10 Tips to Stretch Your PR Agency Budget

It takes two to tango. And it takes two committed parties … that is, a good client and a good agency, to generate great PR return on investment. 

Here are a few tips, learned over years of building and maintaining long-term client-agency relationships, that can help keep your PR agency relationship efficient, productive and enjoyable … and stretch your budget:

1) Create a partnership – The best results come when the client and agency work together as partners, not when there’s an adversarial or vendor/buyer relationship. As a client, your budget is most effective when your agency does PR with you, not to or for you. You’re in this together.

 2) Communicate – There should be no surprises for either party. Open dialogue between both partners and at all levels is crucial. You can’t communicate too much. Better to share too much information than not enough. Take the time to help all teammates to understand the big picture and build trust.

3) Pay attention – High-level attention from both sides of the partnership is just as important as the attention of day-to-day contacts. If your agency’s senior people aren’t involved, you may not be getting the agency’s best thinking. If you want the agency to allocate a dedicated team to focus on your business, make sure you allocate the budget to engage them. Retainers can go a long way to ensure consistent effort by the right people – and can provide financial predictability for both you and the agency.

4) Agree on policies upfront – Make sure everyone shares the expectations with regard to reporting, invoicing, communicating, etc. at the onset. Although these procedures may be less important than strategy, service and creativity, if they’re not established early on, you risk friction within the relationship which can drain energy and resources.

5) Isolate and attack problems together – Don’t wait for issues to build up. Take a continuous improvement approach to identify the problem without blame, work together for a sound resolution, and move on.

6) Agree on the program’s goals and success measures – The team can’t hit the target if they don’t know what it is. Get everyone on the same page, early on.

7) Be fair – The golden rule applies. If you’re the client, it helps to set realistic budgets, establish fair deadlines, and provide clear direction and complete information. If you’re the agency, be accountable, keep the client informed, give the client your best efforts, and understand the constraints/politics the client faces. Instead of presenting the client with new problems, help them solve the problems they have.

8) Respect and encourage each other – Learn all you can about your partner. Each partner brings something different to the team, and if we understand each other’s viewpoint and respect each other’s ideas, talents and perspective, we can create a better outcome for everyone.

9) Be a good steward – If you’re the agency, be thrifty with the client’s budget (spend it like it’s your own money) and get your invoices out on a timely basis. If you’re the client, take care of the housekeeping issues upfront to ensure the agency can get paid on a timely basis. Nothing builds more resentment or frustration – or wastes more time and effort – than overdue payables. Every minute that the agency principal is focused on getting an overdue invoice paid is a minute that she/he is not generating ideas or results for you.

10) Celebrate – Celebrating successes with your partner along the way helps to unify and uplift your team members on both sides of the partnership. A little fun and recognition can go a long way to supercharge your team’s members … and will spark them to stretch even further, together.

What else do you think helps to stretch the value of the agency PR budget?

Five Lean Steps to Stretch Your PR Budget

It’s no secret that corporate PR clients are under increasingly intense pressure to do more with less – less money, less staff and less time. If there’s anything we can learn from the product design and manufacturing industries, it’s that there are ways to make our PR processes leaner – that is, more efficient, faster and at higher quality levels.

As overworked executives, corporate PR folks are often forced to be reactive. To keep tasks moving, they pass them off to their staff or their agency as soon as possible … sometimes just a little too soon.

In many cases, we can go faster by starting slowly. By forcing ourselves to take extra time upfront, we gain the benefit of considering the entire task at hand – from start to finish. We can gather everything needed to accomplish the task. And we can identify and explain our goals, preferences and specifications to those who will be involved.

Here are five steps that can help accelerate your PR projects, while stretching your budget by cutting costs, eliminating re-work and reducing cycle time:

1) Take the time to define the project in detail – approach, objectives, resources, timing, budget, targets, key messages, etc.;

2) Once the project is defined, share this definition with the internal people who will be involved in the final approval, so there’s a consensus of purpose. Get them on-board and alerted to the timing at the onset. For example, on news release projects, we’ve found that nothing causes more delays and changes than the approval process … in some cases this back-and-forth can double or triple the project’s total cost;

3) Once internal alignment is secured, gather and pass all the necessary information to the staff or agency person who’s going to handle the project. The more complete the information and direction provided upfront, the more likely the first iteration will be on-target … meaning less or no re-work (as well as more satisfaction);

4) Start working immediately on artwork, photos or video needed to support the project. There’s no sense in streamlining the writing portion of the project if the artwork delays the project’s completion or adds rush charges in order to meet the deadline; and

5) After the project is completed, identify improvements that could be made to your process for the next project.

What have you done to make your PR processes leaner?