Hiring a PR firm is a bigger decision than most people realize—and a more nuanced one. It’s not just about who has the flashiest client roster or the most confident pitch. It’s about finding an agency that genuinely understands what your business needs, has the skills to deliver it, and will still be a good partner six months in when the honeymoon phase is over.
The smartest way to cut through the noise? Ask the right questions. Not the softball questions that every agency has polished answers for—but the ones that reveal how they actually operate, what they prioritize, and whether they can handle the full spectrum of what modern PR demands.
Below, we’ve compiled the most common questions people ask when evaluating PR firms, along with what to look for in the answers. Use this as your vetting guide.
What PR Services Does Your Agency Actually Provide?
This sounds basic, but it’s where a lot of businesses get tripped up. “PR” can mean a hundred different things depending on who you’re talking to. Some agencies specialize exclusively in media relations. Others are content shops masquerading as PR firms. Still others offer a full suite of services—earned media, thought leadership, crisis communications, social media strategy, and reputation management—under one roof.
Before you sign anything, get a concrete list of what the agency will and won’t do. Will they write blog content and white papers for your website? Handle your LinkedIn presence? Pitch stories to journalists on your behalf? Monitor the media for coverage? The scope varies widely, and vague answers here are a red flag.
What you want is a firm that can articulate its services clearly—and one whose capabilities align with your actual goals. If you need someone to get you placed in trade publications and you’re talking to an agency whose strength is Instagram management, that’s a mismatch worth catching early.
What Kind of Campaign Do You Envision for Our Business—and What Challenges Do You Anticipate?
This question does double duty: it tells you whether the agency did its homework before the pitch, and it gives you a window into how they think strategically. Any firm worth hiring should come to the conversation having already researched your business, your industry, your competitors, and the media landscape around your space.
You’re not expecting a fully developed campaign plan on day one. But you should expect genuine engagement—curiosity about your goals, some early thinking about angles and opportunities, and an honest acknowledgment of the obstacles involved. Agencies that only talk about what’s possible and never mention what’s hard tend to overpromise.
Pay attention to how they listen, too. Do they ask questions about your business, or do they spend the meeting talking about themselves? A firm that asks smart questions is far more valuable than one that arrives with a pre-packaged pitch that could apply to any client.
How Strong Are Your Media Relationships, and What Does Your Earned Media Track Record Look Like?
Media relations is one of the core functions of PR—and one of the hardest things to fake. Ask the agency to walk you through specific examples of earned media coverage they’ve secured for clients. Not just the logos. The actual placements: which outlet, what the story was, how they got it there.
Dig into whether that coverage was truly earned or primarily pay-for-play. Some outlets, particularly sponsored content platforms, will publish almost anything for a fee. That’s not the same as getting a journalist to write about your company because the story is compelling. Earned media carries far more credibility—and it’s harder to get, which is exactly why it matters.
A firm with genuine media relationships knows how to craft a pitch that serves the journalist’s audience, not just the client’s ego. Find out whether they have established contacts at national, regional, and trade outlets relevant to your industry—and whether those relationships are current or names on a dusty spreadsheet.
How Does Your Agency Approach Content Creation?
Content sits at the intersection of PR and SEO—and the firms that understand this tend to be the most effective. A well-placed op-ed, a well-written thought leadership piece, a blog post that ranks well and gets read by the right people—these all require the same underlying skill: the ability to tell a story that serves a specific audience.
Ask what kinds of content the agency produces and how they distribute it. Do they write original articles and bylines that get placed in industry publications? Can they produce long-form content for your site that builds topical authority? Will they ghostwrite for your executives? Or does their content work stop at short-form social posts?
The more platforms your message reaches—and the more formats it takes—the stronger your overall presence. An agency that thinks about content strategically, across channels and over time, is going to deliver far more value than one that treats it as an afterthought.
How Do You Use Social Media as Part of a PR Strategy?
Social media isn’t just a distribution channel—it’s where public perception gets shaped in real time. A PR firm that doesn’t have a sophisticated understanding of social media is operating with a significant blind spot.
Ask the agency to describe how they’ve used specific social platforms to achieve PR goals for clients. What did they do? What happened? Ask for metrics—reach, engagement, impressions, sentiment shifts. Agencies that have done this well will have stories to tell. Agencies that haven’t will give you generalities.
Also worth exploring: do they understand the differences between platforms, not just in audience demographics, but in how content performs? The way a story travels on LinkedIn is completely different from how it moves on X (formerly Twitter) or spreads through Instagram. Platform-specific fluency matters.
What Is Your Experience with Crisis Communications?
Nobody calls a PR firm during a crisis and then discovers they’ve never handled one before. By that point, it’s too late. This is why crisis communications experience needs to be part of the hiring conversation—before anything goes wrong.
Ask directly: what crises have they managed, and how? What was the situation, what did they do, and what was the outcome? A firm with real crisis experience won’t be shy about this. They know the value of having been tested under pressure, and they’ll be able to speak to it concretely.
Crisis situations move fast. Social media backlash, misinformation, reputational attacks, employee misconduct stories—these don’t wait for business hours, and they don’t give you time to get up to speed. Having a firm that has already developed a crisis response framework, and can customize it for your organization, is the kind of preparation that looks unnecessary until the moment it saves you.
Also ask about their familiarity with cancel culture dynamics and public boycotts. These situations have their own logic, and agencies without experience in them can escalate rather than contain.
How Do You Handle Online Reputation Management?
Your reputation online is never fully static. Reviews, social media posts, forum discussions, news articles—all of it accumulates and shapes how potential clients, partners, and media perceive you. When something negative surfaces, the response window is narrow.
Ask the agency whether they actively monitor online mentions for clients, and how. Do they use listening tools to catch problems early? What’s their process when something damaging appears? Can they share a case study of how they helped a client recover from a reputational hit?
Good reputation management is proactive, not just reactive. The best firms build up a body of positive, credible content around a brand so that when something negative appears, it doesn’t dominate the narrative. That means consistent media presence, strong third-party coverage, and an active content strategy—all working together.
A Few More Questions Worth Asking
Depending on your situation, these additional questions can help sharpen your evaluation:
- Who specifically will be working on our account? Senior-level people often win the business; junior staff sometimes run the account. Know who you’re actually getting.
- How do you measure success? PR metrics have evolved. Agencies that still lead with “impressions” as their primary KPI are often covering for a lack of more meaningful measurement.
- Can we speak with current or former clients? References matter. An agency confident in its work will welcome this.
- What does the contract look like, and what’s the exit process? Understanding the terms before you’re locked in is basic due diligence—but it’s surprising how often people skip this.
- Do you have experience in our specific industry? Industry familiarity isn’t always essential, but for highly specialized fields, it can significantly shorten the learning curve.
The Bottom Line on Hiring a PR Firm
The right PR firm doesn’t just manage your messaging—it becomes an extension of your team, one that thinks strategically about your reputation and acts quickly when circumstances demand it. That’s a high bar, and not every agency clears it.
Take the evaluation seriously. Go beyond the polished pitch deck. Dig into the specifics—the media placements they’ve actually secured, the crises they’ve actually navigated, the results they can point to with real numbers. The answers will tell you a lot about whether an agency has the depth to deliver, or whether they’re better at selling their services than performing them.
At Red Banyan, we bring experience across both proactive PR and crisis communications—which means we’re built to shape narratives before problems arise, not just respond after the fact. If you’re weighing your options, we’re happy to have a candid conversation about what your business actually needs and whether we’re the right fit.
