New Year’s Resolutions for Success with Your PR Firm
Happy New Year!
We at K2 are grateful for the wonderful people we’ve had the opportunity to work with over the last twelve years and look forward to continuing with many of you even as we further expand our horizons in 2018.
Here are some handy new year's resolutions to help maximize your relationship with your agency:
- The first and most obvious is to have a PR/marcom budget in place. One of the things that gets continually reinforced are the cultural differences between American and Israeli clients. For the past few months, our outreach efforts in Israel have often been met with “call us in January or February when we have our budgeting done.” American firms more typically have the coming year’s budget done in October or November. With a budget in place, long-term planning can begin well before the new year, with things like projected project launches, website revisions, etc., being funded, along with allocating resources for events along the way like wins, key partnerships and crises. In fact, Israeli companies are only beginning to realize that PR and marcom have to be budgeted entities, just like R&D. There tends to be a lot of last-minute shuffling, usually around getting budgets for trade shows (and trade-show support) and launches. Often, even launches aren’t budgeted, which generally results in lackluster sales. Even clients with whom we had at least weekly phone conferences have only given us a month’s notice of a launch! This leads us to
- Work in close collaboration with your PR team. We’re here because we want you to be successful; in fact, to some extent we’ve thrown our lot in with yours, and we want us all to be successful. We’re your partners, we care, you’re not an afterthought to us, we shouldn’t be an afterthought to you. Our contracts generally call for weekly or biweekly calls. Bring up your plans and concerns. Plus, you can always call us, get us more involved, expand the relationship, push us. We already agreed to work with you, we’ll happily expand the scope of our efforts.
- Listen to your PR team, you’ll benefit from our experience. Sometimes we’ll tell you to push things more aggressively, at other times we’ll say “it’s not worth it,” and save you time and money. Just ask why, we'll happily explain.
- Communications are natural processes that grow as your business grows. The first key to this is
- Purchase an adequate level of service. We realize that your needs may vary from month to month, so if you need one less document but additional outreach instead, that’s usually fine. Flexibility breeds flexibility. Don’t “nickel and dime” us, and we’ll be happy to flow with your needs. If you choose to purchase the minimum package, there’s little leeway. Don’t constantly ask for freebies. We’ll go above and beyond the contract – at times. If you really need more service, expand your agreement. PR pays off by putting you in front of qualified leads. You’re investing in yourself.
To a successful 2019!
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