How to Choose a PR Event Company: Analysis of Three Core Processes

In general, an excellent agency serves its clients through three basic processes: 1) diagnosis before service; 2) essential actions during service; 3) summary and evaluation after service.

Process 1: Diagnosis Before Service – Grasping the Overall Direction of Needs

a. The company has not set an annual overall marketing plan. It needs PR communication as the main approach to help set up annual marketing activities and promotional content. For this type of company, an agency with integrated marketing and PR planning capabilities is suitable, because marketing activities planned with PR thinking not only have sales potential but also have news reporting appeal. Many front-page news stories come from this type of client service. It is like a blank canvas: drawing a beautiful picture on it is easier than completing a picture that has already been partially drawn. Of course, this ease presupposes the client's planning strength. This type of service often not only achieves excellent communication results but also costs very little, not in the same league as hard advertising.

b. The company has already set its annual marketing mainline, including activity and product promotion plans. It needs to leverage the PR company's resources for execution. This execution mainly includes news writing and news distribution. How to strategically turn the client's established mainline into articles that news media are willing to report, especially large articles with images, becomes the core of the agency's capability. Different planning abilities and different media relations will be fully demonstrated at this stage, and service quality will thus be differentiated.

c. The company has its own unique marketing model and execution methods. Because of a special honor, a special opportunity, or a product with special features, it needs to conduct a broad communication campaign to maximize the spread of key core information. This falls under opportunity-driven PR marketing. For the company, such opportunities are rare and may not come again; if missed, they are gone, but if seized, they can elevate the company to the next level. This type of service is 70% derived from the company's own proactive marketing awareness and 30% from the agency's keen discovery ability.

The essential actions of an excellent PR company during service consist of three parts: creativity, writing, and distribution. Process 1 has already helped the company define the service scope, ensuring the effectiveness and relevance of the service. So, in the following three processes, how does the agency provide service?

Creative Phase: The creative phase is the key to determining the quality of this service. Excellent PR companies will send their core advisory team to participate in creative meetings. After 2-3 rounds of brainstorming sessions, they create key creative concepts suitable for the company's characteristics. The advisory team's level is the company's professional high standard. They face all projects but are not specifically responsible for any one project. They serve different industries across boundaries, borrowing the best PR methods from different industries and combining them with the company's own characteristics, contributing to the company's service through participation in the creative phase. This includes directional big ideas such as theme activity creativity, communication topic creativity, and core PR strategies.

Writing Phase: Based on the main creative ideas from the creative meeting, the writing phase completes the proposal writing and article writing. We call this the pen-holding writing phase. The key for the people in this phase is excellent writing skills and strong comprehension ability, able to turn the brilliant ideas from the creative meeting into text form, so that the client can understand the overall creativity and execution methods by reading the proposal. For article writing, it is also necessary to organically integrate consumer characteristics, media style, and product advantages to produce articles that not only attract consumers to read but also effectively express product advantages and cater to media focus points. This phase is equivalent to the production phase in a factory; the finished product is the article that the client can see.

Distribution Phase: After the written proposal and articles are presented to the client, and after the client approves or partially modifies them, the media distribution phase begins. The effectiveness of media distribution largely depends on the PR company's media relations. For the same topic and content, different resource relationships will result in distribution to different media, different sections, and different sizes, with significant differences in effect.

Process 3: Evaluation and Summary After Service – Good Service Accumulates

Ordinary PR companies consider their work done after news release, but excellent PR firms add a valuable evaluation and summary phase. This phase not only helps accumulate experience for the company's marketing services but also refines the agency's service skills.