From a PR agency’s perspective, there’s nothing worse than months of hard work on a PR program only to fall short of expectations and fail to reach the client’s public relations goals.
It happens even to the best agencies. Failures tend to haunt agency owners and senior executives for years afterwards. The thoughts running through their heads: Why did this happen? What could we have done differently? Whose fault was it?
This month we surveyed a geographically diverse group of senior public relations executives, mostly founders of boutique PR agencies, on this topic. With only three simple questions, we elicited some interesting results from 24 respondents.
The first question:
“Based on your agency’s experience, what are the biggest factors contributing to failure in reaching a client’s public relations goals?”
We supplied 10 multiple choice answers to this question (and “other”) and asked respondents to select the top three factors contributing to failure in meeting goals.
| Lack of differentiation / lack of uniqueness of the company or product. | 37.5% |
| Poor quality of product(s). | 0.0% |
| Lack of adequate research in preparation for the PR program. | 12.5% |
| Our agency PR team didn’t have adequate experience. | 0.0% |
| Our client didn’t reveal a significant weakness or weaknesses to our agency team. | 29.2% |
| Not enough thought went into the strategy or planning. | 16.7% |
| Our client contacts weren’t available enough to us, or didn’t cooperate fully with us. | 41.7% |
| The budget was too small. | 37.5% |
| We failed to persuade the client that the PR goals were unrealistic. | 54.2% |
| We disagreed with the client on the definition of success. | 25.0% |
| Other | 16.7% |
The top reason given was “We failed to persuade the client that the PR goals were unrealistic.” Unfortunately, some agencies oversell their services and capabilities, which leads clients to have overly high expectations about results. Agencies that do this create problems for their competitors as well as themselves. Better client-agency relationships result from under-promising and over-delivering, not the other way around. However, sometimes clients won’t be dissuaded from overly-optimistic expectations.
In second place was: “Our client contacts weren’t available enough to us, or didn’t cooperate fully with us.” This problem often stems from a lack of understanding by the client about how PR works and what role the client has to play. The agency needs input directly from top management, not filtered through several levels of staff people. Also, the media and the public want to hear from top management, not from an agency spokesperson or lower-level employees.
Tied for third place in the survey were lack of differentiation of the company or product that the PR firm was hired to represent, and having too small a budget.
It’s tough to do PR successfully for a company and/or product that isn’t buzzworthy, and if they’re not easily differentiated from others, they’re not buzzworthy. Unfortunately, clients have a hard time being objective about differentiation, and often feel their companies are unique and their products or services are substantially different and better than competitors’ offerings, even when there’s no meaningful differentiation.
PR agencies can be objective if they know the facts. But clients are often in a hurry to get proposals, and agencies don’t always have enough lead time to do extensive independent research in advance. When they question the client about differentiation, the answers are sometimes not straightforward, as if the client were selling itself to the agency, glossing over any negatives. This is why over 29% of the agency executives surveyed selected “Our client didn’t reveal a significant weakness or weaknesses to our agency team” as a top reason for failure to meet public relations goals. The truth always surfaces when the PR work gets underway, however, putting the agency in a very difficult situation.
Having too small a budget to accomplish a client’s goals is a painful agency dilemma. Usually the agency prepares a proposal with a scope of work and fee required for that work. If the client says that fee is too high, the agency may offer a lower fee covering a smaller scope of work. Too often, however, clients expect agencies to cut their fees while accomplishing the same amount. Agencies should walk away from those situations. They will inevitably lead to either failure to meet the client’s goals, or over-servicing the client and lack of profitability.
The second survey question was “How important are setting PR goals and measurable objectives in advance to having a successful PR program?” Almost 96% of the survey respondents said this was important or vitally important. Not one respondent thought it was not very important or unnecessary.
| Vitally important | 62.5% |
| Important | 33.3% |
| A good idea | 4.2% |
| Not very important | 0% |
| Unnecessary | 0% |
The third question was “Thinking back to times that your agency has failed to meet a client’s public relations goals, do you think if you could start over that you could change the outcome?”
| Yes | 41.7% |
| No | 4.2% |
| Maybe | 54.2% |
Some of the comments on this question were interesting:
“I would insist on getting more feedback from the client.”
“We would participate more in shaping the goals.”
“I’d be clearer about setting expectations.”
“Sometimes the people making the decision about letting us go or cutting the budget are not the people in charge of marketing or PR…and most of the times they do not understand how PR works.”
One aspect of PR that has changed over the years is the ability to measure outcomes. The internet and digital communications have brought about new ways to do this, which make it much more possible now than 10 or 15 years ago to set measurable objectives. Going back to the first question, when agency and client agree in advance on measurable objectives to define success, they can avoid disagreeing on the definition of success, something 25% of survey respondents cited as an important reason for failure to meet PR goals.