How to get the best results from your PR agency

As a client, you might think your agency is there to serve you, but such an attitude won’t help you get the best PR work. Jon Clements, partner at PR agency Staniforth, believes it is important not to think of yourself as the “boss“ and as your agency as the “subordinate“. He says: “Traditionally, the client is the one with the money who has the power over suppliers. However, it’s only a successful, win-win collaboration between the client and the supplier that makes a campaign work. My contention is that the client is actually an investor, the agency an adviser and the real client is the campaign objective, to which all parties are answerable. Obviously, the inanimate campaign can’t speak for itself, so its subordinates must talk openly, fairly and respectfully to each other.”

Clements suggest that agencies and clients divest themselves of the traditional “the customer is always right” versus “but we are the consultants” power struggle: “Yes, the one paying the bill may be carrying the bulk of the financial risk; but it can’t achieve their objectives alone and surely it’s preferable to have the helping hand of someone whose other hand isn’t behind their back giving the single, middle finger.”

It might seem obvious that it is good practice to work in collaboration, but there are many instances where clients have forgotten this rule, and decided to lord it over their agencies. Heather Baker, managing director of agency TopLine Communications, can think of a few examples: “While the vast majority of the organisations we have worked with are models of good client behaviour, we’ve had to deal with a few stroppy clients in our time. This has included everything from asking us to deliver a complete strategy before signing a contract, to assuming an account manager is happy to double as a personal assistant, to not showing up at a meeting with a journalist. I’ve found that in many instances, these situations can be avoided by establishing boundaries and setting expectations at the start of a contract, so that account time can be effectively spent on securing coverage, rather than wasted on unnecessary admin.”

Baker offers other suggestions for getting the best results from your agency, including: being available; being amenable; not expecting free work; and inviting the agency in to your business.

Richard Ellis, communications director at PRCA, offers four more tips for getting the most out of your agency. First Ellis points out that getting the best out of your agency isn’t the same as getting the most out of your agency. If the team working on the account are stretched, rushed and bullied they will often lose their creative spark and focus on volume of activity, not effectiveness of activity.

Ellis’s tips for getting the best from your agency:

1. Have a clear brief with defined objectives – if you don’t have clear objectives and measurement, both you and the agency will likely have very different views of success and the relationship is more likely to end in tears than not.

2. Agree a working pattern – a weekly conference call to go through an action grid with quarterly meetings often works but it depends on the project and personalities. Regular contact means it is easy to ensure progress and identify any potential issues before they become problems.

3. Don’t be the bottleneck –  the agency will need your input signing off releases and creative concepts or for interviews with the media, for example. Often these will be time sensitive.

4. Pay on time – this is particularly important for small agencies who are more likely to experience cash-flow issues.

Written by Daney Parker.