Two challenges that mid-sized PR agencies regularly face are balancing new business with client services and demonstrating results, writes Gini Dietrich over at Spin Sucks. This isn’t surprising, as they’re some of the most difficult issues to manage, particularly with limited resources.
To compete against the big agencies and scale your business, though, finding a way to balance the work of acquiring new clients with the need to deliver exceptional results is mission critical. One answer is to engineer a process that increases the productivity and effectiveness of your agency’s employees. Yet another is to find and implement tools that streamline work and make it easier to impress your clients.
Broadcast media monitoring is one such tool that agencies can use to their advantage. Although primarily used to track media coverage and share clips, it offers many strategic capabilities - ones that may be underutilized across the PR industry. Consider, for example, the following ways a broadcast monitoring service can help PR agencies find, pitch and serve your clients.
Broadcast Monitoring Helps You Be the First to Identify Potential Clients
Stay on top of developing news in target industries with news alerting. With little effort, you can identify potential clients who have an urgent need for strategic advice or who may need extra resources to manage a crisis or competitive threats.
Bring Your New Public Relations Business Pitch to Life
When you’re ready to pitch, prove you’re knowledgeable about your prospective client and the media environment in which it operates with insights and analytics about emerging industry trends. This is the kind of insight that will ensure you’ll win the business.
And don’t make do with plain vanilla slides. Incorporate video of coverage into the presentation and be sure to stand out among other pitching agencies.
PR Agencies: Prove Your value
After the client signs, broadcast media monitoring becomes a critical resource for account management teams – far beyond the video. By analyzing industry and brand coverage, your teams are better prepared to develop smart campaigns, provide well-considered advice, and bring new ideas to the table. But perhaps most importantly, it provides the data that proves that your efforts are working for the client.
Use Broadcast Monitoring to Retain Your PR Agency Clients by Going Above What’s Expected
Provide your clients with a complete picture of their industry landscape. Track news about their the top competitors so that you can reverse-engineer communications strategies and respond faster to threats or opportunities.
These examples are just a small taste of how broadcast media monitoring is an invaluable asset for agency management. It can also help you market your agency, develop more effective messaging, and act as an early warning system for emerging crises. In fact, broadcast media monitoring underpins every stage of the client life cycle. Indeed, our playbook covers 14 ways mid-sized PR agencies can use it to win business, wow clients and develop referrals.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that all broadcast monitoring solutions aren’t the same. Before you commit to any solution, be sure the vendor offers full coverage of your most important media markets along with tools like alerts and analytics. To best evaluate vendors, create a checklist of must-have features.
The following three essentials should be on your PR agency list:
- Comprehensive market coverage that includes broadcast outlets in all 210 US media markets plus international coverage
- Near real-time email alerts so you can keep on top of emerging issues and crises
- The ability to edit and internally share broadcast media video
Broadcast media monitoring will give your PR agency a competitive edge by helping you and your team to demonstrate again and again that a client’s investment in public relations will return strong results – from the first contact with a prospective client to daily relationship building and campaign execution.
Learn more about how broadcast media monitoring can help your mid-sized PR agency successfully balance new business with client services and prove your value. Our playbook shares specific ways broadcast monitoring is a strategic asset in all your PR agency’s activities, including:
- Track news events to identify potential clients
- Prepare compelling new business pitches
- Create more effective messaging for clients
- Act as your client’s early warning system
- Prove ROI with meaningful metrics
