Is Your PR Agency Doing Its Job?

Looking into an agency for PR help but want to be sure they’re as good as they say they are? You can tell a lot about an agency by how well they promote their own news and thought leadership.

Part of my job as PR Director at Oliver Russell is to keep our agency, and Russ Stoddard, our founder and president, in the news, top of mind, and relevant. Why? Because it’s a key way new clients find out about us, and it keeps us honing our skills and testing new ideas that ultimately benefit our client work. 

Since more than 80 percent of our work is for purpose-driven brands (mostly outside of Boise, where we’re based), our clients benefit from the relationships we build with journalists and editors in the social responsibility space nationally.

So what does success actually look like, in terms of tangible results for Oliver Russell? Well, for starters, we’ve been mentioned on third-party news and blogs 50 times since the start of the New Year, and we’ve increased our market share to 10 percent among purpose-driven agencies, beating out larger agencies based in Portland, Boulder, and Toronto. 

We’ve grown the personal brand of Russ, our humble founder, who will likely blush when he reads this. Russ has contributed to GreenBiz.com, Sustainable Brands, Conscious Company Magazine, The Drum, Real-Leaders.com, B the Change, and that’s all just this quarter. We’ve had hits on Thrive Global, and Ad Age too. Our stuff was shared over 10,000 times on social media and the ad equivalency rate for all this hard work was nearly $140,000 and more than 72 million eyeballs. (Thanks to Trendkite, we can measure this stuff for ourselves and our clients.) 

Oh, and Forbes Agency Council just nabbed Russ to contribute to Forbes.com. This hand picked network of marketing, creative, and PR industry experts provides thought leadership and how-tos to benefit Forbes’ readers. His first essay should post later this month, so stay tuned.

Oliver Russell’s track record shows that we have the chops to get your purpose-driven company into the leading publications read by social entrepreneurs and CSR decision-makers. We’re proud to be able to transparently share our own PR success with clients (and potential clients) to help them evaluate their own. 

If you’re thinking of starting a strategic PR campaign for the first time, or you’re not convinced that your agency of record is hustling for you, shoot Caitlin an email at ccmasingill@oliverrussell.com.