There is a range of PR services that can form a PR retainer. When engaging with a PR agency to support your business, a set of PR services will be agreed that will are included your retainer or project agreement.
Here’s an overview of what PR services typically make up a retainer:
Audits and strategies
A good place to start with PR is with a comms audit. This will help both you and your PR agency understand where your business currently stands, and identify any strengths and weaknesses and what more can be done to boost your efforts.
This information can support you to formulate a strategy.
Having a PR strategy is vital to ensure both you and your agency have a relevant and realistic plan in place to achieve your goals.
Working with a PR expert will help you to understand your goals and how to reach them. Eventually, it will maximise the results along the way.
PR campaigns
A regular drumbeat of PR activity can do wonders for your brand, ensuring that your key messages and news are featured in your target media.
Whether working on a three-month survey campaign or single new appointments press release, securing media coverage in your target publications is the bread and butter of the PR services that an agency or PR professional will offer.
Press office
As well as launching and planning specific PR campaigns, a PR agency can support your business by operating a press office function for your business.
This means they will be actively forming relationships with your target media, responding to reactive media requests and ensuring that they are the first point-of-call for a story discussing your areas of expertise.
Award writing
Awards are a fantastic way of getting your brand noticed and achieving recognition as the industry expert you are.
Awards are brilliant for boosting team morale, showcasing your talents and showing off to potential and existing clients. After all, everybody wants to work with a winner!
A PR agency will offer award writing as a PR service and can support you right from the offset with identifying relevant awards programmes, drafting the entry and submitting it.
There is a wealth of awards programmes that will be suitable for your business. For example, if you’re based in Yorkshire you might want to check out the Yorkshire Post Excellence in Business Awards.
Examples of awards that your business can enter are:
- Local or regional awards
- Industry specific
- Project specific
- For a team or an individual
- Company culture / workplace
Features
A successful press office includes a regular drumbeat of activity and one of the tactics is features and thought leadership content. This includes monitoring relevant forward feature lists, contributing insight and expert comment as well as proactively pitching feature ideas and ‘how-to guides’ that reflect your expertise.
Profiling
Building up a media profile for a company owner or key spokesperson can help build trust, credibility and convey expertise.
Your PR team should proactively source and secure various personal profiling opportunities in your target media for you to tell your story and give the business world the benefit of your personal thoughts and opinions on issues affecting the industry. This includes:
- Profile pieces
- Q&As e.g. Meet the MD
- Opinion pieces
- One-to-ones
- Speaker platform opportunities at industry events
- Expert panels
- Podcasts
If you’re considering engaging an expert to support your PR activities, we would definitely recommend reaching out to them and discussing what PR services they can offer you. If you’re unsure of where to start when pulling a brief together, this guide on how to write a PR brief might be useful.
Our team is always on hand to help your form the most suitable retainer package of PR services to generate the best results for you. Get in touch today.
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