Five Keys to PR Agency Growth
Growing agencies whether small or large – is one of the most significant challenges facing leaders. As one industry wag recently shared, “the moment you win a client is when you start to lose them.” Client turnover is inevitable no matter how good the management, leadership or results.
Keeping the new business pipeline primed while managing existing relationships isn’t easy. Word of mouth only spreads so far, and in a competitive marketplace, it’s important to be top of mind when clients are looking to hire. Unless you have the scale and budget for a CMO or new business director to generate new business, the burden falls on founders and senior leaders to be marketers.
The most successful growth strategies will leverage multiple channels that reflect client interests and needs. Here are five things that are important to success:
Deliver outstanding results for existing clients. Even though this may go without saying, it is worth repeating: Great work is table stakes for any growth strategy.
You need to be visible. With finite budgets and time, you will want to be in the right places at the right time. That means being in front of audiences that matter, be it one-on-one, in small scale settings, or reaching a large but focused group of prospects.
Add value and demonstrate expertise. Thought leadership has and will continue to outlast marketing trends because, when done well, it adds value and underscores expertise. It should always be about providing information that is relevant to the industry and clients.
Don’t oversell. Your track record, results, shared experience of clients, and demonstrated expertise will sell for you. Where there is match between a client’s needs and an agency’s capabilities, the more likely the conversation will start with “you got me at hello.”
Build relationships. Business is all about relationships. The goal of a sales funnel is to connect individual decision-makers.
It's not a coincidence that the partnership between the CommPRO and CommunicationsMatch™ to create new CommPRO memberships is focused on “all of the above”.
CommPRO provides insights and wisdom from industry influencers to help corporate and agency communicators succeed. With an audience of 50,000 communications professionals and leaders, it provides members visibility for content, and hosted events.
The platform enables clients and agencies to share thought leadership to demonstrate expertise. Integrated links in thought leadership and other content to comprehensive CommunicationsMatch™ profiles provides a path for clients to find out more about agencies when they are looking to hire. With key information they need to determine if there is a good match, a profile is a starting point for generating new business leads from clients genuinely interested in working with you.
Underscoring the importance of relationships, memberships provide access to events that bring clients and agencies together to share expertise and perspective on key issues impacting the industry.
Each of these strategies is important to growth. Our approach provides an “Everything Everywhere All At Once” strategy of reaching your target audiences, now and over time, with a range of content, and paths to cliemt-agency engagement to generate new business.
Find out more about CommPRO memberships that integrate CommunicationsMatch™ profiles here.
