Q. Why Hire a Marketing Firm?

A. In one form or another, this is the most frequently asked question when the Public Relations and Marketing Group meets with a prospective client.

At this point, whomever we are meeting with has already taken the first step: they have realized that they face competition and that they need to do more to help differentiate themselves from that competition. Often such clients find they must better communicate their products or services to current or new customers.

But in most cases, these prospective clients are meeting with other firms simultaneously and may be considering various marketing alternatives. So the question becomes twofold. 1) Why hire a public relations and marketing firm rather than deal directly with advertising and media sources yourself? and 2) Why hire PRMG over another company?

First, PRMG is a fully integrated public relations and marketing company that was developed by its principals, after years of experience, to meet every aspect of an organization’s public relations and marketing needs. By putting public relations, marketing, video production, graphic and web design under one roof, PRMG can integrate and leverage its services to call upon whatever tool is needed while providing value to its clients. This means we can address a client’s specific needs and ensure that our strategic efforts are working together for the greatest return.

For example, if you choose to advertise, you may wish to use one or more advertising vehicles, (newspaper print, magazine print, television, radio or the internet), however you are only reaching a targeted market. You are not gaining earned media through public relations.

Today, if you advertise or gain earned media, prospective customers will frequently research you on the web. It is absolutely necessary to have a strong web site and moreover, ensure that it is properly coded so you can be easily found by these customers. Today, you can only take advantage of this free marketing by being at the top of the list of search engine results. Once someone visits your site, you must capture pertinent information and can now send a visitor a monthly e-newsletter and a quarterly printed newsletter.

Another advantage of dealing with PRMG, rather than multiple companies, is that we can come to know your business in its entirety, which helps us to select the best tool to use at the appropriate time. Retaining PRMG results in large savings, as opposed to paying higher rates to other firms for individual projects. You also won’t have to deal with an often frustrating learning curve, as additional firms get to know your business in order to create and implement their component of your overall strategy.

Why not coordinate all of your efforts and deal directly with media companies? First of all, your strategy is going to depend highly on advertising and may not include public relations, customer relations or web marketing at all. Second, almost all media companies — television, radio, newspapers, and magazines — use in-house sales representatives, which allows these companies to make a greater profit: they not only avoid paying advertising firm commissions, but they can charge someone who is unfamiliar with the medium what they think they will pay, which may be higher than the prevailing rate. These advertising sales representatives want to sell you their product and will aggressively market only one advertising vehicle. For example, it simply does no good for a radio advertising representative to tell you look at cable television, in fact it may be cause for dismissal.

By contrast, PRMG evaluates your business, products and services to design a strategic plan that will help you meet your targeted audiences using various forms of advertising and marketing techniques, and then implements this plan with the tools in its arsenal.