18 Feb 2022

Five tips for briefing your PR agency

As a marketing team or business leader, briefing your PR partner on your company, new initiative or project is the springboard for a great campaign or program of work.
While every project will be different, we have five essentials to keep in mind when briefing in your PR company.

Ask us how to brief us!
If it’s our first time working together, let’s chat about the best way to brief us in.
Depending on your needs, other partners and timeline, it might be a reverse brief or an initial meeting to get the ball rolling. We have briefing templates to make the process as easy as possible.

Tell us about your organisation or brand
We will want to get under the skin of your business or brand, so share with us as much as you can (we can sign an NDA at this point in the process). This might include your:

  • Company or brand vision
  • Insights into your target audiences
  • Market position or market share
  • Main business challenges
  • Key business objectives or KPIs
  • Marketing activities or PR services undertaken to date: What’s worked? What hasn’t?
  • Any key partners or stakeholders

Share your objectives 
This is where we want you to describe the outcomes you anticipate or require. For example:

  • Align PR strategy with business direction
  • Increase brand awareness and reputation
  • Raise the profile of people within the business
  • Increase enquiries
  • Generate sales leads
  • Obtain information about your audiences
  • Deliver information to your audiences
  • Plan for, or manage an issue or crisis

Identify what success looks like
What does communications success look like for this campaign or program of work? How will we help you achieve goals?
It’s ok if you’re not sure at this point in time, we will work with you to set KPIs, but it’s good to know from the outset anything you will need to report on internally. For example, prevalence of key messages, positive sentiment, traffic to website, CPM, total reach, etc.

Be upfront about the budget
If you have a budget in mind, we love it if you can be upfront. We have many different solutions available but want to make sure we’re in the same ballpark as you, so we can recommend a solution that is suitable and feasible for your business.

Access to the ECCO Global Communications Network is simple. Contact information for a specific geography is available on the agency overview pages accessed here or contact the ECCO Global Communications office via email info@ecco-network.com.