Content Marketing Today

CommuniquePR: Shouldn’t A PR Firm Do a Great Job on its own PR?

Yes, of course it should. But here’s one that’s missing the content marketing boat.

Communique PR is a Seattle-based firm founded by PR veterans who are comfortable with billion dollar clients and multi-million dollar budgets.

As we all know getting regular media exposure for their clients, is the name of the game. Keeping those client brands foremost in the minds of potential customers is all important. I’m guessing they’re brilliant at what they do. A couple of testimonials suggest that to be the case.

For the most part, you would have a hard time knowing how good they are. Why? They don’t make it easy and obvious to sample their expertise in their newsletter or on their website. There is a failure to communicate their value effectively.

Missing content pieces:

The eNewsletter

• Communique PR has a newsletter which is nominally published every other month, but has been published only 2X in the first seven months of 2007. That’s a pretty low frequency of contact with clients and prospects.
• It takes two clicks to get to the newsletter.
• The newsletter doesn’t link back to any real content on their site
• It’s definitely content-deprived.
  • It begins, “We thought you’d be interested in the latest news from Communique PR.”
    • Well, why would we? What does that mean exactly? The lead story isn’t an encouraging intro. What’s the benefit?
  • The lead story is about a race they ran in Fremont–not much client benefit there.
  • Story #2 describes the value of a ’share of voice’ graph that illustrates a service they provide–pretty good.
  • Next comes a brief article on the internal vs PR agency roles–also not bad
  • They go on to list meetings that were set up for a press tour. This has more to do with the agency than anything else. They note that one article came out of it, Family Circle; that 1 article out of 10 visits. That doesn’t sound very successful to me. But, if 1/10 is a great hit ratio, they should say so.
  • Finally and mysteriously, they have a July events calendar of seemingly random events that presumably relate to their clients’ industries–but there is no way of knowing.

The website

• There is almost nothing on the home page except the usual buzzword-filled description. It could belong to any small PR firm. At least it’s in a big typeface so it’s easy to read.

• You have to click to get to anything substantive.
• There are two case studies that are solid but they are buried three layers deep. When you arrive at the home page, you would have no way of knowing where those case studies would be found.

Recapturing the content marketing opportunity

It wouldn’t take much time or money to bring significant improvements to their online outreach. Specifically:

• Add substantive content to the website. Building more case studies would be a great first step. Bring them up to the home page, so visitors can jump right in.
• Make the newsletter monthly.
• Put really useful content in the newsletter, but drive people back to the website.
• Eliminate the agency-centric content and the useless calendar.
• Consider starting a blog that would give clients and prospects a reason to interact regularly with the agency.

What would the cost be to make these changes? Perhaps a few thousand dollars/month at most. The tangible return would be a heck of a lot higher.