By Richard Clarke
What makes a communications consultancy a good communications consultancy?
No doubt this is a question many ingredients companies will consider as they go through the process of selecting a partner to develop a successful communications strategy.
Is it, they might ask, one that works hard to make my company look good in the eyes of my customers? Is it one that’s always on hand to help out if things aren’t going quite to plan? Is it one that will, ultimately, help me protect and increase my sales?
Yes, in fact, it’s all of those things.
But there’s something else. Something a really good communications consultancy will do – something that is often overlooked by many in the communications business. A really good communications consultancy will make journalists’ lives as easy as possible.
Ok, let me rephrase that. What I mean to say is that a really good communications consultancy will understand journalists’ needs. They’ll have a good insight into how they work, what kinds of stories they truly value, how they like to receive information, what deadlines they operate under. You get the idea.
And, moreover, they will excel at using that information to make sure that their clients are always represented in a way that makes them an appealing subject for a news story or feature.
Occasionally this might even mean telling a client what they don’t want to hear: that the sparkling new sign outside their factory isn’t worthy of a press release because, quite simply, it isn’t what journalists are looking for (well, not the respected, widely-read ones, anyway).
It would be easy for an agency to go with the flow. If that’s what the client wants, why argue? They’re paying the bills after all.
But why would anyone want to spend their marketing budget hiring a communications consultancy that doesn’t advise when a story is unlikely to hit the spot? A really good consultancy will, instead, take some time to find out what’s genuinely interesting about your company – stuff that will get a journalist’s juices flowing.
At Ingredients Communications we put this at the core of everything we do. Some of us (including myself) have been journalists, and spent years writing about the business of food and beverage ingredients. We know what it’s like, from personal experience, to be on the receiving end of a call or email from a press officer who clearly hasn’t a clue what we’re looking for in a story.
The last thing you want is your brand goodwill among journalists to be damaged by the very people you’ve hired to enhance it.
Communications, you see, is an ‘inside job’. A good communications consultancy will, of course, get to understand their clients’ business from top to bottom. But a really good communications consultancy will also know what makes journalists tick. The most successful communications strategy of all is the one that combines these two elements in equal measure.
