned media about your company, which will increase your brand’s reputation, you need to look elsewhere.
Thinking back to a recent experience of working with a company that got burned recently by a ‘pay-to-play’ agency, I sympathized with what they’d been through. After all, heads of marketing will try all kinds of ways to move the needle. The company was testing out that paid media model because it seemed like a lower-cost, sure-fire way to get quick results.
The pay-to-play agency charged their clients thousands of dollars a month. For that, the company got a few pieces of media coverage in recently-build news websites that had similar names to the big outlets everyone knows (eg. The New York Tribune instead of The New York Times). Worse, the stories seemed to be written by ChatGPT, churned out without any actual journalist interviewing anyone.
(There was a weird factor to this: while the stories seemed to be written by AI, because of the speed, we weren’t sure. There were basic errors of spelling and grammar in the stories that the pay-to-play agency had gotten for our future client. We speculated that maybe a human writer had ‘edited’ the AI-pieces to try to improve them, but had just wound up making the articles even worse.)
Now, there was one outlier in the mix last month who was trying a bake-off between our PR agency and the pay-to-play PR agency that used AI extensively to write up bad articles in weird outlets… and we lost that fight.
Their head of marketing explained the situation to me: “I know the pay-to-play articles aren’t good quality. They’re basically unreadable. You know it, I know it. But my CEO? And our CRO, who’s his best bud? They don’t actually read these articles. They say they don’t have time. From their perspective, they see articles are coming out fast and in multiple outlets - and yes, I’ve never heard of these outlets, either. But they think investors don’t read articles, either. They think no one actually pays attention to the news… which is weird because they’re the ones who asked me to find a PR agency to get us media coverage."
Okay, then. Not really a fit for us. And not be all sour-grapes about it, but I don't see their strategy paying off long-term, or even short-term...
If you’re looking for credibility for your brand, paid media just isn’t the same as earned media. From what we’ve seen, a small, boutique PR agency can deliver far better results than an automated paid media content farm.
Looking to hire a boutique PR agency?
Mind Meld PR can help your brand get into the news. Get a better bang for your PR agency buck. Contact the Mind Meld PR agency today