Do You Need a PR Agency? 7 Signs You Should Hire One

There are many (many) reasons why you might need a PR agency. But in our experience, the seven most common are:

1. Your business has big plans – a product to launch, investment to attract or a new market to enter – and you can’t afford to get it wrong.
2. You’re planning to one day sell the business – and are anxious to ensure you get the best possible price when you do.
3. You feel frustrated. Your business is the best, but your competitors seem better known.
4. Your website is underperforming. You need more, better quality traffic.
5. Your marketing team can’t cope. They’ve too much to deal with, including new challenges, and lack the bandwidth and experience.
6. You need to prepare for a crisis.
7. Recruitment is too hard. You’re struggling to attract the talent you need.

Let’s take a look at each of these in a little more detail – to see how and why hiring a PR agency would help.

It’s easy to see why companies with big plans – say a product to launch, investment to attract or a new market to enter – need PR.  It’s the most powerful and cost-effective way to reach an audience and win their interest, hearts and minds.

That’s because, unlike advertising, people believe media coverage and social media buzz when they see it.  They assume that the media is endorsing the brand it’s talking about. The believe the social media noise is justified.

And while it’s expensive to advertise everywhere, using PR to get lots of media, influencers and others talking is much more affordable.

In short, with PR, you get awareness, credibility and reach without breaking the bank.

A company with a strong brand and reputation will command a much higher price when its sold. Some suggest brand contributes as much as 19.5% to the overall value of a business.

That’s because companies with good brand reputations have an edge over competitors. They find it easier to attract and keep customers and they’re much more likely to be recommended too. According to our brand love research, people are 3 times more likely to recommend a brand they love and twice as likely to stick with it, even if it makes mistakes.

Businesses with a strong brand are also less dependent on the business founder for their sales – a huge consideration for a prospective buyer.

And a company which has developed and protected its reputation – perhaps with a crisis plan in place – suggests it is better run too.

Added together, it’s easy to see how PR helps secure the best possible multiple for a company that’s being sold.

One of the big reasons companies turn to a PR agency is because their boards are frustrated. The business’ expertise or ‘specialness’ isn’t properly appreciated in the market. Competitors are much better known. The competitors aren’t better, they’re just better at PR!

Sometimes the competitor is a ballsy new rival; a player who’s disrupting things and threatening market share. In the face of this challenge, doing the same old marketing just won’t cut it. The company needs a bold new approach to PR – that means a PR agency with a fresh, external perspective to kick things up a gear.

50% of our campaigns are for companies which want more, better quality traffic.

For instance, Wellers, the accountancy firm, has used our digital PR services to boost its HubSpot strategy. In less than a year our editorially driven link and brand building campaign  turned up the gas on its already strong marketing activity. We helped Wellers’ Domain Authority increase from 24 to 38 and web traffic grow by 103%.

Results like this are possible because when done well, digital PR delivers on many fronts.

It secures links from lots of good quality, highly relevant media sites. These not only help boost a company’s position in the eyes of Google but they actually deliver quality traffic from the media site too.

But digital PR is more than just link-building. A digital PR agency worth its salt will ensure a company is not just in the media but absolutely everywhere the audience grazes for information. True audience awareness and authority are built, making people much more likely to click on a company’s link when searching.

A study by Red C shows that brands that are known – even if they appear lower on page 1 in a SERP – are almost 5 times more likely to be clicked on than their less well-known competitors who appear higher up.

And if this brand building work goes beyond awareness to creating proper understanding, there’s no need to slug it out with rivals to get on page 1 of Google. People will head straight to your website without resorting to search engines at all. At Energy, we typically expect this top quality, branded traffic to increase by 46% in our first year of working with a company.

Multi-skilled PR agencies are increasingly being called in to support swamped marketing teams.

It’s easy to see why. The demands being placed on marketing have never been greater and are changing fast. While most web plans are focused on Google, 24% of people actually now use social media as a search engine. Google is also behaving differently. We’ve now got zero click results being served up, with people not going through to any websites at all for certain searches. Suddenly social media strategies are mission critical, and SEO is in disarray.

We’ve also got the rise of Reddit, with people turning to the platform for recommendations and advice. Add in the importance of wider reviews and you can see how brand building is back in fashion, big style.

AI is further messing with marketers’ lives. They’re wondering what it should be used for and how. While the rise of affiliate marketing is impacting on media and influencer relationships.

With so much in a state of flux, audience understanding – to ensure that marketing effort is focused on the right things – has never been more important.

Then there are the challenges Boards are throwing at their marketing teams. Improve our cost per conversion, launch a new product, take us into a new market, take us into a new country, create a new go to market strategy…and do all this with less.

The punchline of all this is… pressure. Marketing teams can’t bank on their old approach, skills, or knowledge. Things they once relied on don’t work anymore and keeping up with the changes is exhausting! They’re stretched but unsure what resources they’ll actually need tomorrow. Those that know what talent they need are often not allowed to increase their headcount.

This conundrum is driving many to take on a full-service PR agency – one which handles digital and mainstream PR. That’s because it provides an immense mix of skills and experience to draw on – which can be flexed up or down as needed. Strategy, messaging, content creation, media relations, social media, events, awards, speaker platforms, crisis planning, media training, link building, influencer relations, affiliate marketing, podcasts, SEO. The agency is also much better placed to monitor and tool-up for emerging trends.

When a crisis strikes, companies which for years have done without a PR agency suddenly realise how wrong they were!

That’s because a crisis can be company and career defining. It can wipe out share prices, unseat boards and damage consumer trust for decades – all in a matter of hours.

Crisis and issues handling – knowing exactly what to say and do when, how to minimise the damage, reassure audiences and end interest in the situation – is a highly specialist skill and one most business people completely lack. Whereas an experienced PR agency will have dealt with the fall out from all manner of crises – board scandals, product recalls, cyber-attacks, data breaches, disgruntled employees and suppliers – many times before.

But if you are only just turning to Google to hunt for a PR agency when the crisis has struck, you are already too late.

The white heat of a corporate meltdown, when the media’s banging on your door, is not time to be deciding who your priority audiences are, agreeing approval processes and training spokespeople. You want to have all that preparation work done, with a solid crisis and issues plan already in place and spokespeople trained. It’s then the crisis handling support can kick in.

Companies which have ‘done without’ any brand building PR before a crisis strikes, also find they haven’t built brand trust or banked any goodwill. They find it much harder getting stakeholders onside and the situation turned around. After all, an admired and trusted brand is more easily forgiven. Another reason why companies need to think about hiring a PR agency and including crisis planning in their PR plans sooner rather than later.

It’s not just marketing teams which turn to PR agencies for help, HR heads do too. They’re driven by recruitment, which simply feels too hard, a challenge apparently facing 77% of companies globally at the moment.

In response, they want to improve their employer brand. That’s because organisations with strong employer brands find it easier to attract, retain and motivate talent. There’s plenty of data to back this up. According to research from CareerArc:

• Employers with a strong employer brand see a 43% decrease in cost per hire
• They receive twice as many applicants per role
• New hires are 40% less likely to leave after the first six months, that’s because by having a very clear set of genuine, communicated values, they are more likely to attract employees who fit.

PR is an ideal partner to involve in building the employer brand. After all, people applying for roles check websites, social media channels, awards won, content and recent news stories when assessing a would-be employer. But beyond this, a PR agency will suggest creative ways to bring the company’s employer brand and values to life – and provide the ad hoc, expert resource and a valuable external perspective which the HR team may lack.

If one of these seven situations chimes with you, or your company needs a PR agency for another reason, get in touch with our team at susannah@energypr.co.uk