What Your PR Agency Wishes You’d Share More Often.

It might come up during media training, in the last five minutes of a client call or even in response to a completely unrelated question. To the person who lives and breathes the business every day, it can feel obvious. But to someone on the outside, it can be the beginning of a great story.

Working with a PR agency starts with understanding that it’s a collaborative relationship. As your agency, we bring an outside perspective to your world, with an eye on what reporters are responding to. The more we understand what you’re seeing, hearing, thinking, reading and experiencing, the more openings we have to connect those insights to conversations happening in the media.

Even the best PR agency can’t uncover opportunities it doesn’t know exist. PR is not a simple light switch you can flip on and forget about. The clients who get the best results are the ones who treat their agency like an extension of the team: sharing context, flagging what’s on their radar and thinking out loud. That’s what gives an agency the raw material to be genuinely creative.

If you want to turn those everyday moments into wins, here are five ways to help your PR agency spot the ones you’re sitting on:

Tell us the things you don’t think are stories

We’ve had many clients start conversations with some version of “This probably isn’t worth mentioning, but…”

Tell us anyway.

A new product, partnership or company milestone might be a given to loop in your PR team, but we also want to hear what’s happening behind the scenes. That could be an interesting customer behavior you’re noticing, a surprising data point that your team has surfaced, a question potential prospects keep asking or something that’s changing in your industry that your team can’t stop talking about.

While product, partnership and company milestones are obvious angles for coverage, it’s often the less obvious observations that lead to the most interesting stories. Those small observations can be interesting fodder for a variety of mediums – from social content to byline articles and even speaking opportunities. Sometimes, they turn into a much larger story weeks later, giving us a clearer idea of the story your company should be telling.

Tell us what you’re reading

If you’re reading an article and thinking, “Gosh, we should have been in this,” send it to your agency. Better yet, share perspectives you would have brought to the article, especially if they take an angle that was missing.

It doesn’t always matter if the story has already been published. Any insights you share give us a reason to reach out to the reporter with a follow-up perspective, or to other reporters looking for a different take.

This tells us not only which conversations you want your company to be part of, but, perhaps more importantly, how you envision your company fitting into the broader industry narrative. All of this sharpens our radar, so we’re not just reacting to what’s already published, but anticipating what’s next.

Tell us what you disagree with

If you read or hear something that makes you immediately think, “That’s completely wrong,” we want to know why.

A willingness to challenge industry consensus can make for particularly compelling thought leadership. Reporters aren’t looking for three, five or seven executives to say the same thing. They want people who can help them understand what’s changing, poke holes in the usual talking points and challenge standard perspectives that no longer hold up.

Now, don’t get us wrong. That doesn’t mean we want you to force a hot take. We want your opinion to be genuine and authentic, backed by real experience.

What we do want are your raw insights. Share the unfiltered version of your thoughts, and we can figure out together whether there’s a compelling story worth leading with.

Give us room to connect the dots

This is one of our favorite opportunities to collaborate with clients. And honestly, it’s where some of our best examples come from.

Take this one, for instance.

During a conversation with an executive, we learned that they were seeing people increasingly buying gift cards (physical and digital) for themselves as a way to budget. This wasn’t company news; there was no announcement or overarching product associated with it. It was simply an interesting behavior the company had observed through its work in the market.

We filed it away as a story idea to leverage in the near future.

Weeks later, a reporter was exploring consumer behavior around Kohl’s Cash as a budgeting tool. And just like that, we made the connection. So we brought our client into a national consumer finance conversation, which ultimately led to coverage in what many consider the holy grail: The Wall Street Journal.

That’s how press coverage happens without waiting for your company to have news. Reporters are often more interested in what you’re observing in the market than what you’re announcing about your business.

Those are the connections we listen for, but we can only find them if you give us access to your world.

Send us the inbound, too

Working with a PR agency isn’t only about the stories you send us. It’s also about what’s landing in your inbox: a podcast pitch, a direct note from a reporter or an invitation to participate in an industry roundup.

Forward it to us, even if you think it’s probably nothing.

You might be right. But sometimes what looks insignificant to you can be an early indication of something bigger: a reporter circling your space before they’ve written anything or a sign your company is becoming more visible than you realized. The more you share, even the emails you’ve written off, the more patterns we’re able to catch.

The best PR relationships leave room for discovery

You know your business better than anyone. You live and breathe it every day. But because of that, you’re also more likely to overlook what feels ordinary to you but fascinating to everyone else.

That gap is where a great PR agency adds the most value.

So give us access. Send us the article. Share the weird data point. Tell us what’s frustrating you. Forward us the opportunity you’re not sure about. We’ll ask the extra questions.

You don’t have to know if something is a worthy story before you share it. Figuring that out is our job.

Whether you have a PR team or not, if you’re not sure the right things are getting surfaced, let’s talk. We’ll help you find the opportunities hiding in plain sight.