Why outsourcing PR can help you to be more successful
Why outsource PR? It’s a question a lot of companies ask themselves: do you scale up your in-house team or do you partner with a specialist agency to achieve your objectives? Many companies choose to outsource PR and marketing support as a more cost-effective and strategic way to manage their communications needs. With fewer overheads than permanent staff and a wider bank of resources to call on, a good external PR agency can be worth its weight in gold.
Here we outline some key reasons why an external PR team can provide serious return on investment:
1. Audience knowledge
An external PR agency’s creativity, knowledge, and understanding of current trends can help you to get a different perspective on how to improve your relationship with your audience. If you’re working in highly technical sectors, like science and technology, it’s important to keep up to date with trends affecting the audiences. Specialist agencies will often represent other organisations in similar or related markets, so they build up a strong knowledge of the different target audiences. An external, informed perspective on your audience’s challenges and motivations may help you to better focus your communications messaging and reach your audience.
2. Press relationships
Managing media relations and crafting engaging communications takes time and dedication and a successful PR agency is built on its media contacts. For example, our clients benefit from our global media relationships in life science and applied markets and our close relationships with the media give them access to varied opportunities to reach highly targeted audiences.
While media relationships are nurtured over many years, bringing clients and media together is a core benefit of working with an agency. As long as there is a trusted relationship between agency and client, the agency can be a powerful conduit in bringing a client closer to its target media. At the same time, the agency will act as a buffer between the two parties, ensuring that opportunities with the media are maximised for the client and that the media are receiving the materials and content that suits them and their readership. Managing expectations and deadlines on both sides can be a challenging and skilful job.
3. Benefit from multiple skillsets
PR agencies have a bank of expertise on hand for every media opportunity. There is an art to crafting different PR outputs, from features, whitepapers and press releases, to Q&As and opinion pieces. When you take on a PR agency, you gain that deep expertise that takes years, or decades, to hone.
Today, most PR and content agencies offer a full range of services, with digital often at the centre of any programme. In b2b sectors, where audiences are niche and purchasing decisions can be lengthy and involve many stakeholders, targeting the audience with tailored content and messaging and attracting them to your website for controlled conversion and nurturing ensures that your marketing spend is optimised. Agencies draw on a variety of skillsets, with planners skilled at strategy and integrating the best tools to meet your key business goals: project managers to drive the campaigns, media experts to maximise earned opportunities, copywriters and designers to make creative and unique content and those with the technical knowledge to optimise your online assets.
They might not all be your day-to-day contacts, but agencies are collaborative, so you have a wide pool of talent at your disposal, offering a variety of strengths and skills.
4. Objectivity
An external agency can view your business from an objective standpoint. It’s easy to get waylaid in the politics and precedents when you’re managing your own PR and marketing. By using an outside team, you’re getting an experienced, knowledgeable external viewpoint and independent advice.
A specialist team can bring an entirely new and objective outlook to your company’s marketing campaigns and introduce you to new markets, as well as instilling a sense of freshness and excitement for your brand. With over 20 years of experience in translating scientific and technical excellence into commercial strategy, we combine the scientific innovation of our clients with our creative and communications expertise in order to help our clients grow their brands and create lasting partnerships with their customers.
5. Flexibility
A PR agency is used to working on many projects simultaneously and balancing a variety of tasks. That means they’re more able to be agile and jump on an urgent action, and you can free up time to concentrate on your business, knowing that someone else is working hard behind the scenes to drive your communications, manage your reputation and champion your interests. The best agencies will be striving for long-term partnerships with clients and being able and willing to help you ‘fight fires’ and respond quickly to unexpected challenges or opportunities is the mark of a real, valuable partner.
Trust is key to success
One of the most important factors in a client/agency relationship is trust and making the agency an extension of your internal comms team. It’s crucial to align objectives and set very clear and defined roles for everyone involved to remove any possibility of duplication of effort. When the correct plans are in place, a PR agency working together with your internal team can be an extremely powerful partnership that provides results above and beyond your expectations.
Experience, expertise and passion are the crux of making relationships in marketing succeed and at TSP we pride ourselves on these qualities. If you’d like to learn more about how implementing PR can help your business succeed, then please get in touch.
