How to Brief a PR Agency

You might be putting your business out to pitch. Or you might already know which agency you want to work with. Either way, you need to know how to brief your PR agency.

A good PR brief will detail what you’re trying to achieve as a business, and your marketing goals. It’ll outline your market position, USPs, your key audiences and your competitors. It’ll cover off practical things such as your other marketing activity, the internal resources you have and the external support you need. And the brief will also be an opportunity to establish what success will look like for you – the KPIs.

If you aren’t prepared to provide this level of insight, you can’t expect a PR agency to deliver the results you need.

So what needs to go into the brief? The PRCA has some good advice on how to write a PR brief, but in essence it should include:

• Your business objectives
• Where your brand/business currently is
• Where you want it to be
• Specific marketing objectives – build brand awareness, build authority, move into new territories or markets, lessen dependency on particular products, boost web traffic, improve web traffic quality, boost conversion rates, support a key sales point… etc.
• Key audiences – any insights you can share on these. Remember audiences can include influencers, staff, policy makers, local community, people who impact on your success but aren’t the end decisionmaker etc.
• Key competitors
• Issues and considerations that the agency must take into account
• Any relevant market research or background information
• Other marketing activity you are doing and planning
• Resourcing – what you can do inhouse, what’s being covered off by other agencies and what you’ll need their support with
• Time frame
• Budget
• KPIs – what success will feel like and how you’ll measure it

Alongside these core elements, what else do you need to think about?

If colleagues are going to be involved in the selection process, get their ‘buy in’ for the brief.

Make sure they agree with it. If you don’t, the agencies will be in the impossible position of pitching to a group of people who aren’t listening because they’re too busy picking holes in the brief itself. This is a nightmare scenario. The whole process will unravel, and you’ll waste a lot of everyone’s time.

Similarly, if something materially changes between when you provided the brief and the pitch date, let the agencies know.

Giving no budget indication, because you want to see what an agency comes back with, happens far too often but is utterly pointless. While it may feel tempting to withhold the budget, in case an agency can do the work for much less, decent agencies will refuse to pitch without knowing what budget you have in mind.

It’s easy to understand why. After all, without knowing what you can afford, they risk investing excessive time and resources into concepts that may not be financially feasible.

Remember – you’re not trying to catch the agency out, or grab yourself a bargain. You are trying to find an agency to partner with. So state your PR budget or at least provide a range.

Give the agencies at least 2 weeks to develop their proposals. Any less and you aren’t giving them the scope to think things through properly and develop the best possible proposals for you.

Be prepared during this build up to meet with the agencies if they ask.

If one agency asks to meet up, don’t feel you are giving them an unfair advantage by doing so. They are simply being keen and proactive. As long as all of the agencies could do the same if they asked, you are being perfectly fair.

If agencies ask additional questions having received your PR brief, answer them really promptly and with care. Remember their entire solution for you may depend on those answers.

Don’t share with the other agencies any additional insights one of the players has unearthed thanks to meeting you face to face or asking additional questions. It’s unprofessional and unfair.

Be prepared to provide feedback to the losing agencies. They have invested a large amount of resource and time in your business. It’s only fair to feed back on what was missing from their pitch or what swayed you to a rival.

The PRCA has just outlined in its Pitch Forward research report, agencies spend on average £7,165 per pitch. Some, particularly for more complex campaigns, spend upwards of £20,000! Faced with such a huge potential cost, good agencies won’t enter a process if they think it’s a lottery and the odds of them winning are tiny.

So, if you are going for a competitive pitch, do not have too many agencies on your pitch list. We recommend 3 max.

Are you reviewing your brand’s PR? Get in touch at louise@energypr.co.uk.