PR’s Top Pros Talk… How to Improve the PR Structure

April White, CEO and Founder of Trust Relations, discusses her mission to reinvent the PR industry with strategies to help agency leaders overcome the common challenges that even the best PR agencies have faced for decades. April discusses the shift to remote work, advice to help PR practitioners successfully manage client expectations, tips for better account staffing, insights for junior publicists to advance in their careers, developing more compelling client narratives, and more. She also emphasizes the importance of authenticity in PR and working with clients to put their words into action, before taking their brand stories to the press.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: April, for context, why don’t you start by sharing some information about your agency and the types of clients you work with?

APRIL: Yeah, so my agency’s name is Trust Relations. We work with a lot of clients, both on the B2B side and the B2C side. So, we’ve worked with everything from really heady, you know, sass and tech related things that are very niche, health tech included. And logistics is a big one that we work with a lot of supply chain logistics clients. And then on the consumer side, we work with a lot of lifestyle, food and beverage kinds of clients. And so, yeah, we really run the gamut.

DOUG: From your previous experience, we’ve spoken about how you feel. Sometimes the structure of PR can be really challenging. Can you talk a little bit about some of those built in challenges? And then we can get to how you can overcome them.

APRIL: I think there’s a lot of challenges with trying to make the agency world profitable, because at the end of the day, it is still a services industry, right? And so a lot of times I think what happens is it ends up being staffed by a lot of very young people that are not totally ready to be placed in the positions they’re in, and the senior people kind of get pulled out from doing the work and to doing more biz dev related tasks and things like that. And so, I think that there has been some struggles with just trying to be a profitable industry in general, which has led to some, you know, some practices that don’t always work for everyone.

DOUG: You know, what I’m hearing is if more expensive people are working on the project, the client might need to be willing to pay more to get those qualities, or at least have some more flexibility in the arrangement so that the senior-level people can work on the stuff they need to, and others can possibly be arms and legs.

APRIL: I think it’s some of that, and I think in my case, what I decided to do is, you know, make a completely virtual agency. So, we cut out the overhead of a very expensive office space in New York City or Los Angeles, for example. Because those end up costing a lot of money that then the clients are paying for and they’re not aware that they’re paying for that. But, you know, in some cases, I think clients really value having a fancy office that they can come visit and brainstorm and have meetings in. But I feel like after the pandemic, that’s not really something people value as much. I think people have started to realize the efficiencies that can come with just doing a Zoom call, rather than getting on the subway or getting in a cab, or getting in a car and going to the office and sitting there and then doing it all in reverse.

DOUG: Yeah, and you’re speaking to us from Arizona. So for me, it would be a very long cab ride. So this is working very well.

APRIL: It would be a flight, yes. Or very expensive. The world’s most expensive cab ride, yes.

DOUG: Is it important that clients can communicate better with their agency partners? And how do you make that happen? And of course, vice versa.

APRIL: I think a lot of the communication issues actually come from the same place where if you don’t have somebody senior who’s seen all the pitfalls and already knows, oh, if we do this, it’s going to not work. Or if we don’t have this data or this spokesperson or this, you know, example or anecdote, it’s just not going to fly with the press. And so, what ends up happening, I think, is that junior people are less confident in pushing back on clients and saying, hey, yeah, you know, I mean, this is a silly example, but it’s definitely happened to a number of practitioners I know. Hey, we’re launching a new website. We want to put out a press release, right? And a senior person would say. The website by itself isn’t going to be enough news, but if we can wrap it in, make it a milestone kind of press release right where it’s about, okay, well, we’ve expanded this much and we have these, you know, sales points to prove it or we have this, you know, a percentage increase in revenue or we have a new office that we’re if you can wrap it into sort of a this is, you know, a momentous time for the company, then we can make it work, right? But a junior person would probably say that didn’t have the same experience or confidence would say, okay, and then draft the press release and then pitch it and they get no results. Right. So, I think a lot of the communication issues are really on the onus of the account person and their comfort level with their knowledge and their ability to, to gently obviously say, you know, you always want to approach it more like an improv scene. Yes. And we would love to announce your website. And I think this is a great opportunity to roll it into a momentum release. Right. It’s that kind of thing. So, I think that I think that a lot of the communication issues really still come from that same place of not having the seniority or experience required to be able to inspire the confidence of the client to be able to, you know, say those kinds of things or, or pivot as you will, to make sure that we’re going to be successful in the efforts.

DOUG: The importance of, you know, senior people experience. Clearly that’s a primary factor for you. But there are a lot of really smart up and comers. Any advice for them to really grow their impact and skill sets so they can be given clients the best advice?

APRIL: Yeah, I think if you’re thrown into a situation where you feel a little bit over your head, which we all have, and that’s fine and that’s great, it’s an opportunity for you to spread your wings and grow. I would say the really important thing is to dive into that industry, especially if it’s a B2B tech thing or something really heady. The more that you can kind of study up on the industry and read articles about it and get your head around it, the easier it’s going to be for you to understand whether it’s something that the client wants to pitch or something that you might want to pitch on their behalf is really salient and media soluble. I think that the other thing is that if you can find somebody in the industry, it doesn’t even have to be at your agency. But if you can find somebody with the expertise and the seniority that you can befriend as a mentor, then you can always ask them, right? And you can say. I think it’s always better to say, let me talk to my team and get back to you. I think this is very exciting that you’re launching a website. Let me run this by a few people, and we’ll come back to you with our suggestions or recommendations, right? Don’t ever feel like you have to say yes on the spot. I think it’s really important. You know, if you want to check in with somebody above you and say, is this going to be can we pitch this? I think that’s a smarter way to handle it than to backtrack and have to say, hey, so sorry. The thing we said we were going to do, we can’t do. So always if in doubt, there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, let’s circle back. We’re going to brainstorm this and come back to you with some recommendations.

DOUG: It’s interesting. I always speak to my team about sort of four different boxes of where you want to be. Do you want to appear agreeable? Do you want to appear disagreeable? That’s not going to work. But can you appear agreeable and then be disagreeable by saying things like, oh, that sounds like a good idea. Let me check it out. Can I check it out with some of my media contacts? Then you go back and you could say, checked it out with some of our contacts that wouldn’t fly, but this would. So that’s a way to approach it. And of course, obviously if you appear disagreeable and or disagreeable, that’s not a really long lasting solution as well. One of the things that you’re big on, as many agencies are, is the importance of bringing authenticity to brands, or, I guess, a better way to phrase that would be playing off what their authenticity actually is. How do you go about setting up that kind of structure and utilizing it to brand advantage?

APRIL: So, part of the reason that I coined the term trust relations and named the agency after that was because I felt like the idea of PR being spin was something that we’ve sort of earned as an industry because we’ve done a lot of that, and it’s taking some reality and spinning it into something, you know, spinning up a yarn about something that isn’t exactly so. And, you know, I think that the industry as a whole needs to basically reinvent the way that it’s viewing public relations and that I think what you have to do is you have to do what you say before you can say what you do, right? So you can’t go out there and say, oh, we’re a sustainable company and make all these claims. If all you’ve done is put LED lights in your warehouse or you know something, that’s something that’s not really going to move the needle. So, you have to have those proof points, right? So, there have been instances where I’ve talked to prospects and they say, you know, we want to be known for this. And I say, what are you doing? And they say, for example, I talked to a couch company, which this is an interesting one. I don’t want to say the name, but what they were doing is every time they delivered a new couch, they would offer to take the old couch, and then they would recycle it and give it to somebody in need, right?

DOUG: That’s a great program.

APRIL: That’s amazing, that’s a great program. I said, have you made this official because I don’t see anything on the website? Well, no. And I said, okay, it would be great if you, you know, to be able to go out and say that. I think that’s a great thing for us to promote, but why don’t we formalize the program and have some kind of form where people can sign up to receive a new recycled couch or something like that? And then we have a great story, right? So, if they hadn’t had something like that, then it would have been like, I don’t know how to promote this, but and even without having it formalized, it’s a little bit tricky to promote until you make it something that’s more visible, right? So I think a lot of times what we need to do is just work with the client and say, hey, that’s a great story on the operations side or the business side, are you able to you know, zhuzh a little bit so that it actually looks more appealing to the media. And it’s going to be a really compelling story. So I think it’s really important that we that we do that and, you know, kind of back to the other point, I think a lot of times. You need people working on the account that know those industries really well and know that media really well. And sometimes, sometimes people just get thrown on accounts that they don’t exactly have the credentials to be working on. And so that’s another thing I think is really important is when you have those credentials, you can say, hey, my girl at Marie Claire, my girl, you know, ESSENCE, my girl at whatever meaning the journalist. Not, you know, that sounds too colloquial to make sense. Once you have those relationships, you can say to the client and inspire their confidence. Hey, if we formalize this program, I guarantee you that Lisa over at XYZ publication or Bob over at XYZ publication is going to absolutely die for this.

DOUG: Yeah. That’s to your point about surveying the media in advance to provide guidance. And that also gives you credibility, right, on stories, you know, on our team, our media relations people. And, you know, one of them has been doing it for like 25 years, and the other was working in politics. And it’s now been doing it the last three years. You know, I mean, they can have the power because they know best what’s going to work so we can get their guidance on a story and sometimes tell client they shouldn’t do something that makes sense. I really love this conversation. So, do you have any sort of general principle or ideas that you want to wrap up and leave the viewers, if they take away one thing from this, apart from your wonderfulness, what should that be?

APRIL: You’re too kind. I mean, I would say in general, it’s just really, really important that you work carefully with the client to make sure that you know what it is that their differentiators are and help them define those and give them substance. Right. So anywhere where they can substantiate the claims they’re making, um, then you have it’s easier for you to do the storytelling. And so it’s just really important, I think, to work with the clients, to say, you know, hey, this is we need something like this, or maybe we need to do research or a white paper, or maybe we just need to formalize this program or launch a new XYZ product to show that what you want to be known as in the industry, and what your key points of differentiation are, your value proposition that we’ve really got to meet to it, right? So we can go out and tell this story in style.

DOUG: Thanks so much for your time and great insights. Really appreciate it.

APRIL: My pleasure is so nice to speak with you. Thanks for having me.