It is perhaps one of the most common questions we are asked. Should I go the in-house route or use a consultancy? It’s pretty obvious why you might go the DIY route. Hiring your very own 100% committed member of staff seems a no-brainer. It seems cheaper and it’s easier to monitor what someone is doing when they are based in your company, and there are no confidentiality issues to worry about. The person will also be on tap, there at a moment’s notice. So why might you give up such economy and control, and use an agency? Here’s why…
advice
PR Agency Vs. In House
Date
Feb 20, 2025
Read Time
min read
Key differences between a PR agency and in house PR
Need the answer quickly? Here’s a top-level rundown of the main differences:
| PR agency | In house PR | |
|---|---|---|
| Experience & creativity | A whole team’s creativity and experience to draw on | One or two people’s expertise to draw on |
| Lateral thinking | Will likely offer a wider range of ideas & inspiration – drawn from working across a mix of markets, clients and campaigns | Can be less exposed to wider ideas, but may be more focused on your day-to-day business |
| Capabilities | Will likely offer additional skills & services e.g. social media, SEO, crisis and issues, media training, audience analysis | Can offer additional skills, but will depend on the individual and certain areas (e.g. media training) will still need to be bought in |
| Able to advise | Will likely have more sway with senior leadership | May be limited by business’s hierarchical structure |
| Focus | Will focus solely on their PR efforts | Can get overloaded with non-PR related tasks |
| Deliverables | KPIs will have to be delivered if the agency is to survive | May have KPIs but most won’t have the fear of ‘losing their job’ if they don’t deliver |
| Connections | Will likely offer a much wider network of potential contacts | Can offer a network of contacts, but will depend on the individual |
| Cost | Can vary hugely depending on the agency and the quality of service | Can also vary depending on seniority and expertise – but by the time you add on things like NI, holiday and sick pay, plus the tools they’ll need (below) an in house PR may cost more than a good agency |
| Access to tools | A good agency will have £30k-£40k worth of best of breed tools for things like social listening, media monitoring and audience analysis, plus media databases to draw on | The same tools will need to be bought separately to support the in house team – massively increasing the cost of doing PR in-house |
| Access to talent | A PR agency will give mid-sized companies access to world-class talent, which the company just couldn’t attract to work in house or would be too expensive to employ | Only the largest brands will have this kind of senior talent in their ranks |
Experience & creativity
With a PR agency you have the opportunity to draw on the thinking, and inspiration of a number of people not just one. In a good agency, these people will be at the peak of their PR game, many of them far more experienced than the person you can afford to employ in-house.
Lateral thinking
An agency, because they are handling a mix of companies, will come across a broader range of new ideas, opportunities and media. This isn’t a criticism of your in-house person, they will just not be exposed to such a mixture if they are purely focused, day-in-day-out, on your business.
Capabilities
You need your PR agency to be capable of deploying any of the communications tools at their disposal. You want all the skills under one roof – and we’d argue in the hands of the people who will be looking after your account. If your day-to-day team can’t do social or digital media and doesn’t understand PR’s impact on SEO they are not good enough for you.
Able to advise
The senior team in a company is much more likely to take the advice of an agency because they are paying for it. They are more likely to share their vision and business plan with the PR agency, ensuring the PR campaign is closely aligned to the company’s commercial trajectory. An in-house person, because they are within the hierarchical structure of their company, will often sadly not command the same respect, or receive the same candour from or access to the company’s directors.
Focus
If a company isn’t careful, the in-house person can be seen as a ‘spare pair of hands’ and become overloaded with ‘other’ non-PR tasks. This massively dilutes the focus and pace of the PR campaign. Whereas with an agency there will be no such diversions.
Connections
In our time we’ve introduced clients to potential business partners, investors, distributors, customers and so forth. This is because we are able to be ‘out there’ mixing with all sorts of people from different areas of business. That’s what good agencies can do – and it’s a brilliant tool for clients to harness.
Cost
If you are going the agency route you will be buying the time of good quality, experienced people. You will pay significantly for their services. However if a prospective agency appears much more interested in your PR budget than your business, alarm bells should be ringing as their priorities are all wrong!
A swift glance a PR job sites such as The Guardian, PR Week and Marketing Week will tell you that a good in house PR person isn’t cheap either. That’s before you add to their salary national insurance, pension and other perks. Plus if you are going the in-house route you will also need to buy in resources for them to use such as media monitoring services from companies such as Cision, plus media database tools like Gorkana. Suddenly the cost of a PR agency doesn’t seem such a big part of the equation.
Of course, we are not discounting the internal PR route all together. There are plenty of great PR people working in companies, and we are by no means diminishing what they do. They are a tremendous asset. Indeed no agency can work in isolation; to be working at its peak a PR agency needs to be interacting with a person within the client company who ‘gets’ PR. Equally there are plenty of terrible PR agencies that don’t deliver and that don’t deserve your attention.
However, to simply view the PR Agency vs in-house debate as a matter of budget is to not understand the potential of a really great agency.
If you are reviewing your PR why not call me, Louise on T: 01993 823011 or E: louise@energypr.co.uk
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