“Good news! We got the green light from our CEO. Please send over the agreement. We’re ready to move forward with your PR agency. But, uh, just remember what we talked about right? We’ve signed on to a long commitment, but we want to see PR results, fast.”
Well, okay then.
As soon as I sign a new PR agency client, I know we’re on the clock. I can practically hear time ticking away. The new PR client wants results fast? Well, that’s what they’re going to get… if they can work with us.
What does that mean, exactly? Well, PR isn’t just an automatic thing where you “press go” and the magic happens. If you want to increase your chances of some quick wins, then PR agencies like ours have an urgent need for speed from their PR clients.
I don’t mean that you as the client need to come up with a PR strategy fast. (That’s our job.) You don’t have to write a press release fast. (That’s also our job.) You don’t have to come up with a media list fast, or pitch a whole bunch of journalists fast, or follow up fast. (Check. Check. Check. We got this.)
What do we need? Your expertise. Reporters have questions. You have answers for those reporters (on or off the record). And if we’re fast, we’ve got a good chance of getting your company in the story (and edging out any Johnny-come-lately’s).
How fast (exactly) do you need to be to get results with your PR agency?
Let’s say we’ve gotten a response from a reporter from our news pitch. They like the pitch, but before they create a story, they just need a bit more information to round this out.
We go to our client and they respond with this: “Got it! Our team is discussing this now and we should be able to get back to you tomorrow or maybe Friday at the latest.”
We literally get responses sometimes from clients like this. And it makes us sad.
What’s an ideal response time for a reporter?
20 minutes or less is great!
1 hour is… okay.
2 hours is pushing it a bit.
5 hours in, you may have lost your chance.
Next day? You must be the kind of person who likes high stakes gambling in Las Vegas.
End of the week (or the following week)? If you’re going to be that late, maybe PR isn’t something you should be spending your marketing budget on. Because you’re going to lose 99 percent of opportunities.
Why do reporters really need answers so fast? (How can they even create a story without you?)
Reporters are used to juggling tight deadlines and multiple stories every day. That means reporters are not on your timeline, you’re on theirs. They need to impress their editor by being productive.
If you’re not fast enough, they will find another expert source to fill out their story so they can fill their quota of articles for that day.
“But no one knows as much about this topic as me!” you might think. You might even be right about that. But the reporter has a story to file and if you’re not available, they’ll find someone else who can feed them some information that fits that story.
This is just part of basic PR tactics that get you coverage. Delay, and you not only lose the chance to get your story out there. You might also be burning your ability to ever reach out to that reporter again. (They’re thinking, “Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice…”).
What are the consequences? Basically, sabotaging your own brand-building efforts.
You hired your PR agency to be effective at getting you media coverage on your behalf, right? The PR agency has the “established relationships” with reporters that your company thought they needed. Okay…
But if the PR agency’s job turns into coming up with creative excuses for unreasonable delays, then eventually, the PR associate working on your account is getting burned. You’ve just made it harder to get a win out of that reporter. But you’ve also made it tough for your PR agency to get a win out of that reporter for any of their other clients.
What information does your PR agency need to get fast results?
Give us a little, we can do a lot. It doesn’t have to be a big, onerous process.
Sometimes, just a few talking points or a couple of bullet points are enough.
A quick five-minute chat with an expert from your team—be it the CEO, marketing, or sales—can give us what we need.
In fact, you might already have the information needed on hand without any detailed briefings needed - and all you need to do is throw us a link! You already have materials like case studies, white papers, or past interviews we can review. If it’s already on your website, show us. If it’s an internal file being shared only among your marketing team, well, your PR team is an extension of your marketing team. Share that link or slide deck or whatever.
What if you need to go into more depth with your PR agency to really dig into a topic so your PR pro has what they need to tell the story properly? Okay, then you take that time. You can get through a lot in 30 minutes for one topic. An hour could probably cover a whole series of topics.
Why do companies have trouble giving the PR agency what they need?
There’s a few common problems we’ve seen that can prevent a company from being fast, so they can get fast results from their PR agency.
Too many cooks in the kitchen. The company is so enthusiastic about bringing on a PR agency (maybe for the very first time) that they get everyone on the team involved. The whole C-suite joins the meeting, along with the head of sales, head of marketing, the regulatory compliance officer, the accountant, the boss’ spouse (Yes, this has actually happened, with several different clients), etc.
That many people involved in a brainstorming session or editorial review process is just a recipe for disaster. For different pitches or press releases, you might need just one or at most, two experts from the team to provide essential information.
It’s often true that two brains are better than one, but this approach doesn’t really scale.
Micro-management of PR. We have a PR process that works for getting clients earned media coverage. We also have the people – top notch writers, former journalists, who know how to create and pitch stories effectively.
Sometimes the CEO, head of marketing or a particular marketing copywriter will edit, then rewrite a press release from scratch. We’ll take a peek in at the new drafts in a Google doc and see inscrutable industry jargon layered into everything. Hours pass, then days, then… well, the pitch never gets out because this person can’t let go of the piece they were perfecting. After all that time has passed, the pitch is no longer relevant or newsworthy. Total wasted effort.
Mastering the art of letting go is hard, but there’s a reason why you hired the experts. Let them work (and use our easy press release editing process because it works).
The silent treatment. This can happen either in a “too many cooks” situation or with a micromanager. Either way, they spend a lot of time overwriting our PR pitch. Aside from the time delay, in almost every case, the quality of the pitch goes down (whether from inserting industry jargon, or marketing-speak, or unnecessarily-bureaucratic legalese). Then they present their “improvements” and want us to send out the pitch.
Except… we can’t. We just can’t send out a bad pitch. It hurts our credibility. So now we have to spend even more time fixing up the “improvements” so that the pitch might actually get picked up somewhere.
Instead of working in silos, it’s often better to just hop on a quick call and have the client ask a simple question (if they truly wish to “improve” a PR pitch): “Why did you do it this way?”
In most cases, the client will find out that we are indeed aligned (on brand strategy, technical nuances or what have you). In the rare case that the PR associate actually did make an error, this is still quicker. It may seem like effort to talk to your PR pro, but you can usually hash out in two minutes what might take 2 hours or more to resolve internally.
Ready to get fast results with your PR agency?
Our PR team knows how to work smoothly with our PR clients to get great earned media results, fast. We’re here to guide you every step of the way, so let’s set the stage for success together. Contact the Mind Meld PR agency today.