Hiring a PR Company?

Public relations is an important part of every business, and it’s usually a good idea to involve experts when dealing with such an essential aspect. Let’s look at what’s involved with outsourcing this important part of your business.

To start, let’s look at some pros and cons:

Pros

• Less work: If you’re constantly busy and don’t have time to write emails and make phone calls, outsourcing PR may be a good idea. You may also feel your time is better spent doing what you do best, i.e. design, engineering.
• Particular skills: A PR company that has skills you or your team don’t have means they can do things you aren’t capable of (i.e. Google Adwords, although you can find specialized companies to do this).
• Relationships: If the PR company you’re thinking of hiring has a solid relationships with the media in your industry niche, they’ll be able to reach out to people you may have a hard time getting through to: For example, if they have an in at CNN, they may be able to get you featured in the Business section: If you’re a new, unknown company to CNN and you try to make the contact yourself, you probably won’t hear back from them.

Cons

• Cost: PR companies aren’t cheap – and if they are, they probably wouldn’t do much for you anyway. The money you spend on a PR company could be spent on advertising, networking events (trade shows, dinners, etc.) or additional employees, among other things.
• Tracking: If you don’t have the time, the means, or the knowledge to properly track the effectiveness of your PR company’s efforts, you may be pouring money down the drain. Google Analytics and Mint are good tools for monitoring web statistics. The iPhone application Ego can be used help you keep track of Google Analytics, Mint, and Twitter (as well as a few other popular services) when you’re mobile. You can also setup Twitter Searches to track word of mouth, and monitor Twitter from your favourite iPhone app (mine being Tweetie).
• Image: Because your PR company will be trying to persuade media folk to review and promote your product or service, you need to ensure the PR people are in line with your company image. If you’re a cool, young, hip company, all you need is your PR company to contact a blogger by beginning their email with “Dear Sir or Madam”. It may sound trivial, but aside from the fact that it can deter potential responses, it can change how a media contact will shape its review. If your contact with the media is super professional, their reviews are likely to be too. Just make sure your PR company is on the same page and that you know how it’s talking to the media.
• Strangers: Would you rather talk to a stranger or somebody you know? If you think a media contact has at least heard of your company before, he or she would probably rather hear from you than PR Company XYZ. Media folk usually would rather speak to someone on the inside as opposed to someone on the outside.

Of course there are plenty of other things – for example, if you can’t write very well, you don’t want to be emailing important media contacts yourself. People don’t respond well to improper grammar and typos (nobody’s perfect but if an email reads as though a kindergarten kid wrote it with chalk on your driveway, it’s not going to get a response).

Already have one?

So you already have a PR company – what to do? Monitor, monitor, monitor. Going purely on trust in this industry is not a good idea. Even if a PR company has a proven track record, it doesn’t mean they can do the same for you.

Google Analytics is free and fairly easy to understand. If you don’t already have it on your website, it’s probably the first thing you should install. From there you can explore other tracking tools (as mentioned above), but if you aren’t seeing the numbers you’re looking for, you need to speak up. If your web traffic doesn’t growing month over month, year over year, there’s a problem.

Make a list of things you want your PR company to achieve for you (or carefully examine the list they provide) and make sure it’s delivering on its promises each and every month.

No money for a PR company?

That’s OK! I recently wrote an article about making first contact with the media – that’s is a good place to start.

If you make a quality product or provide a service that is of great value, it shouldn’t be too hard to get noticed. If you can make the best product in your industry, you can sit back and watch the traffic flow.

PR isn’t everything but it needs to be done right.