Emilie Gerber: belief

Transcript context

…Maybe before we get to our very exciting lightning round, it might be fun to chat about how to pick a PR agency. Obviously you run one. When people are trying to decide who to work with and also when to decide to pick and work with a PR agency versus doing it themselves, what advice can you share when they're trying to make that big decision? I think there's an assumption that bigger, more well-known agencies are going to do a better job. I think a lot of those bigger, well-known agencies are used to working with a lot of household brands. And so their strategies tend to be very reactive, focus in the messaging, maybe have to turn down a bunch of opportunities, control what people say. That is the polar opposite in my opinion of doing startup PR. Startup PR, you got to experiment, you got to try new things, you got to be scrappy, you got to be fast. We actually personally love diving into pitching right away rather than spending several months on messaging just testing and market right away. And so don't assume just because they have the huge logos... To your point, you're like, "Oh, well, you work with [inaudible 01:20:16] Perplexity, does that mean you know how to work with all these tiny companies?" That's not necessarily a good thing, so don't just go buy the big logos. I would say that's my first piece of advice. My second piece of advice is find out what month one looks like with them. If month one is them just doing intake calls and learning about the company, and you're a startup that's still really paying close attention to how much money you're spending, you're not going to necessarily want to partner with an agency that needs a three-month ramp up cycle. And so really tactically understand what those first few months look like. I think that's something that I've noticed is a lot of agencies take a while before they get their hands dirty and start doing things. My third piece of advice would be writing recent writing samples. To the point of all those press release excerpts I shared, is that how they write? If it is, maybe they're not the right agency. So ask them. That's so easy. That's so easy to do. Just ask them for a couple recent blogs or releases, whatever they tend to go for, and read those. And, of course, wins too. You want to see what kind of stories they're getting, but that's a little more obvious. A lot of people have already talked about this, so I'll just mention briefly, it's important to meet with the actual team you're working on, not just the founder of the agency. So asking who's our day-to-day going to be? Can we chat with them really quick? One thing I would say don't do is an extensive RFP process. We actually as an agency don't participate in RFPs. The two times I've done it, I have regretted it just because of the amount of work going in versus the value that's there. And it's you're asking a team to do a lot of free work for you, and generally I think the best players are not going to do that, so you're going to weed out some of the best players if you're asking them to do a lot of free upfront work. So those are a few considerations. Perfect. And then just two more questions, because I imagine this is what people are thinking about when they're trying to decide should we find somebody is how long ahead of time they should find someone before something big is happening? And then just what's a budget they should have in mind for something like this? What's a minimum or a range, whatever you think would be helpful for people to understand here's how much you're probably going to be investing here?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.