Companies come to Arkansas from all over the country and all over the world. As you may or may not know, Arkansas is home to the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, plus other heavy hitters, such as J.B. Hunt Transport, Tyson Foods and Murphy USA. These companies, along with the many businesses that feed into their ecosystems, bring experienced teams, brilliantly smart people and big plans. What they often don’t arrive with is an understanding of what Arkansans actually care about. And that’s where a local agency earns its keep.
I’ve owned my agency in Little Rock for 20 years, and the value of local knowledge has only grown in that time. With AI flooding every channel with content, speaking directly to a specific audience matters more than ever. You can’t do that from a distance. You do it by knowing a market from the ground up: the decision makers, the community issues, the way business actually gets done here. Our network, the Public Relations Global Network, calls itself the world’s local agency, and that’s exactly the point. Global reach is only useful if it’s paired with someone who knows the territory.
So what does that look like in practice? For us, it starts with being plugged into the community. I could rattle off the many nonprofit boards our team sits on and the decision makers we’re in constant contact with, and yes, that’s a selling point when we talk to companies that need a foothold in Arkansas. But local knowledge also means seeing what’s coming before it arrives.
Playing the Long Game of Monopoly
Two years ago, we started Lithium Link, a LinkedIn newsletter covering the lithium industry in South Arkansas. Here’s the thing: we had no lithium clients when we started it. But lithium is shaping up to be the next oil boom for our state, and we wanted to be the agency that understood the next big thing in Arkansas before anyone was paying us to.
It has been a fascinating journey of being on the inside of a new industry that is bound to be a very important economic driver for Arkansas. As part of our creation of Lithium Link, we have become a go-to entity when it comes to learning more about lithium in Arkansas. We were part of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission’s Lithium Summit, which brought 800 people together, where we moderated sessions and produced live podcasts. And the relationships we built led to us organizing marketing workshops with entrepreneurs in the space.
My team asked early on why we were pouring non-billable hours into an industry where we had no clients. I told them what I always tell them: it’s the long game of Monopoly. New business development built on relationships takes thought, care and patience. Running some Google ads and hoping for the best is not a strategy. And in a relationship-based state like Arkansas, being in the room when decisions get made is worth far more than any ad spend.
When Local Can Be National
Local knowledge doesn’t have to stay local, either. This past year, we helped pharmacy associations push for reform of pharmacy benefit managers, the middlemen driving up costs for local pharmacies and patients. Arkansas became the first state to pass focused PBM reform. Since then, we’ve shared that playbook with other states. Tennessee just passed similar legislation despite roughly $7 million in opposing advertising. Earned media and tried-and-true PR strategies went up against that money and won.
The lesson here is that a solid strategy created for a specific locale can be the framework for a national movement, using the same strategy, yet with customized tactics and local relationships. That is the type of knowledge sharing we love in PRGN — taking a winning strategy and localizing it for wins across the country.
Don’t Underestimate The Heartland
There’s a lot of business happening between the coasts, and it often gets overlooked. Arkansas has the giants everyone knows in Walmart, J.B. Hunt and Tyson. It also has family-owned and mid-sized B2B companies doing big things on a national level. We help them tell their stories from a Southern perspective, rooted in who they really are, in a way that connects far beyond our borders.
And when those clients want to expand into other markets? That’s the beauty of PRGN. We bring the strategy, the storytelling and the foundation, and a partner in Malaysia, London or Seattle brings the boots on the ground. Local knowledge, multiplied around the world … and even better, the big success stories happening routinely in the middle of our nation no longer fly under the radar!
If you’d like to hear the full conversation with me, Abbie Fink and Adrian McIntyre, listen to this week’s episode of the PRGN Presents podcast series.
