At PRLab, we like to do things differently because we think the traditional PR model is broken. When a startup reaches out to a traditional PR agency, they discover right from the start that the whole model was designed to disappoint and underperform.
Here’s why: to begin with, traditional PR agencies put you in a retainer, lock you in a contract and force you to feed them with company news. The latter means that agencies sit around and wait for you to submit news so they can place it in media that they already have contacts in.
They overcharge you for a service that you have yet to learn what it consists of. There’s a huge lack of transparency in the retainers, leaving you to think - what am I paying for?
You try to get them to understand your product or your agile way of working, but they don’t get it, and there’s no one to blame because the executive that was assigned to your account didn’t actively decide to work in such an old-fashioned way. Forget about adding them to your Slack channel. They ask you to keep communication by email.
They send you reports that don't translate into business growth but instead send reports that outline how much coverage they got that month and how many pitches were sent. Now, how many key relationships did you build from that coverage? Furthermore, the overall impact of those hyperlinks on your holistic SEO goals will probably remain unknown. Why? Because these agencies work in an old-fashioned way, PR is just a stand-alone, luxurious contact-based service that only a few can access.
The whole approach is wrong because it doesn't translate into business growth, and now the PR industry has one of the worst reputations across the whole marketing spectrum. What was said above is exactly our raison d'etre.
