Public relations is a great tool for your business to engage with a wider audience and really penetrate the hearts and minds of your customers. Whether you’re a long-established business or a new enterprise operating around New South Wales, there will come a time for you to engage a PR agency in Sydney.
You might already be engaging a public relations consultant and may want to use the following questions to gauge whether another provider could give you better results. There’s no shortage of choices for hiring a Sydney PR agency and its prudent to ask these questions so that you end up with the right one and avoid a costly disappointment.
1. What is the firm’s reputation?
It’s always a good idea to go with a Sydney PR agency that has operated for a long time and has a great track record of past success for other brands. It’s even better when the firm specialized in achieving success for brands in your industry as this means they will have pre-existing industry and relevant media connections to use in your campaign.
You also want to ensure that the firm operates ethically and has no blemishes against its record.
2. Do they proudly display their portfolio of past work?
Ideally, a decent Sydney PR agency will be happy to display all of their excellent past work on their website and make it easy for you to access. They shouldn’t have anything to hide if they’re proud of the work they did, and this gives you a good indication of both their skill and integrity as a practitioner.
A good test is to see if they would happily let you contact their previous clients for their opinion.
3. Are they experienced with using social media?
Social media is still criminally misunderstood and/or mishandled by many old guard firms who simply don’t click with what the younger generation is doing. Depending on your industry, it could be essential for you to engage a Sydney PR agency that has a broad range of experience and expertise when it comes to popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
4. What kind of contract will you be signing?
When engaging one a Sydney PR agency, it’s essential that you clarify the contract you are signing and how you are paying them to avoid exploitation. Some contracts will have monthly retainers that don’t adequately put every dollar to good use and this could be a big drain for your brand.
Its good to engage a firm that has an approach to payment that’s based on time and materials. In essence, you only pay for the specific work you have agreed to.
The move involved you are, the more you will get out of your PR firm.
5. How will results be measured?
In the world of public relations, the connection between the money you invest and your ROI (return on investment) is blurry and impossible to accurately ascertain. There are lots of analytics that can be used to infer the success of your campaign and this should be established with the firm before you spend any money.
Hopefully the above questions will help you select the best Sydney PR agency to assist you with your campaign and give you the success your business needs.