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Hi, I'm Eric Rattner, an account manager here at iAcquire. This week we're looking at Inbound
Marketing Chapter Thirteen. How to pick and measure a PR agency. PR agencies are important
to have because they can help build relationships and they can really interrupt print media.
Two problems with PR agencies these days is that right now everybody is in PR.
We have bloggers and all these journalists online and everybody has their own blog and
everybody is writing their own content. So that's basically what PR does. Also right
now PR doesn't have proprietary relationships as they used to have because at any point
anybody can typically reach out to some of these news outlets and have contact and build
a relationship.
With that being said, if you don't have people on your team who are digital citizens who
have the reach that a PR agency would have it’s important to hire a PR agency. Basically
this chapter goes into what you need to do in order to pick a PR agency and how to measure
that PR agency's success.
Taking a look at how to pick a PR agency. There's basically three important things to
take a look at and three filters that you should run the agency through. First you should
meet the team. Basically when you go through the process you’re going to have a pretty
fantastic sales person. It's also important to meet who you are going to be working with
on a day to day basis.
The salesperson may know a ton of information about the PR and they know a lot about your
business but how will your immediate team work with you? Making sure that you can work
with them well and that you know what your going to be getting out of this process is
very important. Second thing to do is take a look at the PR agency's website. Are they
practicing what they are preaching? Do they have great inbound links from reputable sources?
So are they just doing it on their own or are they just telling other companies how
to do it?
Typically an agency will say "we don't have time to do this on our end." "We don't have
time to do this in house because we focused so much time on our clients." Don't accept
that answer. Make sure that the PR agency is doing what they say they are going to be
doing for you. The last thing to do is take a look at client relationships and how the
PR agencies are managing client relationships. The book actually suggests reaching out to
some those clients.
Speaking with them, hearing about their experience and making a decision based on that conversation
that you have. So that's the best way to pick a PR agency. The next step that you want to
do with the PR agency is figure out how your going to track their progress. How are they
going to be measured? One way of obvious measurement is the number of inbound links to your site.
There's a couple of ways you can do this.
The book suggests using a tool called website grader. You can also use open site explorer
to just measure the number of inbound links coming into your site. That's obviously a
metric to judge a PR agency by. The next way that you may also want to judge and measure
your PR agency is based on brand mentions.
Every time a PR agency writes an article about you and gets it published it may not necessarily
have a link to your site, but they may mention your brand name which is still beneficial
for the brand. So making sure that you’re tracking this is important. The way to track
brand mentions would be searching Google using your brand name in quotations. What you will
see is on the top of the results page it will say one of ten results of eighty five thousand.
Having that number go up is a way to track the number of brand mentions throughout Google.
So, those are the two ways to track and measure your PR agency. I highly suggest reading this
book and feel free to leave any comments if you have any questions. Thank you.