In my previous blog, I talked about the importance of B2B PR agencies understanding what their clients really want. Here’s our list of top three things that clients want from their B2B agencies:
- Results proved to be popular. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. We know that you can have a strong relationship with a client but you’re still only as good as the success of your last campaign results.
- Expertise was also a highly desired trait. This is because most clients aren’t PR experts. That’s why they hire us – because we are. That means sometimes we need to explain why a press release hasn’t been picked up or used in the way that the client had hoped. We need to take time to educate and consult with clients if they’re interested in developing their knowledge or we need to crack on and get the job done so they don’t have to take time to know how it works. It also means understanding the client’s industry and market sector and using that knowledge to be able to advise what will work and what won’t.
- The biggest surprise however was the number of times ‘partnership’ was mentioned. You would have been forgiven for thinking that clients only care about results especially when they set you a coverage KPI. But it appears that actually clients (well ours anyway) are hoping for a strong relationship between themselves and the agency. For our part, we know that we always deliver stronger, more impactful campaigns and programmes when we work in partnership with clients; especially when we’re given the opportunity to feed into wider marketing campaigns. We know this because we’ve won awards for it. And clearly clients see the benefits too.
Following our meetings with our clients, we developed personalised client charters based on their ranking of deliverables. The charter provides clients with a set of commitments that Skout intends to deliver over the next 12 months. We hope that when we review the charters next year that we’ll able to demonstrate how we have delivered against the commitments, so that our clients can see that we too value partnerships.
Claire Lamb has worked in technology PR for 20 years and has survived more bubbles than Michael Jackson.
