You’ve gone through the request for proposal (RFP) process and landed the new client. Now what? Well, now it’s time to really put in the work if you’re a top public relations professional. You might have wowed them with your pitch meeting skills and ideas, but the next phase in the client/PR professional journey is the most difficult but rewarding one yet – building trust.  

Just because the client signed on the dotted line does not mean they will be around forever. As with every meaningful relationship, you will need to work at it constantly. This means every touch point, from emails to PR strategies, and everything else in between, will need to showcase your PR expertise in such a way that allows the client to feel at ease with your direction.

Trust, in the simplest form, means the firm belief in the reliability of someone or something. When it comes to trust in the PR world, it means having clients believe in your PR campaigns and your ability to execute on them. If you’re still reading this post, you might be thinking, well, I already won the business, so what more do I need to do? That’s the exact mentality you want to avoid, not just in PR, but in life as well. If you perceive it as a fun challenge, fostering trust can be the building block to having a long and fruitful relationship with a client.

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I’ve outlined only a few ideas you’ll want to consider right out of the gate, but when it comes to thinking about ways to build trust, the sky’s the limit!

Be Transparent

You were transparent with the goals and deliverables during the pitching process. Now, it’s time to take all of those ideas and begin to bring them to life. Before you do, and this step sometimes overlooked, make sure your strategy is in place.

To start, conduct a deep-dive kickoff session to ensure both the client and the internal PR teams are working in lock-step. Then, work on a sound PR plan that will allow the client to view those ideas with clear and actionable steps attached to them. Include a timeline for achieving those set goals as well as how you plan to track progress along the way.

Always Overcommunicate

The plan is in place, your goals are set, and the client is onboard. It’s time to rock and roll. As you work through the execution phase of your mutually agreed upon plan, make sure to communicate and, in all honesty, overcommunicate.

When it comes to new client relationships, provide as many updates and as much relevant feedback as possible. You might have met your fair share of clients that don’t want to be bothered or could care less about how the sausage is made. To them I say I hear you, but also, you’re missing the best part of this two-way street.

The most rewarding client/PR professional relationships are ones that get fired up and excited on both sides. By having an open and communicative relationship, you’ll open the door to better collaboration opportunities and new, fresh ideas.

Show Value

You are now a couple of months into your newfound relationship. You have a clear plan and have been communicating the wins and navigating the pivots along the way. Now more than ever, you need to look at each form of communication as an opportunity to show added value.

Is there a breaking news story that could be transformed into a timely thought leadership opportunity? Are there internal company shifts that your client needs help communicating? While it is essential to execute on the deliverables from the PR plan, your work should not stop there. You should strive to see opportunities for your clients and communicate them both timely and effectively. In time, your clients will trust that you have their interests at the forefront of your daily agenda.

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The pandemic has certainly been a reckoning in all spheres of society, especially in business. For brands and customers, it seems like everything has been in a state of decline over the last few months, whether it be revenue, sales, new business or customer acquisitions. It’s often a joke that marketing and PR are the first line items to be cut in times of budget crunch, but not everyone was laughing this year. 

Our professional services team — which includes consulting, financial, HR, recruiting, legal, marketing, and advertising clients — has a proven track record of delivering industry-leading outcomes and are ranked consistently among the top-10 leading agencies in the United States in the professional services specialty category. We know many companies have stumbled in terms of communicating by sending out messages that have been received as obtuse, out of touch, and in some cases, harmful. In a world where every person is glued to a screen at any given time — and more than ever before — a company’s reputation should be one of its most protected assets in maintaining its bottom line. 

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

If there is any value that should remain top of mind in PR today, it must be empathy. The media industry in particular has been reckoning with budget cuts, layoffs and keeping up with a neverending news cycle, bearing a heavy burden with increasingly limited resources. A good PR strategy must rely on ideas and content that make their jobs easier and alleviates the need to conduct extensive research. This means providing insight on the most important trends being discussed in the news and unique perspectives on what specific industries are grappling with. 

While the pandemic has been the nexus of much of the cultural discourse in the media, the subject of intersectionality has been another moment of great upheaval. In the wake of instances of police brutality and protests against racial injustice, businesses have been forced to reevaluate their company culture, policies and messaging to ensure that their constituents feel represented and valued no matter which demographic they fall under. 

Any PR strategy should involve doing due diligence in ensuring that all external communications do not exclude any demographic from any initiative, and proactively find ways to promote inclusivity and diversity. More importantly, it must be clear that these initiatives are intended to contribute to the collective social good and not simply for a more favorable reputation, or getting “fake woke points.” 

With more eyeballs on digital and social channels, PR strategies need to adapt their efforts to match the real estate. In addition to computer screens, audiences are increasingly consuming content on mobile devices. But it’s not as simple as adapting content to fit a smaller screen. The style and syntax should also change fundamentally. Millennials, and Gen-Z in particular, show an increasing preference for shorter, digestible content, so companies need to adjust communications efforts to match

It’s unlikely that the world will return to what it once was before 2020, but that shouldn’t be a source of anxiety. In fact, engaging in self-reflection from a communications perspective can set a business up for success while the business world recovers. Companies that are in-tune with the media landscape and that provide value beyond general news will stand out as the winners in the new normal. PR strategies should always adapt, with or without a pandemic, and this year has presented a wealth of opportunities to do so. 

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On April 30, N6A founder and CEO Matt Rizzetta was joined by Alex Schmelkin, CMO at no-code application platform company Unqork, for a webinar focused on speed. Often the most unsung key differentiator, it’s a concept that is the least understood yet equally crucial to being successful as any other business principle. With many businesses facing unprecedented adversity due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the importance of speed-to-market has never been more critical.

The biggest question is, how can you navigate this environment — smarter and faster — than your competition? The effect of empowering efficiencies at every level across your business from the top down means increasing speed without sacrificing quality, and navigating any environment with productivity and decisiveness.

COVID is creating opportunities like never before to accelerate growth, leap competitors in the marketplace, and position yourself with an edge. Here are some of the actionable insights from the webinar on how business leaders can increase speed without sacrificing quality, and executing with efficiency and decisiveness.

Communicate Proactively

Develop processes, protocols and channels so that messages are being communicated proactively, preemptively and with authority. Never manage communication from a position of defense. Lead communicators in the company should always be on offense when it comes to communication. This guarantees a rapid flow of information that will progress through not only employees, but customers and key stakeholders as well. 

You should also consider establishing regular checkpoints and distribution channels to communicate updates on business impact, protocols and general changes as your business’s situation evolves. It’s impossible to predict what’s coming next. All you can do is be prepared, and get ahead of communications with multiple planning scenarios.

Be Decisive

Don’t waste time overthinking or falling into the trap of analysis by paralysis. Competitors are out there right now being overwhelmed and operating with indecision. Your business can beat them to market right now with smart content and positioning that serves a real purpose. 

This requires decisiveness, so please be smart, think things through, but make quick decisions and then bring them to market even quicker. Speed and decisiveness go hand-in-hand. Given the current conditions, all go-to-market decisions you make for your brand need to be well reasoned, pressure-tested and rationalized. Once you’ve run through the proper checks and balances, then it’s time to make your decisions. 

Compress Time

Everyone has 24 hours in a day, but you can still compress time by operating at a faster pace than your competitors. This requires a thorough look at all of your standard processes, decision-making channels, and routines. Think about ways in which you can eliminate redundancies and compress time on some of these things.

Create streamline processes to make sure the flow of communications go through one lead or a small handful of leads; set up communication transparency channels such as dedicated email aliases and Slack channels to control the flow of communication; cut your standing meetings from 60 minutes down to a half-hour; or see if you can complete deliverable tasks that normally take 20 minutes in five. 

Cut back on redundancies as much as possible so that you can maximize your time as an operator. Hold your direct-reports to the same standard to do everything you can to accelerate the overall work pace. Every minute counts — never chaotic, but always compressed. You’ll churn out the same high-quality deliverables in a fraction of the time, and the time you buy back can be put to use in order to bring new value to market for your brand.   

Create Top-Down Alignment

Look at the most senior and most junior members of your team and ensure they are fully aligned on speed and timing goals. 

One way to systematically pull this together is to enact custom KPIs. COVID provides a clean slate to start fresh and create new goals for the company to set the pace for standard processes. Rapid key performance indicators should be used as an asset to track Incremental improvement and sustained quality. Once you have enough data in place, see where your people were most efficient and then adjust your management style in that direction for maximum efficiency.

To learn more about the impact of speed, check out the replay of our Embrace the Pace webinar here. 

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