Article by Connor Kinnear, Chief Marketing Officer, Passle

 

Most agencies and professional services companies are named after the individuals that founded the company. The reason for this is that the talent driving these companies is the asset that clients buy into. Saatchi and Saatchi was named after Maurice and Charles because, as advertising greats, they realised they were their own secret sauce and their communications should reflect that.

This poses a question for all agencies and businesses where the people are the asset that clients buy. How do you communicate the knowledge and expertise of the true experts in your business? The problem is two-fold. How do you access the insights of these people, given that they are going to be extremely busy and then how to distribute that knowledge?

Research conducted by Passle shows that the top 50 UK PR Agencies produced over 3,500 knowledge pieces last year. The number might seem impressive, but it amounts to only 0.72 pieces created in a year per member of staff. For comparison, the top 100 UK lawyers produced 0.75 pieces of content per staff in 2015! What is this world in which the famously reticent British lawyers are outflanking creative and engaged agencies that sell their ability to communicate?

These two points – that clients want to buy into the core talent at an agency and the industry’s surprising silence in communicating its knowledge – represent a huge opportunity for agencies across the world.

Enter, content marketing. Content marketing is a strategy that puts your audience first. It creates content to inform, help or entertain your audience. The opposite of content marketing is to sell at your audience. Content marketing takes many forms, from blog posts, to webinars, to, yes, social media updates.

If your agency is ignoring digital content marketing for itself, whether that be blogging or vlogging, you are making it harder for yourself to a) attract new clients b) maintain existing ones.  It’s such a shame not to make the most of it, when doing both doesn’t need to take much time away from your day-to-day or cost much money. Indeed, Hubspot’s State of Inbound Report claimed that “content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads”.

PR Agencies have all the skills required to excel at content marketing. They know how to create content that attracts audiences because they help their clients achieve this every day. They just need to create it for themselves now.

 

In Passle’s panel at the Global ICCO PR Summit on 29^th September, we’ll be discussing what your brand, including the personal brands of your experts, says about your agency. If you would like to download Passle’s report into the content marketing habits of the top 50 UK PR agencies, and request a free personalised report, visit pr.rankmyfirm.com