How to choose a digital infrastructure agency
Choosing a PR or content marketing agency can be difficult, whether you are appointing one for the first time or considering a change from your current partner.
Digital infrastructure makes that decision harder. It is a broad and technical market, spanning telecoms networks, fibre, subsea, satellite, data centres, cloud infrastructure, OSS/BSS and network software. An agency may have an impressive broad technology portfolio without necessarily having the people, knowledge or relationships needed to represent your business effectively.
To choose a digital infrastructure PR agency, assess the proposed team’s sector knowledge, who will actually deliver the work, the relevance of its experience, its media and analyst relationships, its ability to generate proactive ideas, its commercial model and how it measures success.
Here are the main questions to consider.
Who will actually do the work?
The people presenting an agency’s pitch are not always the people who will deliver the programme day to day.
Senior leaders may shape the proposal and attend the pitch, before much of the work is handed to a more junior team. Junior consultants can provide valuable support, and bring fresh energy and ideas, but buyers should understand how much direct involvement they will receive from the people who helped win the account.
Ask the agency:
Who will develop the strategy and ideas?
Who will write content and speak to journalists?
Who will attend regular meetings?
How involved will the senior people from the pitch remain?
How many other clients will the account lead be managing?
There is no universally correct team structure. The important thing is knowing exactly what you are buying.
At Temono, the people involved in winning the work remain directly involved in delivering it. That senior-led approach is designed to reduce unnecessary layers and keep experienced judgement close to the work.
Does the proposed team understand digital infrastructure?
A specialist agency name is not enough. Equally, a broader technology agency may be a strong choice if the proposed team has relevant and recent experience.
The key word is team.
An agency may display several major telecoms or infrastructure logos while the people who worked on those accounts have since left, moved into management or will not be assigned to your business.
Test the knowledge of the people who will actually work with you. Can they:
Explain your market without relying on your website language?
Understand the relationship between operators, vendors, infrastructure providers and partners?
Recognise how your proposition differs from similar-sounding competitors?
Identify the commercial story inside the technical detail?
Understand which market developments are genuinely relevant to your buyers?
You should not need to spend the first six months teaching your agency the basics of your sector.
What does its experience actually represent?
Logos in credentials and on agency websites can mean several different things.
They may represent:
A current retained client
A former client
A completed project
Experience gained by a team member at a previous agency
Work delivered by another office or division
None of those is automatically more or less valuable. Experience gained elsewhere can be highly relevant, particularly when the person responsible will work directly on your account.
The important thing is transparency.
Ask whether the experience is current, previous or project-based, who delivered the work, what they personally did and how recently they did it. This will also help distinguish a genuine conflict from a company that simply appears in an agency’s historic credentials.
Can it demonstrate genuine media and analyst relationships?
Most agencies will claim to have strong relationships with journalists and analysts. Buyers should look for evidence that those relationships are active and run both ways.
Do journalists and analysts know the proposed team personally? Do they respond to them? Do they trust the agency to bring relevant ideas, sources and introductions? Does the agency understand what individual journalists and analysts care about, rather than relying on a database and a large distribution list?
Look for evidence such as:
Journalists approaching the agency for sources or comment
Analysts accepting regular briefings and updates
Invitations to contribute to industry discussions
Public acknowledgement from respected sector figures
Relationships that exist beyond a single client announcement
Temono, for example, is one of only a handful of agencies to be regularly mentioned on the Telecoms.com podcast. That is a small but useful indication that the relationship extends beyond sending pitches into an inbox.
Will the agency be proactive without constant announcements?
A good agency cannot manufacture credible corporate news every week. It should still be able to create opportunities between launches, partnerships and funding announcements.
Ask what the agency would do during a period when your company had no major news.
A thoughtful answer might include:
Developing proactive story ideas
Offering executives for background briefings
Responding to relevant market developments
Creating original commentary or thought leadership
Building analyst familiarity
Developing research or campaign concepts
Preparing for major industry events
For companies reviewing an incumbent agency, a lack of proactivity is often one of the clearest signs that the relationship is no longer working. A quiet month is not necessarily a problem. A consistently empty ideas pipeline may be.
Is the commercial model right for the brief?
Not every requirement needs a long-term retainer.
A project may be appropriate for an event, launch, messaging exercise, research campaign or analyst audit. An ongoing programme is usually better suited to sustained media relations, thought leadership, category building and analyst engagement.
A good agency should recommend the model that fits the objective rather than forcing every requirement into the same structure.
It is also sensible to obtain more than one comparable quote.
If one proposal is significantly cheaper or more expensive than the others, understand why. The difference might reflect seniority, geographic reach, deliverables, team size or additional specialist support. A major price difference without a clear explanation should be treated cautiously.
How will success be measured?
Measurement should start with the programme’s objectives, not an arbitrary coverage target.
Coverage volume can be useful, but volume for its own sake does not show whether communications activity is changing how the company is understood, trusted or considered.
A credible agency should use an outcomes-led framework such as AMEC and distinguish between activity, audience response and meaningful communications or business outcomes.
The right measures will depend on the brief. They might include:
Visibility in priority media
Message pull-through
Quality of coverage
Analyst engagement and feedback
Share of relevant industry conversations
Executive visibility
Buyer or stakeholder response
Progress against defined commercial objectives
The agency should be able to explain what success looks like before the work begins.
Seven questions to ask before appointing an agency
Who will actually deliver the work each week?
Which people on the proposed team have recent digital infrastructure experience?
Which examples in your credentials are current, previous or project-based?
What would you do if we had no major announcements for three months?
What evidence can you show of genuine media and analyst relationships?
Why have you recommended this commercial model and level of investment?
How will you measure success against our objectives?
Choosing a digital infrastructure PR agency is not simply a question of who has the longest client list.
The right agency should understand the market, provide the experience promised during the pitch, build genuine relationships and keep creating momentum when there is no obvious news.
Considering a new PR agency? Talk to Temono about what you need.
