It’s not always easy for companies to figure out whether they should rely solely on their in-house public relations professionals for all of their public relations needs, or if they should hire an outside agency to do some of the work, and the ideal choice largely depends on businesses themselves. There are benefits to both options that companies should know about before making that decision.
Agency
One of the reasons why companies should hire an outside PR agency when it comes to their public relations needs is because agencies tend to have better, and even more, relationships with journalists and media outlets. This is mainly because agencies tend to work with multiple clients, which means they’re constantly in contact with various outlets and are able to form those relationships quickly, which isn’t something that a company can always do on its own, which tends to result in companies’ pitches to outlets getting ignored, while if the pitch was sent by an agency that the outlet is familiar with, the pitch would get opened up in the email, and even published. Additionally, in-house PR teams will have to conduct research on which outlets they should be reaching out to on behalf of the company, whereas agencies will already have that information and get to skip that step, and immediately reach out to the right outlets. Another reason why companies tend to choose to hire an agency is that they have too much work they already do, and they don’t have the resources to invest in creating a PR team in-house from scratch, which includes interviewing, recruiting, and training new people, while hoping that they’ll be able to generate the right results after such an investment. On the other hand, companies can work with a team of professionals outside of the business, where the only step they’d need to take is getting those professionals up to speed on the business and its goals.
In-house team
Plenty of companies also decide to forgo hiring an outside agency and create their own in-house public relations teams filled with PR professionals. It can be because the company believes that the in-house team can do a better job at reaching the company’s goals, simply because all of their time will be focused on the business and its PR efforts, compared to an outside agency that has to juggle multiple clients and campaigns. Another common reason why some businesses decide to create their own in-house PR teams is that the agencies that are available to them are outside of their budget, and that’s the only option they have. Some of the benefits that companies can get from working with an in-house public relations team is being able to work with a team of people that know everything they need to know about the company, and more, which is not something that outside agencies are able to do, as most often, they assign one person to be in charge of multiple clients.