Why your PR agency is not just a mouthpiece but a strategic advisor
A seismic shift is taking place in the way that companies relate with their marcomms suppliers. These suppliers offer a range of services spanning from SEO advisory, copywriting, translation, localization, event management, social media management and even media relations. The change didn’t happen overnight, it has been a gradual move from relying on an agency solely as a provider of a specific service to seeing agencies and contractors as much more than service providers: a link to the outside world, a sounding board and sometimes even a coach.
What has driven this change? Well, certainly technological progress. By making many processes more “user friendly” and intuitive, technology has made the Do-It-Yourself approach much more feasible. At the same time, forays into the DIY approach have rapidly shown businesses that inhouse teams are often too overstretched, lack the specific skills and struggle to keep up with how these services are evolving in the wider market (novel ways that they are being used by other companies for example).
When it comes to PR, technology has provided a lot more transparency, offering inhouse teams a huge range of insights to measure and monitor their comms efforts and, in theory at least, to help refine activity and inform strategy. These might be sentiment, reach, online impressions, social media mentions, competitor comparisons and much more. In reality, many of these metrics are so baffling and provided with no real guidance for interpretation that they just cause more confusion.
As a result, businesses are calling on their agencies not only to deliver a service in support of already stretched in house teams, but to provide a way of interpreting the market and results. I would argue that technology has created more awareness in marketing today of the complexities of tracing the funnel and of assessing results. So, instead of making things simpler and more measurable, technology has revealed how difficult it is to univocally attribute a sale or a prospect reaching out to one single activity. This is good news, and your PR people have been telling you for ages. At least now you know we’re not purposefully mystifying the process, rather we’re trying to alert customers to its multiple nuances.
At the same time automation has empowered them to focus more on the analysis rather than the collection of metrics and refining strategies. Similarly, AI generated copy or translations have made some processes faster and more efficient but also highlighted the need for a clear initial strategy. In short, tech has highlighted the need for expert human consultancy, rather than undermining it.
So these are, to my mind, some of the drivers for the shift we’ve been seeing in our role, from PR agency tasked with getting the client coverage to advisor, supporting clients at all stages of the communications process from helping define positioning, produce clear messaging around all key USPs, define a media as well as a social media strategy, speech writing, audience analysis, support clients in making the best use of their resources right across the whole marketing function.
I’ve been saying for a while that we are “so much more” than just a PR agency for our clients, but a short conversation with one of our clients really distilled this. Talking about a marketing agency they collaborate with they mentioned their new business was coming in from pure consultancy rather than service delivery. Now, there is no PR without media interaction, but the future of our industry is moving towards a greater focus on strategic consultancy and delivering a full range of support that goes beyond simple press release drafting and media placement.