Best 15+ Public Relations Agencies in Minneapolis

To help you choose the right PR agency for your business, you can follow these steps:

• Before researching potential PR agencies that fit your needs, list your key goals and expectations that you want the agency to help you achieve. Detail specific goals such as the markets you want to reach, the key messages you want to convey, and the number of media engagements that need to be achieved. When you present these goals to the PR agency during your interviews, they will explain how they will help you.

• List companies you have the potential to work with through a website where you can view the PR agencies available to you, such as the PR Agency Network.

• Ask to speak with past and current customers when you meet with the companies you have listed and learn more about the services they offer. This allows you to understand their strengths and weaknesses and helps you learn firsthand how well they work with other clients.

• After doing research and comparing the prices of different companies, decide which one is the best fit for your budget. If you find that an agency you like is way out of your price range, see if there's room in your budget to adjust their prices. In case there are some companies that you have a hard time choosing between, choose the one that fits your budget while continuing to provide quality service.

Even if PR agencies are very successful in the services they provide, they may be caught unprepared for some problems and face a failure story that leads to closure. Among the many problems faced by agencies, the most common ones are; poor cash flow, underutilized teams, poor data tracking, and lack of strategy. Perhaps the most important of these problems is the cash flow problem. The first step in mastering cash flow is understanding the agency's overheads. To find their overhead, agencies need to list everything they routinely pay for, such as rent, payroll, software subscriptions, and other regular expenses. Then they make annual plans and comply with them. Agencies that cannot make a regular budget calculation in this way are more likely to go to closure.

One of the jobs that today's agencies spend the most time on is trying to gain new customers. PR agencies also need to constantly seek out new clients and explore new ways to grow their agencies. Below are the steps to be taken to achieve these goals:

Website: Creating a website that will make a good impression as your most important marketing tool is critical. If you want to get your website visitors excited about taking the next step and contacting you, a website that will highlight your agency, your team, your industry expertise, and clients you've worked with before and instill confidence in your visitors should be the first step in your marketing strategy. Don't overlook the importance of optimizing your site for SEO best practices to attract potential PR customers to your website. An optimized website increases your chances of attracting organic traffic and helps you build a stronger online network.

Content: Create content that will position your agency as an expert in your field and industry. When creating this content, remember that instead of writing generic content pieces, you should offer unique content and tailor it to your target PR clients when creating content that reveals your agency's expertise. By producing content in this way, you can benefit from content generation methods from company blogs, e-mail newsletters, LinkedIn posts, webinars, podcasts, YouTube, and other social media platforms to stand out as a thought leader in your industry.

Case Studies: Be sure to include case studies on your agency's website to showcase your past achievements and expertise. These studies will act as a kind of social proof and play an important role in attracting more PR clients to your agency. These case studies are very helpful for your clients to see what you can do.

Quality Presentation: You are one of the many PR agencies on the list for your potential clients who want to have a meeting with you and present to them. The only way to stand out is to craft a persuasive business presentation and PR proposal, customized to the client's needs. At this stage, you need to fully understand the client's business, past business, trouble spots, and competitors. Once you understand these, create an interesting presentation and try to attract all the attention of the customers during the presentation.

PR agencies make money by charging their clients for the services they provide. Some may charge an annual fee as a registrar, a monthly fee as a service fee, or a per-project fee. Usually, a deal contract is signed between a business PR agency before the business starts.

• A good PR agency in the business will help you with PR and communication by working closely with your company to get the right message, content, and tone of voice.
• PR firms not only use their expertise to generate a variety of new ideas but also build relationships with the media and specific journalists. They tailor the best content for each platform and broadcast t on your behalf.
• A specialist PR agency will help you focus your energy where it is most effective and contributes to your overall business and marketing goals.
• PR agencies know how to get the most bang for your buck within your budget, how to leverage timing, and how to structure and target campaigns. They know what works and what doesn't, because they have tried-and-tested formulas that have proven successful, and are open to telling you if an idea is worth pursuing.
• Collaborating with a PR agency means that your company is safe in case of crisis. Since PR agencies have prepared a crisis plan in advance, they will be with you to prepare all kinds of explanations and present them to the media in the event of a crisis.

The amount companies have to pay to cooperate with PR agencies will vary from agency to agency, depending on the services requested and the size of the agencies. To say an average price, we can say that it is around 1,000-15,000 dollars per month.

The top five PR agencies in the world are as follows:

• Edelman

Edelman, the world's largest PR firm with more than 6,000 employees and a revenue of $984.9 million in 2021, is an American PR and marketing consulting firm founded in 1952 by Daniel Edelman. It is currently managed by Daniel Edelman's son, Richard Edelman.

• Weber Shandwick

Weber Shandwick is an American PR firm founded in 2001 by the merger of Weber Group, Shandwick International and BSMG. In 2021, it took the second place in the ranking of the world's largest PR agencies with a revenue of 860 million dollars.

• BCW (Burson Cohn & Wolfe)

Burson Cohn & Wolfe, which put $772 million into its coffers last year, is a New York-based multinational PR and communications firm. In February 2018, parent WPP Group PLC announced that it had merged its subsidiaries, Cohn & Wolfe, with Burson-Marsteller. The combined agency is now known as Burson Cohn & Wolfe.

• Fleishman Hillard

Fleishman Hillard St. Louis, Missouri is a PR and marketing agency. The company, which generated $680 million in revenue in 2021, was founded in 1946 by Alfred Fleishman and Robert E. Hillard. It is currently headquartered in Missouri, USA.

• Ketchum

Ketchum; is a global public relations firm that provides marketing, branding and corporate communications services in the corporate, healthcare, food & beverage and technology industries. Ketchum, which is on the list of the five largest PR agencies in the world with its revenue of $ 550 million in 2021, was founded by George Ketchum in 1923 as a Pittsburgh-based advertising company. Its headquarters are now located in New York.

Social Media Manager: Responsibilities of social media managers; promoting the brand, interacting with audiences across various social media channels, as well as coordinating and developing unique brand voices for each channel. Their day-to-day duties may include creating a social media content calendar aligned with the overall PR strategy, engaging with audiences across all channels through brand-voiced comments and posts, and monitoring various data points to track the success of specific campaigns and strategies.

Publicist: This is the position that works with the client and works with the client to develop a unique PR strategy. They then use this strategy to find specific campaigns, events, and outreach that will most effectively execute this strategy. The most challenging part of their job is undoubtedly managing crises. When there is negative press about a client, the PR professional has to quickly find the best way for the client's brand to recover.

Copywriter: Copywriters in PR agencies execute promotional strategies by writing press releases, speeches, blog posts, social media posts, and other materials. They must be versatile enough to write in a variety of brand voices and adapt that voice to suit a variety of campaigns or PR content.

PR Specialist: PR specialists are an essential part of PR agencies, whose main responsibility is to maintain good relationships with journalists and other media contacts who can help them produce press releases, appear on TV, broadcast speeches, and other promotional media strategies.

Spokesperson: Spokespersons, whose responsibility it is to act as the face of the brand by representing the company in public, in speeches, and on TV, often work in-house for the company. They must also have the strength to respond to criticism and bear the brunt of negative press when crises occur.

The way to understand the difference between PR agencies and advertising agencies is to make the right distinction between the concepts of PR and advertising.

While PR serves the purpose of increasing the prestige, image and recognition of an institution or person, advertising aims to increase the sales of a good or service or to spread an idea. Therefore, these two concepts are separated from each other in terms of basic purposes.

Another important point that distinguishes the concepts of PR and advertising is the target audience. In PR, the target audience of the institution is the public, but in advertising, the target audience includes a limited audience in line with the area of ​​​​the goods or services to be sold.

The third difference between PR and advertising is their working time. Since there is a long-term image work or communication of an institution in PR, the studies are continuous and uninterrupted because creating the perception always requires a long process. On the contrary, in advertising, the work is intermittent and periodic due to certain periods when products or services come to the fore.

Every company has similar aspirations to become an industry leader and stand out from the masses, and one of the ways to achieve this is by collaborating with PR agencies.

Because having the right PR relationship plays an active role in taking any company to the next level and getting ahead of its competitors.

Brand awareness is the backbone of any successful business, and working with a PR agency allows you to create a unique brand identity if you don't already have one, and ensures that an established brand is properly represented in the media and public domain.

PR agencies can help you channel your messages across multiple media platforms and ensure you are represented where you want to be because PR agencies have extensive media networks that will enable your company to use its resources effectively and help you distinguish what is newsworthy and what is not so you can get the most appropriate media coverage possible. and have connections.

PR agencies will be able to offer ideas on what would be effective to reach your target audience and keep you informed of market trends, enabling you to identify the best strategic opportunities to expand and grow your company.