How to Choose an Agency Partner

See if this sounds familiar.

You receive an email from a building and construction industry publication, or you are reading one of them – online or otherwise – and you come across an article that features a competitor or one of its projects. Maybe it’s a lengthy piece with lots of great pictures and quotes from the competition on how they solved a customer’s challenge related to sustainability, or aesthetic impact, or costs. Or perhaps it is a guest article authored by a senior executive at a competing company offering his or her point of view on a key industry issue.

“How did they get featured?”

“Why didn’t we get contacted or asked to participate?”

“What do we need to do to be included?”

In an increasingly fractured and frenzied media environment, it is no doubt a confusing and unsettling time for companies that produce everything from exterior cladding and insulation to windows, doors, roofing, lighting, and everything in between. Your building products brand likely finds it a challenge to consistently tell its story and regularly secure media coverage, all to drive credibility and awareness for the organization, its products, its innovations, and its people. Getting results requires a commitment, and the results are never guaranteed.

Simply stated, the endeavor is a heavy lift that requires time and resources.

One sure-fire way to make headway in this space is to engage the services of a marketing agency with public relations (PR) expertise that specializes in developing a brand’s story and then sharing that story to all your brand’s important audiences.

How do you go about selecting the right partner? What are the red flags to avoid? And what mindset should you take into the process if you are going to partner with a firm?

Here are the top considerations.

#1 – Find Your Voice

Much like building a single-family home or commercial building, you need to lay the foundation before you start selecting and installing cladding, windows, and insulation. Undertake the same critical exercise before choosing an agency partner to help you up the ante with your PR efforts.

Ask yourself a series of questions. How well do you know your brand’s voice and what it should sound like? Has your organization undertaken efforts to define the brand based on research and industry insights? How does your brand’s story set you apart from the competition?

If you have solid answers to these questions backed by sources of authority, you are ahead of the game. If you have work to do on this front, consider engaging a firm with PR expertise to help you define your brand voice. Ensure they have the capabilities and the experience to develop a strategic plan for your brand complete with audience insights and industry personas that mimic your target audiences. How can you tell a compelling story and gain traction in PR if you do not know who you are talking to and what is important to them?

Partner with an agency that helps you to define your brand, and they will be an even more powerful ambassador for you as they go out into the marketplace to tell your story. They will know it, and they will be able to deliver it, because they helped to craft it.

#2 – Understand the Investment

Companies that engage an agency with PR expertise and expect results immediately – high-profile media coverage in top-tier publications or exclusive coverage in the industry media in the first few weeks or even months – are setting themselves up for disappointment.

Getting traction in public relations for your brand is not like flipping a light switch. To truly get results, your brand will need to invest in a program that drives a continuum of activity over the long haul. The PR practitioners at your agency will be engaged in a wide variety of activities to activate this and sustain it once they have landed your narrative and brand voice. They will be conducting ongoing story mining to identify the compelling stories within your organization, developing content assets to tell those stories, merchandising those assets across your owned and earned media channels, developing and feeding relationships with journalists in the space to secure coverage, and more.

Consider it a red flag if the firm promises you instant results or guaranteed results from media relations they conduct on your behalf. There is a reason it is called “earned” media. The coverage you seek for your brand must truly be earned, and that takes patience and time.

#3 – Commit to Continual Story Mining

If you want your chosen agency partner to truly get results for you, ensure that your organization is primed to assist them and empower them to do the job right. This means making a commitment to perpetual story mining. It is not a once-and-done exercise. It requires constant cultivation.

Get a commitment from top leadership down to ensure that the PR practitioners at your chosen firm have access to key people within the business – the C suite, senior sales executives, R&D specialists, and other subject matter experts. Provide transparency into where the business is going and what innovations you seek to deliver to the marketplace. Your agency will understand if certain initiatives are not ready for public consumption, and they will certainly execute a non-disclosure agreement with you to protect you. Keeping secrets from your agency partner keeps them in the dark, which is not the pathway to driving earned media coverage or awareness for the brand.

Want to tout solutions you have delivered to customers and how those solutions have enabled your customers to solve a specific challenge? Get the sales team on board with the process. Ensure that sales is ready to make introductions to leading customers. This way, your agency can help you activate the voice of the customer by developing customer testimonials and case studies, which are among the most impactful forms of storytelling. This enables your brand to offer third-party credibility to your claims. Rather than you singing your praises, someone that bought your services is delivering the message.

As you interview prospective firms for their PR capabilities, discern their commitment to storytelling. Are they asking the right questions? Are they pressing you for details much like a journalist would, diving in to identify the story? Does it seem as if they can get their arms around your business and identify the drivers? Are they aggressive in pursuing solid story angles?

If they are not, they may not be the right partner.

#4 – Find a Firm that Connects the Dots

Effective storytelling on behalf of your brand is most certainly not a single-track execution with only one pathway. Pitch a story. Get coverage. Count up the placements.

A reputable, experienced agency partner will go well beyond this. They will ensure that the program they develop for you is fully integrated so it can deliver on both owned and earned media fronts. Media relations is a critical component of this, and that means hiring a firm with dedicated expertise in securing media coverage is important. Can they demonstrate that they know how to engage the media and get results? Do they have established relationships with media stakeholders that can pay dividends? Ask the agency to demonstrate results on this front.

With media consumption constantly changing and newsrooms of every kind shrinking, your chosen agency’s PR team needs to ensure that your brand is delivering content on its own channels as well – blog posts, authored articles with expert insight, videos, customer testimonials, case studies, and more. You need to be the arbiter of your own story, driving the conversation with your prospects and customers – via social media, on your website, in email – and the stories you tell will help to drive those conversations. Is the firm you are considering ready to make this happen for your brand? Do they know how to conduct brand journalism, and are they able to syndicate content across your owned media channels to get maximum impact out of the investment?

If your chosen marketing agency partner has a broad array of PR capabilities, they will also be able to coach your subject matter experts via media training and prepare them to be interviewed by a trained journalist. They should also have the expertise to help you manage a crisis for the brand if it erupts, whether it is a reputation crisis brought on by a senior executive or a fire at your manufacturing plant that may have resulted in injuries. Can your chosen agency step up and help you mitigate the damage in a crisis when you need them the most?

Ask other critical questions of your prospective agency partner. What experience do they have in terms of developing video content? Video remains a powerful tool in the content marketing arsenal, and it can cascade to everything from paid media to your website, your YouTube channel, social media, and more. Does your chosen firm have capabilities in these endeavors? What experience do they have in producing podcasts, another growing area of influence in the new media paradigm?

If the firm you are considering cannot connect many of these dots to drive holistic results for you, you may need to consider another partner.

#5 – Consider an Agency with Industry Experience

If you are facing health problems, you certainly want the advice and counsel of an expert in that arena, a specialist. That means it makes little sense to get an appointment with a podiatrist if you really need a cardiologist to treat a heart condition.

Translate this to the selection of an agency partner with PR capabilities. Sure makes sense to consider one that has expertise in your industry. They know the players. They understand the market forces, the hot-button issues, and all the key audiences you seek to impact. This collapses their learning curve when you engage them, enabling them to get up to speed quickly and get better, faster results for you.

At BLD Marketing, our singular focus is on building and cultivating brands in the building and construction space.

Let our PR team help you tell your story as your agency partner.