Kick-off meetings with new agency clients
Best Practices
Posted 07 Jun 2018
After winning a new customer with a successful pitch, it is important to start with the PR work right away in order to deliver first results. For a successful start, the right kick-off is crucial. Not only does the team need to get to know the new company, its products/solutions and the working methods of its contact persons, the client also needs to know how the agency operates. Only if you work together and communicate openly from the beginning, you can avoid confusions, misunderstandings and frustration.
Especially the first weeks of the collaboration will determine the further course of events. Embarrassing mistakes or unnecessary misunderstandings can seriously harm the start of a new collaboration. In order to prevent this, a good onboarding strategy is important.
The first kick-off discussion is about getting to know your counterpart and the company. Who is in charge for which topic? Who are the contact persons that are available for statements or interviews? Who are the speakers that are available for statements or interviews? What is the procedure for approvals and who makes the decision in the end? Which products/solutions are sold? What is the focus of the current communication? And what are the goals you want to achieve in the next quarter or year? And many more questions.
Those are the first important pieces of information that the agency needs from the client. And the other way around as well: The client should also be informed about the agency’s working methods. For instance, at HBI we are structured into teams that manage particular customers in a targeted manner. This means that we fulfil all tasks in those teams, from consulting, writing texts to arranging press briefings and compiling clipping reports. This helps us to fully familiarize ourselves with our customer’s products/solutions and the messages that the company wants to communicate. We can then support them in meetings with editors or when writing texts.
KPIs should be agreed upon at least roughly at the beginning of each collaboration. Often, misunderstandings arise which could have been avoided with concrete objectives. If a customer has not worked with KPIs before, we can discuss them together during the kick-off meeting.
Possible KPIs can be:
In order to start the PR activities as smoothly as possible, it is always helpful to receive and sift through existing material. This includes most recently published press releases, the latest articles or interviews. Additionally, biographies, templates for reporting or briefing documents are helpful and make it easier to get started. If there is no consistent layout for certain documents, we are also happy to provide our templates and develop a useful layout for the customer.
The provision of the materials does not only help the agency team to bring itself up to date and to continue working from there. The wording and the type of previous communication can also be derived from them. In this way, we can ensure that there is no break in external perception just because the agency has changed. Except of course, the break in communication is desired!
Once the first onboarding is done – which usually happens quite fast – the planning and implementation of the first PR activities begin. In order to avoid problems, it is important to communicate proactively. Especially at the beginning of a collaboration, it is for example not enough to say “We will do that”. Rather, a certain period of time should be defined such as “We will do that and send it to you by tomorrow morning”. Because in this way the company’s contact person knows when he/she will receive a text and can thus arrange for him/herself the time to edit the text (which can take even more time, especially with the first texts). Or you get the feedback that the text needs to be finalized on the same day. Then you can react directly and do not earn yourself the reputation of a slow-working team. With open and proactive communication, misunderstandings can often be avoided.
There will undoubtedly still be some more hurdles to overcome. The cornerstone is a good start and after an initial start-up phase, we will master all future PR activities together. As soon as the first very good results are published and the team has grown together, the work is not only fun but also successful!
– This article was written by Jasmin Rast, Account Director at HBI
