By Dianne Canham, founder and director of éclat Marketing
It’s been a busy start to the year for everyone here at éclat as I’m pleased to say we’ve signed up a number of new technology PR clients in both the cloud and security sectors. It’s always a frantic time when the agency first starts work with a client, not just because we often need to build the client’s profile from a standing start, but because of the need to figure out the best way of working with each individual customer. To be honest getting to grips with the technology is often the easiest part – particularly as we’ve got a strong track record in both of these tech areas. What takes time and effort is figuring out how the client ticks, working out the processes to get the information we need and educating the client about what is actually newsworthy and what is just marketing hype.
There’s also the thorny question of when to take the client out to meet the press and who will make the best spokesperson. It’s not always the CEO who will be the best person to engage with the media and we can often suss this out from doing some media training with a group of potential spokespeople and then giving our honest feedback on who would work best. This can of course be political suicide for the agency or the client side contact if handled insensitively!
Getting time to meet the media is also difficult in this day and age, with most journalists having their nose to the grind meeting daily deadlines for online news. That’s probably why informal social events like getting together over a beer after hours seem to be more popular these days. Finding a strong news story to tempt our time-pressured media friends out for a meeting is a must have – but some clients need help in appreciating what is and isn’t newsworthy. This is again where having agency time with client spokespeople who have first-hand experience of dealing with customers can be invaluable in helping us wheedle out potential news angles. Impressing on our clients the value of statistics and independent endorsement of marketing messages is also vital as well as helping them to understand how to craft a comment on a breaking news story that offers new insight or information.
What makes a massive difference in helping to speed up this process and enables the agency to quickly start gaining coverage for the client is the competence, understanding and credibility of the PR contact at the client. When that individual can help in digging out those PR nuggets – particularly when the client HQ is overseas – the speed and success of any media engagement is dramatically increased. The willingness of that individual to also take advice and guidance from the agency is also paramount. Here’s hoping our new batch of clients falls into this category!
Anyone else want to share their experiences of helping build a PR profile from scratch?