10 Yetis Insight: 7 Requirements You Should Have Of Your Digital PR Agency

Making the decision that you need to hire a PR agency is the easy part. You then have to trawl through the internet, listen to countless recommendations and deal with various companies getting in touch via social media in order to compile a shortlist of agencies that you’d like to speak with, and possibly meet with. You also need to decide what you want to gain from a PR campaign and what you’re looking for in a team.

Sometimes it’s not that hard. As PR’s we occasionally reach out to companies and brands that we hope to work with, in the hope of that light bulb moment of “Sam from 10 Yetis Digital has just made me realise how much I want and need PR!” *ding*

Here’s a few tips for what you should look for in a PR agency though – and hopefully it’ll give you some inspiration for questions to ask when going through the process of chemistry meetings and presentations…

They need to be accessible

If you need to get hold of them, whether that’s via phone or email, you want to know that they’re going to be able to get back to you within a decent period of time, particularly if it’s urgent. If your main day-to-day contact isn’t available, you want the peace of mind in knowing that someone else in the PR team knows what’s going on with your account and can answer your questions, meaning you don’t have to wait hours/days for a response (depending on the level of urgency).

Many agencies provide their staff with work mobile phones and therefore you’ll not only have an office number to call and an email address to send an email to, but you’ll also have their mobile number in order to ring them directly too.

We pride ourselves on being available 24/7 if you need us… not many agencies can say that. Just saying.

How do you want your reports?

I’m not asking you that now, but that’s something your PR agency should ask you when you first begin working together. For example, I email my clients a weekly roundup every Friday, I email them a monthly round up on the last Friday of the month, but in between I also email them when any coverage comes through – which, not to brag, is most days.

You may find that this is too much reporting for you; you may want the daily updates and that’s it, or you may prefer to just leave everything until Friday to save you getting so many emails. It’s a personal preference, and you’re welcome to change your mind whenever you want.

Final sign off

I’ve never heard of an agency that don’t give you final approval on every piece of work (press releases, features, reactive statements, case studies etc.) before it gets sent out to the media, but that’s not to say it doesn’t happen. At the end of the day, you’re the expert within your field, as much as we try to understand what you do and how you do it, we’ll never know as much about your field as you do. You should be able to read through everything, ask any questions you may have, request changes if you’re not happy, and then have final sign off on the work before anything gets sent out.

Coffee and cake?

I don’t mean that every time you fancy coffee and cake your PR agency have to foot the bill, but if you want a face-to-face catch up, you should expect the team working on your PR campaign to free up some time in order to meet with you and discuss the campaign. Obviously within reason though. If you’re in the same team you can’t expect a daily catch up, or even weekly for that matter – it just takes too much time out of the day and there isn’t *typically* enough to discuss weekly. But once a fortnight, once or a month or once every few months is completely reasonable.

Quick off the mark

If a journalist requests a quote, or a story breaks in the news that you could be put forward to provide an expert comment on, you expect your PR agency to be on the ball and jump straight onto these in order to prevent missing out. Reactive opportunities and ResponseSources, for example, are the ones that need to be responded to within a matter of minutes, and the quicker they are at replying and helping you to structure your quote, the better you’ll be remembered in the journalists mind for future opportunities.

They need to have a backbone

At the end of the day, you’ve hired a PR agency because you’re not skilled at PR and you want the best for your company / product / service. If you start barking off orders to your PR team (what you want, how you want it and where you expect it) you want to know that they’ve got the campaigns best interests at mind, and that they won’t be scared to tell you that they disagree with you. For example, you might think that Beth in Accounting’s birthday is a big occasion for the company, and you may think of doing a local press release about it, but it’s not the most exciting news story and we’d much rather use your press release allocation for a story that we know will get great coverage and plenty of high quality links.

In the same respect, alongside not wanting a team that will just rub your ego by agreeing with everything you say, you want a team that’s going to be realistic with you. We CAN’T guarantee you coverage in X, Y, Z publications – we just can’t, I’m sorry. I really wish we could, but at the end of the day whether a journalist runs a story or not is at their discretion. We may have the best relationships with journalists, but that doesn’t mean we can guarantee you coverage where you expect it. If any agency promises you this, run. You’ll only be wasting your money on empty promises.

Do they understand you?

I briefly touched above on you being the experts in your field, but you should still expect your PR agency to want to get to grips with what you do. They don’t have to know it as in-depth as you do, they don’t need to know every last technical detail, but they need to grasp the basics. If they can’t, how are they going to speak to journalists and sell in press releases and the such? Over the years I’ve become somewhat knowledgeable on the packaging industry, the cloud computing industry and even the mattress industry.