The key considerations for choosing a PR agency.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners that have got value locked up in their organization if they can just find cost-effective and simple-to-use ways to communicate that. And I'm joined today by Rob Da Costa, who is an agency owner and now a coach helping other agencies and clients to get the most out of their agencies. Welcome, Rob.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Jim. It's been great to be here. I've been a fan of your podcast, so I'm glad to be a guest on it.

Likewise, and I'm a fan of yours, so this is fantastic. Rob, tell us, how can a business owner get the most value out of an agency?

I think you almost have to go back a step and say the owner has to be saying to themselves, why am I hiring an agency in the first place? I see sometimes businesses who have a problem and they think they can outsource that problem to an agency, And they think once they've got the agency on board, that's the end of the problem and they can move on to the next thing. And of course, those relationships always fail because, you know, the agency will fail to deliver to their expectations and the, you know, the business owner will get frustrated and ultimately decide this isn't working. So I think if you're thinking about hiring an agency, you need to think about what is it that you're trying to achieve by hiring that agency. And how am I going to measure success of the engagement with the agency? And I guess also, and I would say this to agency owners as well, the business needs to make sure they can tie back the work that the agency owner is doing to the bigger business goals. And if they can't have a way of measuring that, then we are going to be heading towards an unhappy relationship and a sort of failed relationship. And for some businesses, that looks like lurching from one agency to another. without actually looking at themselves and going, hang on a sec, I'm not managing the agency very well and I need to change the way I'm behaving and I'm managing them and how I'm measuring them, how I'm communicating with them so that I can make sure they're a success. It's that old adage really that is such a true thing, which is that when you hire an agency or any kind of external partner, you need to build a partner-partner relationship, not this imbalanced customer-supplier relationship, because it just won't work.

We've all seen this sort of agency switching. How does a client then go about selecting which should be the partner?

Yeah, so I think the first thing is, I would always say, is find an agency that's a specialist in your business or in your sector. So find a niche specialist agency that focuses on what you do, so they not only are able to do the discipline of whatever the agency is— PR or web design or SEO or design or whatever it is, but they also have a really good understanding of your sector. I think then you need to find someone that you're going to get on well with. So an agency that you feel you can build good empathy with, that understands you on a cultural values level as well as the commercial level, and an agency that is a good listener. I've sat with a few of my clients while they've been going through formal pitches for agencies, and it's, you know, besides it being extremely boring when you sit through 4 of those pitches, It's amazing how sometimes agencies just don't ask questions and don't listen to their customer. They just tell them how great they are and tell them what they're going to do, but they're building— there's no opportunity for them to build any empathy because they're not listening. So I would say find an agency that is in a niche that you work in. Find an agency that you feel you're going to have a good working relationship with, just like you would if you were employing someone. You wouldn't want to hire someone that you thought might be quite good at the job, but it's going to be really disruptive and really awkward. So find an agency that you have good empathy with, find an agency that is a good listener. And then the last part, find an agency that can demonstrate their ROI. Find an agency that's going to ask you the questions about what are your business goals, and then work with you to put a set of metrics and KPIs in place that can tie back the work they're doing into the results that you're trying to achieve for your business. And then the last piece I think is find an agency that is— that you are going to communicate and work with closely. You need to be communicating informally with them very regularly, but formally sitting down with them monthly, quarterly, and reviewing your plans and reviewing their strategy to deliver your goals and working with them to change things. I mean, let's face it, if the one thing the coronavirus situation has taught us is that we need to be nimble as business owners, we need to not be setting our plans in concrete and trying to deliver them by hook or by crook, but be willing to pivot and change based on whatever's going on in the world today that we didn't know yesterday.

And so when you look at the client side, what sort of tools or information templates can they give to an agency? Because often the agency puts together a proposal, With remarkably little information about the client, which I often found is one of the main sources of the miscommunication at the very beginning.

Yeah, it's interesting. I would actually advise an agency not to do that, and if they can't get the information they need from the client, then walk away. Because I'm always amazed, as an example of this, is if you're a web development agency and you're going in to do a pitch, and the part of that pitch the client says, we want you to do some mockups and we want you to show us some examples of what our website could be, you're crazy if you're a web design company and you agree to doing that, because you will have a process which gets under the skin of the client and understands what they need before you start doing that. So I think it comes back to this thing about the, the business needs to be willing to work in partnership and to realize that actually I have to dedicate time and resources and give them access to lots of information in order for them to come up with a solution that's really going to deliver the results I want for my business. So I think one of the selection criteria I would advise a business on, in fact one of the most important ones that I didn't mention, is understand what their briefing process is. Go and ask questions around how do you learn about our business, what's your process, that you will take us through so that you can get under— look under the bonnet and really understand the inner workings to make the best recommendations that are going to help us deliver the results that we want to achieve.

But this sounds as though there's a fundamental change in mindset though required by companies that are procuring or engaging agencies, because often it is a procurement function. But it sounds though, Rob, to be effective, they really need to look at the agency as a A strategic partner.

Totally, yeah, absolutely. It might be, it might be a procurement function from the procurement department, but the people that are going to be managing that agency on a day-to-day basis absolutely have to see them as a strategic partner and absolutely have to recognize that they have— the business has to make an investment of time to work with the agency and to manage the agency and to give access to information. I mean, you must have experienced this yourself, Jim, where you are taken on to do media relations for a client. In the pitching and briefing process, you've talked about some of the things that you're going to need and some of the access to people that you're going to need in order to create the stories that they're hoping to achieve, and then they're just too busy and they don't get you the case studies, they don't get you the customers, they don't make their senior staff available to you. As spokespeople, and then they get upset because you're not delivering results. And of course, to the point where you're trying to justify why you're not delivering results because of that lack of access, it just sounds like excuses. So it's really important in the early stages of that relationship that the agency is very clear about their process and their working, and the business gives them access to that. And as I said, one really key thing I would advise people is to ask an agency about their briefing, their fact-finding, their immersion process, because if someone can give you a very clear methodical approach to that, then they're going to be, you know, a solid agency who has experience about onboarding businesses like yours.

And what about this issue of sort of finding out what they've done before? Because an agency is a purchase of trust, isn't it, as much as anything else? What would you say could be the due diligence? Because at the moment, the due diligence is often just inviting 3, 4, 5 agencies to all pitch.

The obvious things like you want to see examples of work that they've done before, perhaps even examples of campaigns they've done before. But I would say talk to some of their customers. You know, I would absolutely— I mean, as a lot of people do with me when they're taking me on board, they'll say, can I talk to Can you give me 2 or 3 clients to talk to? And, you know, they want to pick up the phone and have a chat with these people because they don't just want to get the canned written response testimonial, but they want to actually get the warts-and-all example of it. And I think if an agency isn't willing to give you that, then that's a bit of a warning sign. If an agency isn't able to give you that because they might be new, then that's another warning sign, although of course we all start somewhere. So I would say the due diligence is to, you know, look at their website, look at their LinkedIn profiles, look at the— ask for examples of the work they've done before, but ask for examples of campaigns that they've done before. So like the process that the agency took the client through to deliver these end results. And also ask to talk to some of their customers, and not just one customer, but maybe 2 or 3, because, you know, you might have that one raving fan that's always going to say you're amazing. And there's nothing wrong with you, but we want that honest approach.

Now, the other issue for clients is often about the costs. Rob, what can you share in terms of how clients should be setting budgets?

When a client says, can you write a proposal? And the agency says, can you give me a budget? And they say no. And the client then— the agency then is completely stabbing in the dark. So my advice to an agency is that if a client won't give you a budget, then you should walk away because there's a good chance that the client isn't serious enough. Because if they haven't got a line item on their P&L and they haven't allocated a budget towards whatever this is, PR or whatever, then why are we trying to test people to see what it costs? I mean, imagine if you were having an extension to your home and you had a builder come round and the builder said to you, what's your budget? And you said, I'm not gonna tell you. And so then the builder walks away. Are they trying to put a kind of plastic lean-to on your house or a 3-storey extension? So it's silly. So I think the first thing is that the company has to have set a budget.

And I think they can either base that on previous experience or they can go and get some advice on what the costs are. But I would also say, you know, when it comes to the company picking their partner agency, they need to base it on all the things that I've talked about already. before they base it purely on price. I mean, if you just take the cheapest agency on board, you're never necessarily going to get the best results. So, you know, and if you're understanding what the bigger business results will be from this intervention, then you're going to be more willing to spend money on it. Whereas if you're thinking about a very tactical thing like, I need to get, you know, 5 pieces of coverage in the media every month, then, well, how do you measure that? But if you If you're measuring it in terms of outcomes for the business, then you're going to be able to apply a bigger budget to it. So it is a bit of a dance around our handbags to get the budgeting right, because obviously the company doesn't always know what they should be spending. But in that case, if you really don't know, I would go and— every business has got a peer network. Every business has got people that they are connected with that they can go and ask these questions to get a sense of what their budget should be. And then they need to listen to the agency and be willing to hear from them what they think the cost should be as well.

But there are also companies like R3 in Singapore, which I think is also in America, which helps companies to select agencies. Have you got any experience in any of these kind of agency facilitator companies?

I don't know of anybody that's gone through that process before, so I don't know whether that is a totally objective service or whether it's like you pay to be part of their business and therefore they put you forward. I don't, so I don't know really.

So in terms of once a company has made a decision about which agency to use, Rob, how can they get the most out of that agency? Because often the relationship starts well, but like all relationships, you know, love is a verb, isn't it? Not a noun.

I think the key thing is communication, regular communication, the right reporting, and tying back the work that they do to the business goals. So in my experience, a lot of agencies might report to a marketing manager, and the marketing manager might have a whole bunch of goals in their mind, like a number of new leads generated or the amount of coverage we've got. But then other people that they report to, the managing director or the finance director, might have a whole bunch of different goals saying, well, I didn't— I don't care how many leads we converted, I care about how much new business we got, or I don't care about how much new media coverage we got, I care about what did that mean in terms of business. So I think it's really important that the agency has these very honest conversations early on with the client about how to measure the success of the campaign, and that they keep using those metrics and revising those metrics regularly with the client so that the marketing manager can report back to their colleagues as well about how the campaign's going. And I think the other thing is that we need to make sure as an agency we are constantly reviewing the strategy we've put in place. I would say at least on a quarterly basis to reflect the changing environment for the business. So if things change for the business, as I said, like coronavirus, we are not just kind of going, no, we've got a plan and we're going to execute that plan, but we're actually sitting down with the the client and saying, okay, let's look at where you're at as a business, let's look at your priorities over the next quarter, and let's make sure the campaign we're delivering is driving towards those business goals. And the last piece of that, I think, is to make sure if you have a really good partner relationship with the business and the agency, then you can also have an honest relationship. And an honest relationship means that the agency can hold their hands up and go, guys, this strategy is not working, this is why I think it's not working. This is what we need to do differently. This is what we feel you need to do differently. And if we can have that honest relationship, then there's a much better chance that the agency and the business are going to stay aligned and be happy with the work.

Rob, let's talk about legal for a moment. Should companies have a retainer or a project or a hybrid model with an agency?

It's an interesting question, isn't it? Because I think the retainer model is changing a lot. I think a lot of people don't like that word anymore. Because it sounds like I'm paying you a fixed amount of money every month, but I'm not entirely sure what I'm getting for it. So I think in a way the word retainer doesn't help much. So it probably is a hybrid model. It's probably where people put, say, a 6-month campaign in place, and then in month 5 or month 6, they're then talking about the next 6-month campaign. So in effect, it is a retainer, but we're being much clearer about the outcomes and the focus. Obviously, from an agency's perspective, having a retainer is a desired thing because it means you've got— you can do your budgeting, you know how much revenue you've got coming in each month. But on the other flip side of that, from an agency perspective, a project-based campaign means that they can be much clearer about what's included in that project and what isn't included, because we all know as an agency that we can get caught out in the scope creep, kind of the client saying, can you just do this? And of course, can you just actually means another day's worth of work.

In terms of technology, let's just look at how can companies and agencies really dovetail the working together using platforms, do you think?

You know, when I started my agency back in '92, we were using Excel spreadsheets for time recording internally. We were using Word documents to produce reports.

We were—

I'm not even sure there was email, to be honest, when we first started. So we weren't even sending emails. We were sending faxes to our clients, you know, all that kind of stuff. So the world has changed a lot. There is a lot of great collaboration tools. You know, I use, for example, I use Google Drive with a lot of my clients. They've got access to the shared documents together. They can see plans that we're working on. They can update them themselves. They can see when I've updated them. But there are also great project management tools like Monday and Asana and all that kind of stuff that you can use both internally in the agency, but also collaboratively with the client. And then of course you've got Dropbox. And so there are many, many, many great tools now. And I guess it's a case of, again, I would say when you're selecting an agency, understand what tools they're using to create this collaboration, because if they don't really have them, again, that's a bit of an amber warning light. Whereas if they are— they have a really clear process and they have a really clear engagement process with the client that not only talks about how we're going to communicate physically with each other, but how we're going to communicate virtually through tools such as Asana and Google Drive and so on.

Rob, thank you so much for sharing today on Speak PR.

Could you just tell us, how can people find out about Well, the best place really is my website, so dacostacoaching.co.uk, and there is lots of great free content on there, including my new book that I've just finished writing called The Self-Running Agency. And they can always drop me an email, which is robert@dacosta.co.uk.

Thank you, Rob Da Costa, and thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR, the podcast. For PR for Business.