At the start of this year, we took a big leap and brought our PR in-house. We have the expertise within our team, and who better to write the story of a campaign than the agency who created it? 

What is PR?

PR stands for Public Relations. It’s the way in which organisations communicate with the public, promote themselves, a product, or a service, and build a positive reputation and image. There are two types of PR known as digital and traditional:

• Digital PR is the act of link building through creating content to outreach (email) to bloggers and journalists to secure coverage. The main goals are higher social mentions, better online presence, backlinks, referral traffic and search engine rankings.
• Traditional PR is a more old-fashioned form of connecting. It centres around face-to-face networking, meeting up with journalists, visiting trade shows, either over the phone or face to face interviews, and so on. It’s a direct approach based offline and focuses on building real life relationships. Traditional PR utilises leaflets, billboards, newspapers, and magazines to boost awareness and reach.

Our Journey

It was a hefty undertaking, so we stripped it back to the studs and started from the very beginning to make sure everyone was on the same page. Following an in-depth workshop, we detailed how we were going to make a PR strategy work for us, and what we wanted to achieve from our efforts. Ultimately, our main goals were coverage and building connections. Our long term goal is to continue developing our PR offering, hopefully earning us enough credibility to run our own external workshop.

Our Advice

One Agency’s PR sits within our content team – that’s us, hi! Here are the biggest lessons we want to share with you if you’re thinking about taking your PR in-house:

• Editorial writing can be a turn off for some journalists. Review previous work of theirs to gauge their writing style, and tailor your press release accordingly.
• 3 days is the minimum amount of time you should wait before sending a follow up email.
• No matter how big your contact list is, half of them will be out of office. Don’t panic,  you can redirect your email to another journalist if it’s urgent.
• Not every campaign is press worthy. That isn’t to say it’s not incredible, of course it is, but it needs to have the hook to peak interest.
• Don’t be disappointed when you don’t get the coverage you expected. It could be for a number of reasons, such as being missed in an inbox, or breaking news taking precedent. 
• Always check Google for coverage. Journalists are super busy, and don’t always have the time to reply to you with a link to your article.
• Clients want to trust the companies they do business with, and nothing builds and fosters trust quite positive like PR.

We have a long way to go, and a lot to learn still, but we’re really proud of how we’ve stepped into this role and been able to showcase the phenomenal campaigns created at One Agency and One Events. We’ve got some pretty cool work in the pipeline.

If you have any tips for us to help progress our PR journey, or would like our help, please contact us through our contact form.