How to get the most out of your PR strategy
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, it’s important that you get the best results from your PR strategy. Here, in our regular blog, we look at 5 top tips to ensure your PR agency is delivering results:
- Set a clear strategy
From the outset, its important to have a clear idea of what you are trying to achieve with a PR strategy. You’ll already know where you’d like PR to support your business, although we can help you refine this with a detailed PR plan to get your brand and product out into the marketplace.
When you are developing your PR strategy it is important that it is measurable, which means at the end of each month and quarter you are able to report back to the business on progress towards target. Again, our experience in the construction sector means we can help you set realistic, demanding target that means you get the best value for money.
- Work with an agency that understands your industry
At Dragonfly PR, we specialise in the construction and manufacturing sectors. It’s what we done for over 20 years. It makes sense, really, as it where we have generated our best results. It comes down to the experience of our team and we have some brilliant writers and content creators that can understand your building product and routes to market, and create content that appeals to architects, industrial or public sector specifiers and contractors.
- Leverage content over multiple channels
Like most aspects of marketing, PR has been revolutionised by the growth of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and many other aspects of digital marketing. In reality, PR, and here we mean good quality written content, is the foundation of an effective digital marketing strategy. For instance, we regularly write white papers, thought leadership and opinion pieces for construction and architectural press. This is really good quality content that can be used across other digital channels, so helping, for example, your SEO, or for repurposing as blogs on your website.
This is one of the reasons why we ensure that all the content we write is optimised for SEO and digital platforms. We provide SEO and digital marketing programmes, providing content to help you improve your status in organic search rankings.
- Demand measurable results
Whether its sales leads, brand awareness, or sentiment, its important that your PR strategy and chosen agency provide you with regular, measurable results. Our approach is to provide a report at the end of each month that details our performance against target.
For example, our PR strategy incorporates a target number of follows on LinkedIn. At the end of each month we let our client know how we have performed against that target. It shows percentage of the year elapsed versus percentage achievement of target. A very simple measure, but it let’s you know how you PR agency is performing.
It’s the same when it comes to measuring press cutting or column inches, sales enquires or Click Through Rate (CTR) to website, or any other range of measures we use to determine the success of our PR strategy.
- Flexibility in an agency makes a difference
When you appoint a PR agency it’s important that they fit around the requirements of your business, not the other way around. For example you may well have a long standing relationship with your Pay Per Click (PPC) partner and may prefer your PR agency to collaborate with them to identify new ways in which to promote your business – using the written content they generate.
This is something that we are more than happy to do and regularly provide content and idea to our clients’ partner agencies for them to use for paid promotion, either via PPC or social media.
We think this flexible approach works better than each partner agency being overly protective of their space. Ultimately, we are here to promote our clients’ businesses – if they are doing well, then so are we. That’s why we are always happy to work collaboratively.
Interested in finding out more about PR services? Take a look at our case studies and drop us a line hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call 0114 349 5345.
Dragonfly PR is a is a Sheffield-based PR agency, with over 20 years’ experience in creating meaningful and engaging content, specialising in working with clients in the b2b, construction and manufacturing sectors.