An excellent agency serving clients follows three fundamental processes: pre-service diagnosis, in-service execution assurance, and post-service summary and evaluation.
Process 1: Pre-Service Diagnosis — Grasping the Overall Direction of Needs
a. If a company has not set an annual overall marketing plan, and needs PR communication as the main approach to help set annual marketing activities and promotional content, this type of company is best suited for an agency with integrated marketing and PR planning capabilities. Marketing activities planned with a PR mindset not only have sales power but also possess news reporting appeal. Many front-page news stories are born from such client services. This is like a blank canvas: drawing a beautiful picture is easier than perfecting a partially drawn one, provided the client has strong planning capabilities. Such services often achieve excellent communication results at minimal cost, incomparable to the expense of hard advertising.
b. If a company has already established its annual marketing mainline, including activity and product promotion plans, and needs to leverage PR company resources for execution, execution mainly includes news writing and distribution. The core capability of the agency lies in how to strategically process the client's established mainline into articles that news media are willing to report, especially large-scale articles with images. Different planning capabilities and media relations are vividly demonstrated at this stage, and service quality is clearly differentiated.
c. If a company has its own unique marketing model and execution methods, and due to special honors, special opportunities, or products with special features, needs to conduct a broad communication campaign to maximize the spread of core information, this is opportunity-driven PR marketing. For the company, such opportunities are rare and may not come again; missing them means losing out, while seizing them can elevate the company to the next level. This type of service is 70% dependent on the company's own proactive marketing awareness and 30% on the agency's keen discovery ability.
The basic actions of an excellent PR company during service include three steps: creativity, writing, and distribution. Process 1 helps define the scope of service, ensuring effectiveness and relevance. So, how does the agency provide service in the following three steps?
Creative Phase: The creative phase is key to determining service quality. Excellent PR firms send their core consultant team to participate in creative meetings, and after 2-3 rounds of brainstorming, they develop the most suitable key creative concepts for the client. The consultant team represents the highest professional level of the company; they face all projects but are not specifically responsible for any single one. They cross-serve different industries, borrowing the best PR practices from various sectors and combining them with the client's own characteristics. Through participation in the creative phase, they contribute to client service, such as thematic event ideas, communication topic ideas, and core PR strategies—directional big ideas.
Writing Phase: Based on the main creative ideas from the creative meeting, the writing phase completes the proposal and article drafting. The key people in this phase have excellent writing skills and strong comprehension, able to transform the brilliant ideas from the creative meeting into text form, so that the client can understand the overall concept and execution plan by reading the proposal. Article writing also needs to organically integrate consumer characteristics, media style, and product advantages to produce articles that attract consumer reading, effectively convey product strengths, and cater to media interests. This phase is equivalent to the production process in a factory, with the final product being the articles visible to the client.
Distribution Phase: After the written proposal and articles are presented to the client and approved or partially modified, the media distribution phase begins. The effectiveness of media distribution largely depends on the PR company's media relations. With the same topic and content, different resource relationships lead to different media outlets, placements, and sizes, resulting in significantly different outcomes.
Process 3: Post-Service Evaluation and Summary — Good Service Accumulates
Ordinary PR companies complete their work after news release, but excellent ones add a valuable evaluation and summary phase. This phase not only accumulates experience for the client's marketing services but also refines the PR company's service skills.