When you speak with a friend or colleague that has worked both agency and in-house PR you almost always hear the same thing, “In house has the potential to become repetitive, while working at an agency keeps you on your toes and the content fresh.” It didn’t take long into my time here at Matter to find truth in that statement as I would soon be tasked with working with a wide array of clients from consumer products to nonprofits.
As a member of Matter’s Precision team, my daily work reaches every end of the spectrum from drafting social media posts on GaN to pitching lifestyle editors to review my client’s chocolates. There isn’t a single day that I don’t find myself changing hats from accounts like lifestyle and consumer to auto and education. You may ask, “Wouldn’t you rather be fully immersed in one client or product instead of having your feet wet in so many different topics?” My answer every time is and always will be “No.” My reason? Because my clients overlap more than you may think. Here are a few examples:
- By drafting social posts about my client’s latest blogger review, I learn how to make my tweet about mobile technology more digestible to my client’s followers.
- My face-to-face meeting with a member of the press for one of my digital imaging clients makes that scary lifestyle editor a lot less intimidating when I finally get him or her on the phone.
- Holding a conversation with a professor at one of the world’s leading institutions? Well, let’s just say that makes speaking with almost any client a breeze.
The key to finding ways to make your experiences benefit you moving forward across your client accounts is by realizing that at the end of the day they’re not all that different. Sure one client may take longer to understand than the other, but ultimately they come to you for the same reason – to make their product, research or insight enjoyable and desired by the public.
Being a PR professional may mean that you’re an expert communicator, but it also means that you’re able to learn on the fly and understand multiple worlds at the same time. Next time you find yourself looking back on your day wondering how you managed to cover so many different types of clients, remember that your job as a PR professional is also to be a master of many trades. Convincing yourself and others that you’re an expert in your client’s work is vital to making your time in PR a success. While it may seem odd to be pitching one client as an expert on the Internet of Things only to later be pitching product reviews, you’ll soon learn that your daily client work intersects. Later this week take a second to play back all that you’ve accomplished and see how all of those tasks have helped you improve your client work as whole. You’ll be surprised with what you find.
What benefits do you find from working with a variety of different clients? We’d love to know!