How often should we meet with our PR agency?

A step-by-step guide to creating effective recurring meetings

Working with a PR agency requires regular communication and feedback. A good PR agency should strive to be an extension of your marketing team. It should keep you in the loop on marketing efforts to build awareness and brand identity for your company. But just how often should you be meeting with your PR agency?

Depending on the volume and urgency of a project, you might meet with your PR agency weekly, biweekly, or monthly. Every client is different. Larger programs or projects require more time and a higher frequency of meetings to strategize and coordinate.

You might meet more often at the beginning of your program to have your PR agency get familiar with your company and processes. But too many meetings can take up productive time that could be used more efficiently.

Client communication should happen in between recurring meetings so you’re not left in the dark from one meeting to the next. 

What does a recurring meeting agenda look like?

• Expectations/introductions: Every meeting should begin with everyone sharing their expectations for the meeting. This will help with the flow of the meeting so your PR firm’s team knows what it should cover if it hasn’t planned to already. What do you hope to accomplish? What updates do you want to hear about? This is also the time to make introductions if anyone new is joining the meeting.

• Project updates: The PR agency should share updates on the progress it has made on any projects or the campaign as a whole. What was its response to the latest news release? Has it contacted any new reporters? How has the social media campaign been progressing? What updates have the team made to your website?

• Reports: PR professionals frequently use real-time media monitoring methods to monitor the company and brand news. As they track coverage, they’ll insert all deliverables into a PR agency client report. Most PR agencies report monthly or quarterly. Axia Public Relations prefers to update its clients weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually to communicate effectively with clients.

• Upcoming projects: The last half of your meeting should be dedicated to any new topics or projects your company has coming up. This gives your PR agency insight on what your company has coming up in the next weeks or months.

• Recap of action steps and expectations: You should conclude the meeting with action steps and who’s responsible for each one. Ideally, there’s one point of contact for each action item on the agency and client-side for mutual accountability and clear ownership of each task and to-do item. Do you need to send your PR agency a project overview or set up a meeting with a member of your internal team? Does your PR agency need to get started on a news release or write a blog post for your website? Once action steps are assigned, the meeting concludes by making sure everyone’s expectations have been met. If they haven’t been met, maybe you can extend the meeting or schedule some more time to address those expectations at the next meeting, in a special meeting on a later date, or during an offline conversation.

Do meetings with your PR agency look anything like this? If not, maybe it’s time to cut ties. Download Axia PR’s e-book “How to Fire Your PR Firm.”

Clarissa shares client messages across news, social, and web media. Clients love her work ethic and results-driven approach. Clarissa joined Axia in August 2019.

Photo by You X Ventures from Unsplash.