Hammerkit Blog

Yesterday Hammerkit put on its penultimate webinar: ‘How to grow your digital revenue without growing your overheads’ in the series: ‘The 4 Big Trends in Digital PR in 2013’. Thank you to everyone who attended. We hope you found it useful and interesting.

If you missed the webinar and would like to watch it please follow this link.

The webinar covered a tricky PR topic that is: ‘outsourcing digital solutions’. In 10 minutes we discussed the pros and cons of keeping or not keeping your digital work in-house.

The digital capability of PR agencies in this country varies. Some have an in-house team who work directly alongside the account executives on creating digital solutions for clients. This way of working can leave PR professionals in certain agencies waiting for their in-house team to finish projects before they can start working on what they want. This leaves a backlog of digital tasks waiting to be done. This leaves both the PR employees and the clients in a difficult situation.

Other agencies outsource their digital solutions and build partnerships with digital companies. PR executives pick and choose how and when they want a digital solution created. Nearly 100% of the time both parties are happy and the client has a functioning and engaging digital solutions at their fingertips.

What’s plain to see is that more and more clients are going to be asking for digital solutions in the future. Technology is evolving and growing at a fast pace and PR agencies need to be ahead of the curve.

In our 10 minute webinar we unveil a ground-breaking digital solution that will help PR in choosing and implementing digital solutions: ‘CloudStore’. 

Last week we hosted our second webinar: ‘How to think like PR people but measure like Mad Men’ as part of the on-going webinar series: ‘The 4 Big Trends in Digital PR in 2013’. Thank you to everyone who attended! We hope you found it useful and interesting.

In last week's webinar we predicted the growing dominance of social media as a medium of communication in 2013. We also pointed out how social media is more measurable than other forms of media. Measuring the results of used tactics has always been hard for the PR industry. However, the new metrics that social media enables, such as the amount of 'likes' on Facebook, give PR professionals the chance to prove to clients and board members that Public Relations is a vital part of business.

Overall our webinar ran smoothly and we got positive feedback from our attendees. This week's webinar is: ‘How to grow your digital revenue without growing your overheads’ If you would like to register or to find out more about this upcoming webinar please see the event page.

Following the masterclasses from this summer we are in the midst of preparing a new webinar series ‘The Four Big Trends of Digital PR in 2013’. In these four consecutive 10 minute long webinars we will highlight and discuss the importance of digital for the PR Industry in the upcoming year. 2013 will indeed be very critical for PR agencies to start capitalising on the full potential of digital. 

The webinars are free to attend and you’ll discover how to confidently pitch digital solutions as part of
an integrated PR campaign. The topics and dates for the webinars are as follows:

1. How to turn one great idea into digital gold
2. Social media: How to think like PR people but measure like Mad Men
3. How to grow your digital revenue without growing your overheads
4. How PR must engage the mobile future

Join David Duffy, our VP of Sales, for the first webinar on Thursday November 22^nd at 3PM (GMT)

More info and registration here.

Today as the PR adapt to the era of digital communications, a lot of agencies face thought competition from digital ones, and struggle to maintain profitability and retain market share lost to digital. Producing one-off online campaigns and digital marketing projects no longer works, proving that PR and marketing agencies need to adapt to new era, and use the right tools in order to regain its position.

Recent statistics show that the digital marketing is gaining bigger market share, while traditional PR and marketing are losing it. Some examples here:

Leading communications groups WPP[i] and Havas[ii] are doing extremely well, with WPP posting a 10 percent increase in full year profits and Havas a respectable nine percent for the same period. In WPP, while the top line growth for PR at 6.2 percent was lower than the advertising and media arm of the business, which posted 12.2 percent revenue growth, PR still increased its profit margin by 0.3 percent to 16.1 percent. WPP reaffirmed its long-term target to improve the staff cost/revenue ratio by 0.3-0.6 percent per annum, with a focus on the application of new technology. For Havas, digital and social media now make up 23 percent of revenue compared to 19 percent in the previous financial year. This is a 20 percent annual growth rate and at this level digital revenues will account for 50 percent of the firm's revenue within four years.

The latest research from Kingston Smith W1[iii] indicates that PR bosses are very optimistic about 2012 with 71 percent predicting greater profits. Perhaps with a greater focus on digital and the application of smart technology, the industry will also be able to rise to the challenge of controlling the cost/revenue while taking back territory from the digital agencies.

Saying that, in the digital age, agencies need to change their mindset from a one-time, one-hit wonder approach and turn every project into an instant global sales opportunity to kick those pesky digital agencies out of their PR field.

That's why Hammerkit is here, giving PR agencies tools to execute online campaigns faster and better with greater global scale, so they can regain market share that they are now losing to the digital. With Hammerkit repeatable solutions, PR agencies can build intelligent web services that are based on a coordinated, connected and collaborative production process, instead of wasting time and efforts on creating new campaigns each time!

[i] Source: WPP FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[ii] Source: Havas FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[iii] Source:”PR Bosses retain 2012 optimisim, finds Kingston Smith”, PRWeek.co.uk

As industry professionals, we sometimes forget that we have in-built capabilities to see beyond the look and feel of a web site. This means we understand what it takes to make something, and just what you can do to repeat a solution. You may have encountered the challenge that your clients cannot do this – they just cannot imagine what it will be and they need you present something that looks just like them in order for them to be confident that you can handle their digital project.

Typically, you need to go through a rather involved process to create a vision for your client of what their web service is going to look like - paper-prototypes, wireframes, static mock-ups and functional descriptions - and a lot of this work is done before you get the deal in many cases! This is risky, time-consuming and more often than not unfulfilling for both you and client. The problem is always, that no matter how beautiful your art is, the final product always misses something that the client thought was going to be there.

There are fantastic examples of how to do it right, and I remember clearly the advice from Paul Boag (@boagworld) that he never, but never does more than one suggested layout and never just sends a visual - he sends a video with him explaining the design choices in context. His view was this avoided what he called "Frankenstein" layouts with bits of functionality grabbed from various options and thrown together in a haphazard way.

When we devised the CloudStore we thought about this. We listened to a many industry practitioners about their approach to the challenge and decided we needed to make it easy for clients to know what they were going to get. To do this, we decided early on that we needed to show "live prototypes" demonstrating how one format has been repeated for different clients. What we underestimated was the value of this small feature – it has gone from being an afterthought to one of the key aspects of repeat ordering.

The point is that the client should not only know what their site is going to look, but also know exactly how it will do it - meaning they can put their hands on the format before they order from you. This sets the expectations at the right level and means the client can order with a high degree of confidence in what they will receive. This is a big change from the current "Ta-Da!" approach to showing the client the finished article (usually to their initial delight and subsequent disappointment).

To overcome this challenge, we are adding more example sites and trying to provide a range of look and feel options that reflect different classes of client; from banking to FMCG. The idea is that we can make it easier for the client to imagine how it will look for them and shorten the sales cycle a little bit more.

It would be great to hear how far you have had to go to get a client to understand what a service might look like before they have ordered. 

PR has always found it difficult to quantify precisely the business effect of its work. Fortunately, today it is getting easier and easier to offer clients rock-solid metrics that connect the work you do with the returns your clients enjoy. The key is to know what to measure and how to connect them. To do this you need to adopt a more analytical and data-driven approach to the day-to-day issues you are tackling and ensure you have the tools you need to provide the numbers your clients crave.

I thought we should take a moment to consider what are meaningful data points for your clients and how to provide a link between them and their bottom line. For me, matters such as sentiment, mentions, influence and most importantly sales leads are the key data points. It might be argued that there is a causal link in this chain from sentiment through to lead, but so far I have not been able to find any service that will let me analyse that chain (please let me know if there is one!). Leads drive sales and sales hit the bottom-line. The truth in sales is more leads, more sales. It should then follow that the more influence (thought-leadership), mentions (mindshare), positive sentiment (customer love) you have, the more leads you will create.

Sentiment: To measuring sentiment is a tricky business, but there are newer tools like Leiki or Connexor are available that allow you to automatically quantify positive and negative in social streams. This is a very powerful way of learning almost in real-time what people are saying about your organisation or your clients. Cutting edge stuff, but worth understanding today.

Mentions: The trick with mentions is to understand what is driving peaks and troughs in your mentions. Therefore, you need to tie your mentions to your content to discover the discussions that drive the numbers up. No tools needed here – just review your mentions on Facebook analytics or your Twitter account. If you do want to make it easier, however, you could always use something like Sprout Social to gather the numbers for you.

Influence: This is something you both have and can leverage from others. Today it is the new metric that measures your collective ability to move the SoMe masses. Influence is more of a vanity measure at the moment, but I think in the next year or two it will become a key determinant of buying decisions by consumers, so start getting into this now. If you have not signed up for Klout then do so. This will provide you with a score of your influence across SoMe networks. The more you engage, the higher your influence. Another service to watch for is Traackr. This allows you to identify the movers and shakers related to a topic of interest. The idea is that you can then connect with them to help you reach your audience. Choose and topic and try it - it makes for interesting reading!

There has been some great work published lately by Deirdre K. Breakenridge on Social Media and PR (Social Media and Public Relations, Eight New Practices for the PR Professional, FT Press, 2012) and if you have not yet got a copy I recommend you do. Practice #8 is all about measurement in the SoMe context.

Final thought for this entry comes from Katie Paine, author of Measure What Matters and CEO of KDPaine & Partners. In her opinion, “The key to good Social Media Measurement is to be clear about goals. Is the intent to reduce marketing costs? Improve positioning relative to the competition or the marketplace? Shorten the sales cycle?” If you can help your clients set clear goals, collect the data and understand what it means, you can create actionable insights. That’s what your clients will pay you for.

In a word: profit. The most successful form of television for the last 5 decades is format TV. From the standards we know today like American Idol, to ages old game shows like Family Fortunes, formats are a perfect fit for the consumption habits of the TV viewing public.

Viewers love formats: why? Because they know what they are going to get and the producers know that for a format to fly it needs viewing figures. When we relate this back to the digital PR world, we find that clients also like to know what they are getting – surprises are not good – so format-thinking helps the client to order with confidence, in full knowledge of what they will receive.

Producers love formats: Why? Because formats are cost effective and fast to produce. They have clear production guidelines (called Format Bibles) that set out in minute detail how to make the programme. This makes it easy to budget, finance, staff and roll-out. In the digital PR world, we are pioneering the use of Format Bibles for our web formats that make it faster and easier to produce new web solutions using the same principles.

TV Advertisers love formats: Why? Because formats draw huge audiences of a given demographic to a particular timeslot that buy products and services. This makes it easier to target the audience and, consequently for the TV channel and producer to leverage supply and demand to drive up the price of advertising. In the digital PR world, a close-fitting format targeted at a demographic of client can create be offered at a premium price – because building a one-off would not be possible at that price point, but being without the solution would be more costly.

In the digital PR world, treat clients like viewers, developers like producers and clients like advertisers. Give them tried and tested formats that will deliver what they need and profits will follow.

Just a few short years ago the business media landscape was a relatively simple place. There were journalists that worked for media outlets, such as newspapers, print magazines, radio and TV and if you wanted to get your story out you needed to work with a PR person who could help you get to them. Today the picture is vastly different. 

The rise of social media and citizen journalism (blogging to you and me) has meant that how you get your message out is changing rapidly. It is a much more nuanced world, where you should pre-announce, announce, retweet, repost, blog, link, comment and pin in order to cover your bases. This means you are using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, online Wire Services, blogging platforms, Quora and a whole host of other services even before you get to your own website, print media (which still is interested) and the big boys like radio and TV. 

So today, to be an effective PR person you need to know about all of these channels and be fluent in how to get your message out there.

Your core skill used to be creating a good press release, but how many times have you heard "The press release is dead" in the last 2 years? In my opinion it is not - it has just evolved, fragmenting into a series of short messages that can prolong comment and discussion, get you noticed and convey the core message - but not as a single document.

You cannot promote your business without social media today. So to win, you need to leverage your knowledge of great messaging, learn which platforms to send it to and be an active contributor to the discussion that ensues.

My advice: find a way to bring as many of the channels under control as possible. Use Sprout Social or something similar to gain a grip and then coach your clients in the art of the new press release - the social media release. This way, you will win.

A web format is a package of materials that allows a new web service to be localized, redesigned and rolled out according to a pre-defined formula.

The obvious thought is that a web format is just a site template that we copy. If that were true, we would all be using web sites that work like that. In actual fact, to make a format you need a lot more. It must encompass the sales and marketing, design, production and maintenance phases of the solution lifecycle. Here is the list of the things we design and produce when we make a format: 

-       a product design: what it is and what it does
-       a web site template: how the functionality is packaged
-       a format bible: how we made it and make it again and again
-       a business case: what the business benefits are for a client
-       a range of examples: what it can look like
-       a financial case: how much a PR agency can make from it
-       a FAQ and support statement: how we support the agency and client
-       a commercialization plan: how we licence and sell the format
-       a 2-sheet and 4-slide sales pack: support materials for account teams
-       client reviews: what the clients think of the solution
-       delivered repeats: what the real delivered cases look like in live action

We are not going to into all of these in detail here, but suffice to say that you need to broaden the thinking beyond just making web sites to make repeatable digital solutions a reality.

How do we know this? We worked with a range of producers and borrowed ideas from an industry that has been making formats successfully for decades – TV. We are all familiar with formats like Pop Idol, X-Factor, Who Wants to be a Millionaire – but we are probably less conscious of just how much TV is format-driven. The commercial reality is that format TV far outstrips ready-made TV in the profitability stakes and we believe that the Internet industry is heading in a similar direction.

There are lots of potential examples of great web formats for the PR industry, from corporate communications and mobile sites to social media integrations. This means lots of potential for completely new sources of revenue and profit.

If you would like to learn more about how we make web formats and repeatable solutions send me an email or connect with me on Twitter @msorsaleslie

I just listened to a great keynote from Marcus Sheriden (@TheSalesLion) at the PRSA Counselors Academy event in New Orleans. This guy turned his swimming pool company into the most successful one in the US using content marketing. Almost everything he said was pure common sense, but I think the most important thing was to be human.

Here are the 5 things:

1. Brainstorm the 50-100 questions you are asked all the time by clients and turn them into blog posts. This will give you 25 weeks of content to get going!

2. Being open about issues like price, quality and what you really deliver. These are the questions that prospects really are interested about and they will then ask you more questions. These questions are inbound links and they will boost your rankings.

3. Use the x. vs. y approach to showcase how you are different/better/not so good as the competition - again this will create debate and this is great for rankings.

4. Face up to problems about your service and be open about the solutions to the problems. Authenticity and trustworthiness is key.

5. Write how you talk. Answer the real questions your prospects and clients are asking in the way you would talk to them. Google will sort out whether you get good rankings, but it is not about tagging and meta data - its about search terms, and a prospect will ask like "Who is the best PR company in London?", "Why should I use a PR company?", "What ROI do I get from PR?" - these are the questions and all you need to do is answer them!

Check out www.thesaleslion.com for a free ebook on content marketing - and watch the video - Marcus is really entertaining ;)

t:M

We had a wonderful event at Atomium in Brussels and the final leg of the Repeat This! World Tour heads to New York for Internet Week. We are holding an invite only event for the digital PR elite to learn about repeatable digital solutions, CloudStores and how to take back turf from their agency competitors.

We will also record a webinar from the event itself and try to get interviews with some of the great and the good during Internet Week. It should be a blast!

If you would like to apply for an invitation, send an email to [email protected]. If you are coming along, I look forward to meeting you!

We head to the fair city of Brussels next week and are hosting a Cocktail Party at the world famous Atomium for the PR community. The idea is to share our findings from talking to many people working in the industry and to learn a little about how the scene in Brussels does digital. The response has been fantastic and we are looking forward to meet you all.

If you work in PR and have not already received an invite, please send a tweet me @hammerkit or send a message [email protected].

The latest results posted by WPP[i] and Havas[ii] for their FY2011 show some interesting glimpses into the future of the industry. In both cases, they are doing extremely well, with WPP posting a 10% increase in full year profits and Havas a respectable 9% for the same period. Looking a little more deeply, though and we see that while PR performed well there are some issues on the horizon.

In WPP, while the top line growth for PR at 6.2% was lower than the advertising and media arm of the business, which posted 12.2% revenue growth, PR still increased its profit margin by 0.3% to 16.1%. WPP reaffirmed its long-term target to improve the staff cost/revenue ratio by 0.3-0.6% per annum, with a focus on the application of new technology.

For Havas digital and social media now make up 23% of revenue compared to 19% in the previous financial year. This is a 20% annual growth rate and at this level digital revenues will account for 50% of the firms revenue within 4 years. The Havas CEO, David Jones, referred to this "as another strong year driven by aggressive growth in digital".

The latest research from Kingston Smith W1[iii] indicates that PR bosses are very optimistic about 2012 with 71% predicting greater profits. Perhaps with a greater focus on digital and the application of smart technology, the industry will also be able to rise to the challenge of controlling the cost/revenue while taking back territory from the digital agencies.

With not much legacy in digital, PR has the opportunity for its Estonia moment – to leapfrog the old ways of doing things to move straight to the best available technology and methods just as this fledgling country did when it emerged from the old Soviet Union. This kickstarted their economy and offered immediate benefits to all. Is it time for PR to leapfrog the digital agencies? Let’s hope so.

[i] Source: WPP FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[ii] Source: Havas FY 2011 Results, 1.3.2012
[iii] Source: ”PR Bosses retain 2012 optimisim, finds Kingston Smith”, PRWeek.co.uk

IN THE UK:
In 2010 PR revenue was up by 9.24%. 2012 revenues are expected to outstrip that.
However, in 2010 PR profits were down 23% and PR employment costs were up 9%. In 2010, profit per employee in the UK's top 40 PR agencies was 13,400 GBP per year.

IN THE US:
In 2010, agency revenue was up by 7.7%.
Traditional PR represented only 6.5% of revenue for US advertising/marketing agencies in 2010. Digital marketing represented 28% of U.S. agency revenue in 2010, but the leaders of the pack such as Edelman could only achieve 12% of U.S. revenues from digital.

Total takeaway: Digital marketing - including social media and CRM/Direct marketing, will supplant "traditional PR". The future is all digital/social/online.

Take back your market.

During the market research we undertook to create the CloudStore I discovered that there seem to be three different approaches that PR agencies took when attempting to deliver digital projects for their clients. I wanted to share what I have learned to help to demonstrate why PR is missing an opportunity to be better at digital than the pureplay digital practices. I found out that there were three types of practice:

The Practice of Denial: this is the agency that is still trying to be a traditional PR agency. I heard comments ranging from "we don't have the staff, so we use local web designers when we need to", to "we want to move up the value chain and be delivering strategy, not web projects - the digital agencies can do it better anyway." I fear that these practices disappear as clients side-step them and go direct to the agencies offer digital services as standard. Typically, this type of practice has only recently appointed a digital director and is still trying to workout what the job should entail.

The Practice of Illusion: this is the agency that believes IT IS doing digital because they have a few members of the team that know how to buy web projects from smaller suppliers. They are acting as a procurement service for their clients, rather than actively influencing the use of digital. There are revenues flowing from digital and several team members with a good understanding of how things work on the web - they know digital is more than just managing a social media stream. This is the agency that needs to invest in building expertise and capability to leverage the knowledge it has gained.

The Practice of the Big Brain: this is the agency that worked out a long time ago that to do anything serious in digital they had to attain critical mass. They did this by creating a crack team inside the organisation that deliver almost all the digital projects the agency produces. The Big Brain is very knowledgeable about digital and can do almost everything. It is, however, a bottleneck in the organisation that creates tension in the rest of the business. The Big Brain can do digital, but scaling it across the business globally is painful and challenging.

Do you recognize your agency in any of these types? I think there is a chance that these types exist together in the same global agency, so it is possible you have encountered more than one. 

I believe that if the PR industry wants to move forward to become the champion of digital, it needs to break out of these three practices and become the practice of globalisation. I think that to do this you need to:

decentralize the ability to deliver digital products effectively: provide a standardised way for your teams around the world to offer high quality digital services regardless of the local expertise in place

share a common memory of the best ideas and services: ensure that the services that are used by lots of your clients and easy to discover by anyone in the business

leverage client power and practice scale: work with your clients to develop new ideas that can be turned into massively successful web products for you and for them. Use your global office network to spread those ideas quickly and gain thought-leadership points.

It would be great to hear your thoughts on digital practices you have seen in the PR industry.

It was really interesting to read about GolinHarris acquiring FUSE to boost their digital street cred. It really is an important change that PR firms go after digital pureplays and was most recently commented on by Steve Barrett in his PRWeek blog article “The Agency Revolution continues”, where he said that digital is both an opportunity and a threat for PR firms. Acquisition of a bespoke digital agency is certainly one way to deal with that double-edged sword, but is it a wise one? Could it be a very costly mistake?

Clearly, there are new skills required to be a modern PR firm – and being digital savvy is really not enough. You need to be able to confidently deliver digital solutions to clients that have increasing demanding and wide-ranging tastes. It makes sense, therefore, to bring in talent from outside to gain that confidence and ability. The test will be whether two very different business cultures can become one and deliver what is the client needs on time and on budget.

My experience tells me that acquisitions have a 8/10 chance of failure. That’s not to say that GolinHarris has made a mistake. Indeed, I believe that their g4 approach is a really interesting way to trying to focus energy on how digital can help clients, but I can’t help thinking that some of that energy will be drawn to integration rather than revelation.

I believe that what is needed in the PR industry is to look at how to do digital more intelligently – not just how to do digital. At Hammerkit, we preach repeatable web solutions not because their different, but because they are obvious. Rather than buy in digital talent, buy in repeatable solutions and train your existing PR talent to be fantastic solution sellers. After all, many clients have very similar needs. That way, you can spend all of your energy on the client and not on melding cultures.

As part of our growth plan we are looking to recruit talented, committed team players to help us deliver repeatable solutions to the PR industry globally. We have a number of positions open right now in our account management; production and development teams and you can review them here.

In a nutshell, our account management team will be helping clients to get their CloudStore up and running and will have a unique position in the industry of being acting as format producers, working with clients to help them discover the web services that could be repeatable and making sure they are created and placed in the CloudStore.

Our production teams will be working on original web formats as well as managing the fulfillment of format repeats. This requires talented web designers, developers and UX gurus with amazing organizational skills.

In our development team we build and maintain the Hammerkit Cloud Platform. Joining this team will give developers and DevOps people the challenge of creating a world-class software development platform and cloud infrastructure that has to perform 24/7 for a global user base.

If you feel you have the talent, the track record and the tenacity to help drive our business forward then apply. We’re waiting to hear from you.

In the meantime, why not have a look at the roles currently available in our careers section

Big news! I repeat, big news! Not only will I be hosting a webinar with Hill+Knowlton tomorrow at 4PM CET, we are planning to follow the webinar with a whole series of webinars and clinics that are designed to educate the PR industry about repeatable solutions and the benefits they bring. The schedule for the rest of the Repeat This! series will be solidified in January, so stay tuned for updates.

We hope you join us tomorrow when we kick the series off, but if you can't make it, fear not! True to fashion, we will repeat the webinar again in January.

Register here

With the growing shift of client marcomms spending from traditional to digital channels, what does it mean for PR? I think it means that unless your agency starts to gain the capability to produce digital well - not just post and manage social media conversations, but actually move into the world of helping move internal and external comms on to the web.

For example, more and more businesses are creating digital annual reports for shareholders, or producing digital newsletters for clients and staff. They are creating Facebook landing pages that capture "Likes" and engagement and microsites to drive SEO rankings. These used to be complex productions, but today there are many ways to produce them effectively.

We talked to a number of clients and many of them have set the goal of 100% of the marcomms being spent on digital productions. This literally means no more print publishing of any type. What does this mean for PR agencies and what opportunity does it create?

Personally, I believe that content has always been king, so if PR agencies can do digital intelligently, then coupling this with the ability to write well and the trust of the client to put their message out, I think PR has a great future. What do you think?

I will be hosting a webinar together with Hill+Knowlton at 4PM CET on December 15th 2011 to discuss how the PR industry can borrow a few good ideas from other industries to improve the way digital services are created for clients.

If the most recent predictions will come true, next year is going to be a difficult one for the industry. I believe that to cope, the PR sector should focus on three things to ensure business can boost profitability: repeat, repeat, repeat!

"Repeat what?", you may ask. We are going to look at how PR agencies can do digital intelligently by focusing on turning one-off web projects into global best selling products.

Please join to learn more about what will change in 2012.

Register here

The PR industry now finds itself in a rather amazing position. In this era of economic uncertainty, reduced spending on advertising and increasing digital conversation, PR has the potential to become the “new advertising” modeled for and by the times. So, why then is the PR industry going backwards when it should be moving forwards? Something doesn’t add up.

What is going wrong lies somewhere between revenue and profitability. Revenues for the industry are up dramatically (by 9.24% in 2010) but profitability is down, burdened by increasing employment costs and a lack of productivity. The profitability of the Top 40 agencies in the UK fell by a staggering 23.8% in 2010 according to the Kingston Smith W1 report, heralding the lowest profit margins for seven years. So what needs to be done to increase productivity such that the increased revenues are no longer squandered?

According to Avril Lee, UK CEO at Ketchum Pleon, as quoted in response to a PRWeek report, "everyone in PR is having to be flexible about how we use resources and our most precious asset – our people. The need to cultivate and find great talent, and having it available �?just in time’ when campaigns do get the green light, is often our most pressing day-to-day challenge."

Flexibility is great, but with flexibility comes new challenges. What can be done to help this most precious resource with consistency? Strategies, especially in the digital marketplace, must be equally nimble but must not sacrifice productivity. What is needed are high quality repeatable solutions that can be rolled out at the drop of a hat.

Think about the kind of digital projects you are asked to do for clients. Many of them are similar. Corporate websites, product microsites, newsletters, Facebook campaigns, LinkedIn applications, social media aggregators, etc. are all great examples of repeatable solutions that are different in content but similar in form. We recently interviewed a director at one of the world’s largest PR agencies, who said that about two-thirds of the solutions they produce for clients could be repeatable, meaning that in most cases repeatable solutions could reduce production costs, shorten turnaround time and, most importantly, guarantee consistently high quality.

At Hammerkit, we have been working with repeatable solutions for many years and believe that there has never been a better time for the PR industry to use them to their full advantage. Beyond that, we believe that to ignore repeatable solutions is to be left behind, facing statistics like nearly 25% drop in profitability mentioned above. Repeatable solutions accelerate profitable growth, improve productivity and create happy clients.

Here is how Hammerkit can help. We recently launched our Cloudstore for PR, which makes it easy for agencies to turn one-off web projects into best selling products. Every project has the potential to become a repeat sale, another solution added to your bag of tricks. It is like having your own PR AppStore. Our Cloudstore allows your agency to share all of the best selling items, shortening the sales cycle, and recycling what works. Valuable creative resources are stored rather than lost, and thus, also revenue is stored rather than lost.

If the PR industry doesn’t answer the call in 2012, it risks squandering its advantageous position. Smart agencies will focus on three things: repeat, repeat, repeat.

PRWeek Article
Kingston Smith W1 Report