How Companies and their PR firms get along

PR Hack: What to Expect, What to Do

PR firms could do much better at communicating with and educating new clients to ensure their relationship starts off strong. And by doing so, clients know what to expect in terms of time, effort and outputs in the first 30+ days. When both are working together harmoniously, amazing work can be done. When one side is misaligned with the other, it can be a total disaster.

So, the question is: How Do PR Firms Set-Up New Clients for Long Term Success?

Quick backstory: I created Ditto after seeing everything that is wrong with PR.

Problem: Employees were on too many accounts (up to 12!), PR firms put the majority of work on juniors, there was either no strategy and people were just blindly pitching or there was too much strategy and no execution. No one took the time to actually become knowledgeable of the client and its industry, and therefore, there was no ongoing proactiveness from the PR firm.

Outcome: The client and PR firm are never fully aligned, and the “relationship” doesn’t grow.

How we do it at Ditto: Each employee is on 4 accounts, every account has a senior PR professional on it, we have a process to become experts in our client’s business and we combine smart, proactive communications advise with scrappy, impactful results.

Be smart. That’s not enough: Clients stay with us for a very long time because we form a personal and professional relationship early, and month-over-month deliver results. But there have been a handful of new clients that didn’t work out.

So, back to the question: How Do We Set-Up New Clients for Long Term Success?

1. Have a very clear understanding of what the work is and what success looks like. We put a lot of time into very clearly defining the work we have been hired to do and what the client’s expectations are.
2. Educate (and re-educate) new clients on how we do PR and what to expect in the first 30, 60, 90 days. A lot of start-ups know very little about how PR works, and while we talk a lot in the new business process about how Ditto does PR, sometimes the people on the client side in those meetings aren’t even our contacts once we start.
3. Make sure the right people on the client side are bought-in to this relationship and approach. The Founder, CEO, etc. has to understand and agree with the approach, timeline, expectations and process. If not, he or she is just gonna make everyone’s life hell.
4. Communicate with a new client how much time they are going to have to commit to in the beginning. The PR firm can only succeed if the client agrees to get them what they need to succeed. How can a relationship form if one side isn’t putting time into it? And participation on the client side in the beginning has to come from the top, down.
5. Do all these steps as early as possible. Starting as early as the new business stage, potential clients need to understand how a PR firm operates, how to start-off successfully and what the first 30, 60, 90 days look like. Otherwise, the lack of understanding and alignment will very quickly result in an unruly client.

Conclusion: For a relationship between a company and its PR firm to work, it has to start strong. The PR firm needs to have a process in place to ensure they are aligned with the client, and the client needs to understand their role and responsibility — especially early on — in this new relationship for it to succeed.

Shameless plug: No one puts as much thinking into clients as Ditto, especially in the first 90 days. And it’s because we want our clients to be happy, and just as importantly, I want my employees to enjoy what they do.