Is an invoice the only thing you’re guaranteed to get from a PR agency?

If you have dealt with a PR agency, you would have heard them say that press coverage is not guaranteed, meaning their remuneration can’t be linked to performance. Once you have signed the contract, the only thing you are guaranteed to get is an invoice at the end of each month.

Let’s start with the recipe for success:

Step 1: Come up with an idea, find a technical co-founder, and build a product.

Step 2: Hire a killer PR agency that will get you into local, national, and international press, on TV and on the cover of Fast Company and Wired. Acquire 90% of your target audience in a few days.

Step 3: Sell the company for a price large enough to buy a small island.

Step 4: Buy that island, sit on a beach, and blog about how to be successful.

So easy and yet 99.9% of start-ups get it wrong!

A lot of entrepreneurs tend to initially believe that successful PR is all that a start-up needs to go from zero to overnight success. Yet once they try working with a PR agency, many are left thinking that PR was a waste of money and all PR agencies are shit.

Not so fast though — lets examine all the factors.

In truth, there are a lot of clowns in the PR industry who will promise you everything, lock you into a twelve month contract, happily take your money, and deliver absolutely nothing. Every time you question the lack of results, they will tell you that press coverage is not guaranteed, but they are sure that there is something big coming next month…

When your PR efforts fail, it’s easy to blame it on the PR agency, but, in many cases, the problem is not solely with your agency— it is with company/agency fit, timing, expectations, and effort.

I have had my fair share of good and bad experiences with various PR agencies and hope that I can share a few pointers of how not to do things wrong.

Fit

Start-ups often chase large PR agencies, the ones with impressive client lists, shiny offices, and fancy cookies served in the boardroom. They negotiate the lowest possible price and end up being their smallest client. Being the smallest client of a large PR agency is what automatically places your file under the large pile of papers on the overworked intern’s desk — that’s where good company accounts go to die.

If you are a start-up evaluating a PR agency, don’t look at their largest clients, the companies whose logos decorate every presentation. Instead, look for other small, unknown names who they helped ‘put on the map.’

As a bonus, when possible, it would be ideal if the people who are working your account are also passionate users of your product. After all, their job is to sell you to the press — to journalists who see hundreds of pitches every day. It is easier to sell something that you like, use, and believe in. Ask them to use it and define why they like it and why is it better than the alternatives and competitors. If they are unable to answer these questions, they will not get the press excited. If you can’t convince them to use your product, you are unlikely to convince anyone to use it.

Timing and Expectations

Your expectations should be guided by your timing. If you have just released your first buggy public beta and are expecting the mainstream press to take any interest, you are likely to be very disappointed. Mainstream press will not care that your Pinterest for cats offers better filters than Instagram. Even if, by some miracle, you manage to get a piece of coverage somewhere, people will come and bounce right off of your untested sign-up funnel.

At that stage, you should be chasing tech blogs and you don’t need an expensive agency for that. If you can’t convince at least a couple of tech bloggers to write about you, then you are definitely not ready for mainstream press.

If you are early on in your product development cycle, take whatever you are budgeting to spend on a PR agency and use it to acquire some users. Learn from how they interact with your system — iterate, iterate, iterate until people engage and stick — then your story will start to take shape.

Effort

Having a PR agency doesn’t mean that a part of your business is on autopilot and the only time that you should ask them about results is when you receive the third reminder to pay your monthly invoice. Quite on the contrary — while your agency will execute on the various aspects of their work externally, they need to become an extension to your team and the relationship should be actively managed. They should always be aware of developments within the company and should report and be held accountable for their activities.

Employing a PR agency doesn’t mean that all of your marketing is “taken care of.” PR should be a line in your marketing plan and not the ENTIRE marketing plan itself.

Bottom line is that working with a PR agency could be very beneficial, but only if it is done with the right agency for your company, at the right time in your development, and managed correctly. If not, then all you will have at the end of this relationship is a pile of invoices and regrets.

We have worked with some great agencies, so ping me if you’d like to know who they are.