How to Choose a PR Agency: Five Things to Test Before You Sign

Choosing a PR agency is harder than choosing most marketing partners, because the product is largely invisible. A creative agency can show you a campaign; a PR agency mostly shows you a list of outlets and a few clippings. Yet the wrong choice costs more than a wasted retainer: it can cost you a journalist's trust, or a badly handled crisis that people remember for years.

The good news is that you can test a PR agency before you sign. Below are the five areas I check, and the questions that separate real capability from a confident presentation.

1. Scope: what exactly are you buying?

"PR" covers very different services: media relations, corporate communications, product publicity, influencer relations, internal communications, public affairs, event support and crisis management. Many agencies are strong in one or two of these and only adequate in the rest.

Before you meet anyone, write down what you need over the next 12 months:

• Which audiences matter: consumers, business press, investors, regulators, employees?
• Which outputs you expect: press releases, interviews, opinion pieces, events, social content, monitoring reports?
• What stays in-house, and what goes to the agency?

Then ask each agency to describe a typical month on your account: who does what, how many hours, which deliverables. A vague answer such as "we will be your extended team" usually means the scope will be negotiated later, at your expense.

2. Media relationships: test them, don't trust the list

Every PR agency says it has strong media relationships. A list of outlets proves nothing; anyone can build one. What you are paying for is the ability to get a fair hearing from the right editor or journalist, and the judgment to know when a story is not worth pitching at all.

Ask questions that require specifics:

1. Which journalists covering our sector have you worked with in the last six months, and on what?
2. Show us a story you placed that was not a paid partnership. What was the angle, and why did it work?
3. Tell us about a pitch you advised a client not to send.

In a small market the media community is close-knit: editors know each other, and an agency that floods them with weak releases damages your name along with its own. In multilingual markets, also check which media the agency actually covers. Azerbaijani-, Russian-, English- and Turkish-language outlets each have their own editors, formats and expectations.

Be clear about paid placements too. If a "publication" is really a sponsored article, it should be labeled as such and priced separately. Mixing earned and paid coverage in one report makes results look better than they are.

3. Crisis capability: ask for the process, not the promise

You hope you will never need it, but crisis readiness is where good PR agencies earn their fee. A product problem, a viral complaint video, a leaked internal message: on Instagram and WhatsApp, a local issue can spread within hours.

Ask the agency to walk you through the first 24 hours of a crisis:

• Who is your contact outside working hours, and how fast do they respond?
• How do they verify facts before anything is said publicly?
• Who approves statements on your side, and how can that chain be shortened?
• Do they train your spokespeople before anything happens?

A strong agency will want to prepare in advance: a list of likely scenarios, holding statements, an approval tree and a contact sheet. If the answer is simply "we will handle it", with no process behind it, treat that as a warning.

4. Measurement: agree on success before you start

PR results have long been reported as piles of clippings and "advertising value equivalent" (AVE) figures, which multiply the size of coverage by advertising rates. The industry's own measurement body, AMEC, is direct about this in its Barcelona Principles 3.0: "AVEs are not the value of communication."

Ask the agency how it will measure the work on three levels:

• Outputs: what was produced and placed (releases, interviews, coverage in priority outlets).
• Outcomes: what changed for the audience (message pickup, share of voice against competitors, sentiment, search interest, inquiries).
• Impact: what changed for the organization (reputation, recruitment, sales leads, stakeholder support).

Agree on a small number of goals at the start, and on the format of the monthly report. If an agency cannot explain how it would show progress on your goals, it will report activity instead.

5. Chemistry: meet the people who will do the work

PR is a trust business. You will share bad news with this team before anyone else hears it, and they will speak for you to people you may never meet. So meet the people who will run your account, not only the founder who pitches.

Watch how they behave in the meeting:

• Do they ask about your business, or only talk about themselves?
• Do they disagree with you when you suggest something risky?
• Can they explain things simply, the way they would to a journalist?

Ask for two client references you can call, and ask those clients one question: "What happened the last time something went wrong?"

Making the decision

Do not choose on the pitch deck alone. Shortlist three agencies, give them the same brief and the same questions, and score each one on the five areas above. A small paid test project, such as a product launch, a round of interviews or a crisis simulation, will tell you more than any presentation. If you publish your brief on the platform, you can compare several agencies' responses side by side.

The right PR agency is the one that tells you what not to do, knows exactly who to call, and can show you, in measures you agreed on together, that the work made a difference.