Over the last month, I’ve run into at least three marketing executives who have expressed frustration with their PR agencies. One even went as far as wanting to fire their agency. Have agencies become afflicted with the incompetency bug? Or have clients become impossible to please?
From time immemorial, agency-client relationships have been a source of much contention among clients and agencies. Both sides point the finger at the other when things go awry. Regardless of who is to blame, there are a few ground rules that either party should subscribe to for more effective partnerships.
Set Realistic and Relevant Goals
Good PR metrics tie back to an organization’s business goals and should be set collaboratively by both client and agency. Effective PR programs typically present the client’s point of view or story and sway key audiences to that point of view or persuade them to prefer a client’s offering over the competition. Set program metrics accordingly. Not every story or program warrants coverage in the Wall Street Journal or a cover story on Fortune, yet clients often insist on this as a metric for PR success. Agencies need to stand their ground and educate their clients on the appropriate metrics. Failing to do so could be the undoing of what would otherwise be a productive relationship.
Communicate, Communicate, Communicate
Clear and consistent communications between all parties is key to a healthy, long-term relationship. Seems like an easy thing to do, right? Wrong. Accurate and timely communications is the responsibility of both the client and the agency. One client contact I spoke with was repeatedly asked to provide the same information by different members of her account team over the course of a week and she had to consistently prompt her team for status update reports. While the fact that her account team was spread over three time zones might have something to do with the situation, it still doesn’t excuse the team’s lapse in communications. The simple scheduling of weekly status conference calls along with the assignment of a single point of client contact within the account team would resolve the situation.
On the flip side, clients need to communicate changes within the company such as a change in strategic direction or a corporate restructuring to their agency as soon as they are aware of it and preferably BEFORE the news makes its way to mainstream media or the blogosphere. This allows the agency to be most effective in helping its client be more proactive in presenting its side of the story to the media and get on the right side of the news cycle.
Timely Reporting
Client contacts like most executives have bosses to report to. Make your client’s job a little easier and present him/her with concise status reports that he/she can easily re-purpose. Remember to present your results in the context of the goals that were jointly developed at the beginning of the project. Schedule your reporting schedule to correspond to that of your client contact’s reporting schedule to his/her supervisor.
Be Flexible
Sometimes the best laid plans do go awry. Both client and agency need to keep an open mind and allow changes to be made to the game plan. For instance, product messages developed may not resonate with their target audiences during launch time. Agencies need to respond by not only providing their clients with the feedback but also offering recommendations on how to refine the messages so that they would meet with a more favorable response. Clients must fight the reflex reaction to “shoot the messenger” and be open to counsel. Only by doing so, do clients benefit from the full value of their agency.
These rules are by no means exhaustive. I would love to hear your take on building better client-agency relations.
