By Patrick Southwell:
Some of our clients have worked with PR agencies before. Some haven’t. But when it comes to getting going, they tend to all ask the same thing: “So, how will it actually work?” Seasoned communicator or not, it’s an important question to ask.
After all, investing time, effort and money into a relationship needs to get off to a good start and show results quickly. That’s why we’re always 100 percent clear on what five things clients can expect from us.
1. Partnership
When you work with us, you’ll get true partnership. We’re nimble enough to be an extension of your team, making suggestions, coming up with ideas, helping you get buy-in and showing off results. We’re not here to do the bare minimum or down tools the moment we meet KPIs. We’re all on the same side and need to work with clients like they’re our peers, colleagues and – more often than not – friends.
2. Proactivity
Let me make this very clear – it’s the responsibility of the agency to come up with ideas, creative content and opportunities. It is not down to the client to push things along. We do everything we can to be in the driving seat from day one. That’s what our clients want from us.
3. Quick wins
When our clients begin working with us, they don’t want to wait a month for any inkling of a result. They want a return on investment within days. We always strive to get going quickly. We write content fast, come up with ideas quickly, get coverage swiftly and make an impact straight away. Our clients often don’t have the luxury of time on their side. They need to show their boards solid outcomes from day one. We deliver them.
4. Storytelling
It’s become standard that clients expect excellent storytelling from their PR agencies. Quite right too. We make sense of the world through stories and they’re the basis of how we communicate in everything we do. We ensure storytelling is at the heart of how we deliver the strategies we create.
5. Process
We work in a creative industry. But we need guidelines to make us effective. That’s why we start as we mean to go on, with strong processes. These mirror the ways in which the top agencies operate, making use of best practice and applying it at the right scale for our clients. This means having things like activity plans, weekly work-in-progress documents, regular client calls, coverage trackers and impact reports, quarterly planning sessions, and approval processes.
Hopefully, you now have an idea of what working with Five not 10 is like. Give us a call or drop us an email and we’d be delighted to show you exactly what you can expect from us.