All good food companies need a good food PR. Yet too often they try the DIY approach and handle the PR function in-house. If you employ a full-time PR team then that’s fine, but many companies can’t afford to so the company’s PR becomes one of a number of responsibilities assigned to the sales director or the MD’s secretary. This is often leads to food companies not getting the publicity they deserve, publicity which can help deliver more customers.
The answer is to appoint a specialist food public relations consultancy. But here, companies are often put off by the perceived cost. Here are benefits on hiring a Los Angeles food PR agency.
Time: Inevitably you don’t have the time to do your own PR properly. A PR agency will dedicate a team of consultants, guaranteed to work on promoting your business for as long as you can afford. Do you really have the time for this?
Strategy: A good consultancy will create a PR strategy that will help deliver your business objectives. Rather than generating coverage for the sake of filling column inches, your messages will be targeted at the right customers, through the right media. Isn’t that a good idea?
Expertise: You wouldn’t ask a plumber to fix your car so why ask a salesman to handle your PR? A good PR consultancy will have the right expertise to do everything from writing a press release to delivering a social media campaign. These are probably not the skills you have in your organization are they?
Consistency: Be honest if you do your PR in-house; it’s patchy at best isn’t it? That’s because you have other important things to do. Successful PR is about consistency, you have to be feeding journalists with stories regularly. A PR consultancy will be working for you to deliver a consistent PR campaign, not delivering ad hoc bits of PR as and when they have time.
Sector knowledge: The right agency will know your sector inside out. They will know the right journalists, when they go to press and what they are interested in writing about. They will know how to ‘pitch’ a story to a journalist and nine times out of 10 they will be successful. Do you really have this level of knowledge?
Crisis communications: When things go wrong they will be able to help you. Food companies are regularly the subject of food scares and recalls so this type of expertise is vital. They will deal with the media whilst you deal with the business.
New media: Do you know a tweet, from a post? Good food PR consultancies do. They are immersed in the world of social and digital media and help you achieve a good online presence. They know the short cuts and what works. Are you really a digital native?
Creativity: PR people are bursting with ideas. Food PR depends on creativity to generate attention-grabbing stories that go on to become headlines. No doubt you have some great ideas, but good PR people know how to turn great ideas into great coverage.
Profile: The combination of all these factors will deliver profile to the people who matter – your existing and potential customers. A good campaign will deliver strong profile over the entire period of the campaign, meaning you just have to sit back and enjoy the benefits. That’s what you want isn’t it?
Measurement: A good food PR agency can tell you using a series of measures such as opportunities to see, advertising value equivalents and pre and post campaign research. All this can give you a real return on investment number, so the financial director will love you. Can you really know the value of your current PR activity?