Six tips: How to choose the best communications agency for your business
Finding a good PR and marketing agency can be a challenge. You need a team that fits your culture, understands your business, delivers communications campaigns that serve your objectives, and proactively drives you to success.
Size doesn’t matter, it’s all about finding an agency that can get under the skin of your organisation to deliver the results you need.
We’ve compiled our top six tips for choosing the right agency for your business. Have any questions? Contact our team on 01392 680740 or via info@absoluteprandmarketing.com.
1. Relationships
Your organisation is the sum of the people within it. In business – as in life – relationships are critical: how we engage with people, talk to them and, most importantly, how we listen.
This is especially true in PR and marketing. Your business needs an agency team that will listen to you and understand your business. They must fully grasp your ethos, your business objectives and what your customers want. When they have absorbed this information, your agency team can reach out to new audiences on your behalf, become an ambassador for your business and think like an employee.
2. Location, location, location
Long gone are the days when big agencies in the city were the ‘go to place’ for PR and marketing. High speed internet can connect creative people with businesses anywhere in the world now.
Brilliant agencies can pop up in any location, staffed by driven, creative individuals who benefit from surroundings that inspire. What’s more, without the expense of swanky city offices, these agencies have lower overheads, meaning fewer costs are passed on to their clients.
Many businesses prefer the personal and local input that smaller agencies outside London and larger cities offer. In fact, regional agencies often have a better understanding of the broader communications environment as many of their staff have previously worked in London. This means they not only have the ‘bigger agency experience’ and ‘city contacts’, but they’re adept at providing creative thinking for both regional and national campaigns.
3. Creative communications
Knowledge and experience should be par for the course, but the best PR and marketing agencies stand out for their creativity. The team should be proactive in finding solutions to problems, looking for new communications channels and innovating in their field.
An agency that offers to maintain the status quo for you isn’t working hard enough. Look for a dynamic agency team brimming with excitement that can’t wait to share their ideas with you.
4. Strategic thinking
Creative and novel ideas are all very well, but your prospective agency should also be able to directly connect the activity they propose to your business objectives. A PR stunt or social media campaign might be impressive, but if it doesn’t deliver on those business objectives, it’s a waste of your budget and resources.
A cute kitten video might clock up thousands of shares by cat lovers on Facebook and produce lovely-looking social media reports. But if you’re an agricultural equipment wholesaler, that won’t cut it: your prospective audience is more likely to be browsing key trade media titles than cooing over cute animal videos.
5. Experience speaks loudly
What relevant experience can the agency team bring to your business? Are they au fait with traditional marketing tools as well as evolving digital techniques? Rather than trying to gather a range of expertise internally, with an agency on your side, you have the skills and experience of a much broader team of professionals.
To be sure that you’re working with the right agency, ask them to share examples of past successes and client testimonials to support what they say. We pride ourselves on our experience and it’s our successes and recommendations from satisfied clients that help us to expand year on year.
6. Relationships
You’ve heard the saying ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’. Successful PR and marketing rests on relationships with clients, their customers and stakeholders, the media, and other influencers. But it’s more than just name dropping; it’s about the ability to strike up relationships with key audiences, knowing what makes good news and content, tailoring the story in just the right way to grab attention, and headlines. Our relationships, and our ability to generate engaging copy and content, means we can target the correct on and offline platforms, helping you to engage with your target audiences, bringing the right influencers within your reach and opening up key markets for your business.
There’s no doubt about it. Finding the right PR and marketing agency can be a challenge, but if you follow these top six tips you’ll not go far wrong. The best agency for your business could be just a call away.
For advice or to find out how Absolute PR & Marketing could meet your business objectives, contact us today on 01392 680740.