[melicious]

Hi,

Can anyone recommend some good PR firms in HK?

And can anyone offer me some idea on how much firms are likely to charge to manage a small-medium sized professional firm.

Thanks a lot!

[PDLM]

The absolute minimum retainer for an international name PR agency (Edelman, Hill&Knowlton, etc) would be about US$5,000 per month. You may be able to get a local agency a bit cheaper. It really depends what exactly you want them to do.

[KnowItAll]

Fair number of smaller expat run agencies that are not as high profile as Edelmans etc and deliver much better value for the smaller business.

So "local" does not mean "local chinese".

[PDLM]

Yes - sorry - by local I meant just having a HK presence and focus. The international agencies can, to some extent at least, act regionally or globally.

But the question remains what you want them to do. After trying the retianed PR agency for a while, we found that the same amount of money spent on focussed advertising, advertorials, sponsorship and so on gave us a better return than "PR".

[zenlogo]

Suggest you call Peter Bolton at:
The Creative Solutions Group
Asia's leading events, graphic design & premium gifts agency
+852 2110 5810

[melicious]

Thanks for all the replies.

I suspect a lot of what we want done (such as advertorials, website maintenance, events, etc) could be done without hiring a PR firm especially, but it's more about what they may offer in terms of their connections with media outlets. My boss is interested to know if PR firms offer good return on spending.

PDLM - did you find your retained PR firm generated good/reasonable publicity and increased your firm's profile?

Thanks!

[KnowItAll]

Upstream Asia | Marketing + Media | Asia, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Japan, PR, Public Relations, Specialists - does a lot of regional PR work ... David Ketchum's a very well connected and sharp guy.

[PDLM]

Originally Posted by melicious

PDLM - did you find your retained PR firm generated good/reasonable publicity and increased your firm's profile?

Not really - we found that for the same amount of money we could get much better publicity through paid marketing.

Essentially the difference between PR and marketing is that with PR you are paying the PR agencies to persuade other people (newspapers etc) to do things for free. With marketing you just pay the newspapers directly. We found that for our product (which is a commodity so it's difficult to generate any "buzz") that paid advertising/advertorials/street fighters worked better than the agency. But if you have something that is whizzy and innovative and exciting which features writers would like to write pieces about then the PR agency might be the better way to go.

[melicious]

Nope, unfortunately nothing whizzy or exciting to sell... I work for a professional services firm that is quite traditional and conservative.

Thanks for all your help!

[KnowItAll]

That is generally a good area for a PR firm to be involved - stories about how you've saved your client's money, made their lives easier etc etc.

PR in my opinion tends to work better for companies that have the "sell softly" approach, but have great stories to tell.