What do PR agencies do?

The business world is an extremely competitive environment. It can be difficult to grow your business simply by word of mouth alone when other big businesses seem to fill the market with noise about their products and services. To be successful and to grow a comprehensive sales pipeline, it’s important to get the right messages to the market at the right time, and to engage with potential customers as much as possible.

Even for businesses with industry-leading solutions and services, this can be challenging to achieve when you don’t know how to leverage the changing media landscape to your advantage. Additionally, businesses that focus solely on building their sales pipeline through direct engagement with customers miss opportunities to reach new audiences and sales prospects.

Working with a public relations (PR) agency can help to bridge this gap and empower your business to engage more with the marketplace and encourage more leads. While your business is made up of people that understand the benefits of your products and services and how to sell directly to customers, a communications agency is staffed by people who specialise in the art of communication. They know how to steer you and your business through the minefield of public attention by using innovative strategies to get you noticed more by the people that matter through strategic owned, earned, and paid communications.

What is PR and how to make it work for you?

In simple terms, public relations, or PR, is more or less what it says on the box: it’s relations with the public. Businesses use the art of PR to widely communicate brand message, vision, position, and more with existing and potential customers, stakeholders, media, and the general public.

A good public relations agency will anticipate, analyse, and read public sentiment affecting both your company and its environment to determine the most appropriate communications strategy and messages to go to market with. Ultimately, this will help to build and protect your reputation with the wider marketplace. For the under-informed, PR can seem simple. Many businesses just starting to scratch the surface will be satisfied with simply searching “how to write a media release” online, sharing it with a few journalists whose details are publicly available, and hoping for the best.

However, PR is more than just sharing key company updates. Savvy business leaders will understand the value that having a communications agency on-hand will do for their business pipeline. When used strategically and effectively, PR can deliver a great return on investment (ROI) through ongoing media coverage and strong relationships with key journalists. This can ensure that you’re always in the wider industry conversations you want and need to be in.

What can a public relations agency do for your business?

To achieve this, a public relations agency will deliver value to your business through a number of key internal and external strategies and investments:

• Media relations: one of the primary functions of a PR agency is to engage with relevant industry-specific and general news media to share your company news and updates with a wide audience. A communications agency will use many tools to achieve media coverage, such as proactively pitching stories and interviews to relevant media, as well as writing and distributing media releases. They’ll also support your business with speechwriting, product launches, event planning, and networking.
• Media training: securing positive media coverage takes more than just a well-placed media release. Often, media want to speak with customers and company spokespeople to get news that none of their competitors have. So, you need media-facing spokespeople who are savvy, confident, and possess a deep understanding of how the media works and how to make the most of any journalist interaction. This kind of experience is not developed overnight. A PR agency can help you learn the ins and outs of the media and provide you with professional training and development to help your business thrive with every interview.

• Brand management and brand strategy: beyond direct media engagement, a communications agency can help maintain your brand’s reputation in the public sphere and help manage your image when negative events occur, such as an internal scandal, product or service recall, or customer issue. This is when media training is especially important for spokespersons within the company.
• Internal and external communications: a public relations agency can also help you to communicate internally with employees and key stakeholders, as well as externally with the likes of suppliers and customers. This could include anything from regular company updates to communicating about major changes in the organisation. It is surprising how many companies need to improve their internal communications, and a communications agency can help you to identify bottlenecks and improve processes.

How to get the best from your communications agency

A corporate communications agency can also help you ensure your company messaging is consistent beyond the media landscape so that every public-facing element of your business tells the same story. In addition to media engagement, a public relations agency can help you with:

• Social media content: a public relations agency can create and implement comprehensive social media strategies and content to post on channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Content including polls, images, sales promotion, webinars, whitepapers, and blogs can help communicate with audiences, and can be developed to strategically align with the content and campaigns you run in the media. Without considered content developed by an expert, it can be hard to cultivate engagement, promote goods or services, and generate website clicks.
• Social media management: social media platforms are great environments to connect directly with your customers; however, they can also be a source of controversy. Social media can be used as a point of contact for customers who wish to leave a compliment, ask a question, or make or resolve a complaint. It is important to be responsive on social media so your organisation can actively direct discussions, but it can be disastrous if the messaging isn’t consistent or well-constructed. A public relations agency can help by carefully crafting responses with the right messaging to ensure clear, consistent communication between customers and the business.
• Website content: beyond social media, a communications agency can help look after your online presence by building and auditing websites (if they have a digital creative team), as well as content writing for the site including blogs or videos, optimise websites, and set up digital widgets and tools such as web forms or live chat systems.

Working with a dedicated communications agency gives you access to specialists that spend all day every day engaging with industry and general news media. They know what makes news and how to best share your company updates with the media and audiences that matter in a way that resonates with potential customers.

Write Away Communication has a wealth of experience supporting businesses in the built environment, consumer technology, and homewares industries. As part of Australia’s leading group of PR and marketing specialists, The Recognition Group, Write Away Communication is one of the top PR agencies in Australia that knows what works for you and your business.