What Does a PR Agency Do? Services, Team Roles and How Agencies Work

What is a public relations firm? A PR agency is a team of communications specialists you hire to shape what people hear, read and believe about your brand, mainly through channels you do not pay to control. The Chartered Institute of Public Relations defines PR as "the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you", and it is that third part, what others say, that a PR agency exists to influence. In practice that means earning media coverage, running campaigns, managing social channels, producing content, preparing spokespeople and protecting reputation when something goes wrong.

We have written this from our own experience running a 25 to 28 person integrated agency in Leeds, where about 60% of our work is consumer PR, so the examples lean towards food, drink and retail brands. The principles apply equally to B2B.

What does a PR agency do? The core services explained

Most PR agencies sell some combination of the services below. The mix varies: a traditional media relations firm will focus on the first three, a full-service communications agency will cover all of them from one team.

Press office and media relations

The press office is the engine room of most PR retainers. It covers writing and distributing press releases, pitching stories and features to journalists, fielding inbound media enquiries, securing expert commentary for your spokespeople, and keeping a running log of coverage. A good media relations team also does the unglamorous groundwork: maintaining accurate media lists, knowing which editors cover which beats, and understanding lead times so seasonal pitches land while editors are still planning, often months ahead of publication.

Campaigns and creative activations

Beyond the steady drumbeat of the press office, agencies plan and deliver campaigns: a research-led story, a stunt, a product launch, a seasonal push. For a consumer brand, campaigns are usually tied to sales and listings. Our BBQ season campaign for Primula combined national PR, TikTok-first creators and a partnership with @Temp_Tation, and delivered 137 pieces of coverage, 20+ national pieces and a national Morrisons listing. Separately, our press office work on four new Primula flavours secured 30+ pieces of product-placement coverage, including The Grocer and the Daily Express, and supported a Morrisons listing online and in stores nationwide.

Digital PR

Digital PR is media relations with a search objective. The team creates data stories, surveys, tools and expert content designed to earn links from authoritative online publications, which supports organic rankings, referral traffic and, increasingly, how AI assistants describe your brand. We now track what ChatGPT and Perplexity say about client brands as part of this work.

Social media and influencer marketing

Many agencies now run social media management alongside press work: strategy, content creation, community management and social listening. Influencer marketing sits next to it: mapping creators, negotiating contracts, briefing, managing content approvals and tracking results through links and codes. We run press and creator activity as one campaign against a single set of objectives rather than two parallel workstreams, because the story is usually the same and the audiences overlap.

Content, video and creative

Stories need assets. Content marketing covers everything from guides and whitepapers to podcasts and website copy. Some agencies outsource photography, design and video; others, including us, keep video production in-house so a launch film, a social cut and a broadcast-ready clip come from the same shoot.

Crisis communications and reputation management

Crisis communications has two halves. Preparation means a crisis handbook, scenario testing, holding statements drafted in advance and trained spokespeople. Response means managing journalists and social channels in real time, issuing corrections, briefing stakeholders and rebuilding trust afterwards. Our Reputation Guardian programme covers both halves: stakeholder and risk mapping, issues planning, crisis communications, spokesperson training and monitoring dashboards. What a reputable agency cannot do is make negative articles disappear from Google; that is a legal or search matter, not a PR one.

Media training

Media training prepares your executives for TV, radio, podcast and print interviews, including hostile ones. Expect message development, filmed mock interviews with playback, and bridging techniques for staying on message under pressure. The best sessions involve working journalists, not just agency staff.

Thought leadership, events and reactive PR

Rounding out the list: thought leadership (executive positioning, speaking slots, opinion pieces), event PR (launches, pop-ups, press days) and reactive PR or newsjacking, where the team monitors the news daily and gets your expert into a breaking story within hours.

Who sits in a PR team? Roles and responsibilities

The phrase "PR team" means slightly different things in-house and at an agency. In-house, it is the communications function of a single organisation. At an agency, it is the account team assigned to your business, drawn from the wider agency, plus specialists who come in as needed. Here is who you can expect to meet and what each person actually does.

Experience bands are indicative; titles and thresholds vary between agencies, which is one reason to ask who exactly is on your team. In our own team, for example, Chris Norton, our founder and managing director, personally leads crisis work; Will Ockenden, a director, specialises in social media, online crisis management and training; Vicki Murphy heads client services across four account directors; and Andy Ireland runs in-house video production. That mix is what lets one account team pull in press, social, creator and video skills without subcontracting.

Two titles that cause confusion. A public relations strategist is normally a senior person (account director level or above) who sets the direction of the programme rather than executing it. A PR rep is the American term for whoever represents you to the media day to day; in the UK that is usually your account manager or senior account executive.

Whatever the title, a public relations professional's duties and responsibilities fall into five buckets: understanding your audiences and the media that reach them, creating stories and assets, placing those stories with journalists, creators and on owned channels, protecting reputation, and measuring what changed. Ask any agency how those five are split across the team you will actually get, and how much of the senior time in the proposal survives into month three.

How PR agencies are structured

Agencies tend to organise in one of two ways, and plenty blend them.

The account team model. Each client gets a dedicated pyramid: a director overseeing, a manager running the account, one or two executives doing the bulk of the work. This gives you consistency and deep brand knowledge. The risk is that the team you are sold at pitch stage is not the team you get, so ask for named people in the contract.

The hub-and-spoke model. A core account team draws on specialist hubs (digital PR, social, creative, video, insight) as the brief requires. This is the integrated model. At Prohibition, PR, social, content, creative and video sit in-house under one roof, so one creative idea can be adapted across press, creators, social and video without being rebriefed to three suppliers. The thing to check is whether the specialists are genuinely in-house or white-labelled freelancers.

Commercially, the arrangements you will come across are: a monthly retainer (a fixed number of days or hours for an ongoing press office and campaign programme), a project fee (a launch, a campaign, a crisis) or ad hoc consultancy (senior time by the day). Retainers suit brands that need always-on media presence; projects suit a specific moment like a product launch. We have written more about engagement models and shortlist questions in our buyer's guide to working with a PR agency.

What a typical month looks like

On one of our consumer retainers the rhythm is: objectives and KPIs agreed and tracking set up before anything is pitched; a regular planning session with the account manager looking at the news calendar, product dates and seasonal hooks; proactive stories sold in; daily news monitoring for reactive opportunities; creator and social activity running alongside; and a monthly report built from coverage logs, social and web analytics, client sales data, sentiment and share of voice. The process follows what we call Create, Engage, Convert: audience insight and a defined business challenge first, then creative activation across channels, then tracking against the KPIs that were agreed up front. Convert does not only mean ecommerce sales; for a public sector client it might be sign-ups or changed behaviour, for a food brand a retail listing.

How agencies measure what they do

This is where agencies differ most, and where you should push hardest. Coverage volume and "advertising value equivalent" tell you little. The AMEC Integrated Evaluation Framework, which we use in-house through our proINSIGHTS tool, separates outputs (coverage, reach), out-takes (engagement, message recall), outcomes (visits, enquiries, applications) and impact (sales, reputation). It means setting up tracking before a campaign starts. Our PR measurement and evaluation page shows what that looks like in practice, including an 8% sales uplift credited to PR for Cartwright & Butler and a 34% rise in scholarship applications for the Martingale Foundation.

PR consultant vs PR agency: which do you need?

Public relations consulting covers everything from a sole freelancer to a boutique consultancy of three or four senior people. The differences from an agency are practical rather than philosophical.

A sensible rule: if you need a plan and a sounding board, hire a consultant. If you need the plan delivered across several channels, month after month, hire an agency. Some brands do both, with a consultant sitting client-side and briefing the agency.

PR agency, communications agency or marketing communications agency?

The labels overlap and the industry is loose with them. A PR agency traditionally leads with earned media. A communications agency usually signals a broader remit: internal communications, stakeholder and public affairs work, corporate messaging and often social and content too. A marketing communications agency leans further towards the marketing side, adding advertising, design and campaign production. An integrated agency deliberately combines PR, social, content, creative and video so that one idea is planned and measured across all of them. In reality, judge the agency by its case studies and the people on your team, not by the word on the door.

Do you need a PR agency? Seven signs a business is ready

1. You have a story and nobody is telling it. A launch, a listing, a founder with a point of view, a product that outperforms. If competitors with weaker products get more coverage, that is a PR gap.
2. Your marketing team is already at capacity. Press office work is relentless and needs journalist relationships that take years to build. Bolting it onto an in-house social manager's job rarely works.
3. You rely almost entirely on paid channels. Earned coverage and creator content add third-party credibility that ads cannot buy, and the links and mentions they generate support search visibility.
4. Retail buyers, investors or partners are asking "who are you?" Third-party credibility shortens those conversations. Our work with Better Eggs supported the brand from challenger launch to major retail presence and a finalist place at The Grocer Gold Awards.
5. You are entering a new market or category. Awareness has to be built before demand can be captured.
6. Something could go wrong and you have no plan. Product recall, a viral complaint, a data incident, a regulatory issue. If the first time you think about a holding statement is the day you need one, you are late.
7. You are being talked about and cannot see it. If you do not know what the press, social media or AI assistants are saying about your brand, you are not managing your reputation; it is managing you.

Companies that do not yet need an agency are usually those without a clear objective. "We want to be in the press" is not a brief. "We need to secure a second major retailer listing for our new range in the next six months" is, and an agency can plan backwards from it.

What a PR agency should do for you: questions to ask before hiring

• Who will actually work on my account, and what proportion of senior time is in the fee?
• Which services are genuinely in-house and which are subcontracted?
• Show me a campaign that moved a business metric, not just a coverage count, and how it was measured.
• Show me one that did not fully work, and what you learned. (One of our published case studies, a research-led Primula campaign, is open about missing its total coverage and backlink targets despite seven gold-tier national pieces.)
• How do you handle a crisis call at 9pm on a Saturday?
• Can you support activity outside the UK? We are a member of the Worldcom Public Relations Group, which lets us bring in partner agencies for international work while remaining an independent agency.
• What does the first 90 days look like, and when should I expect results?

If you are weighing up one integrated team against several specialist suppliers, we have set out the trade-offs separately.

Frequently asked questions

What does a PR and communications agency do?

A PR and communications agency manages how an organisation is perceived by its audiences: customers, media, employees, investors, regulators and the public. Day to day that means running a press office, planning and delivering campaigns, earning media coverage and online links, managing social media and creator partnerships, producing content and video, training spokespeople and handling crises. The best ones tie all of that to a business objective, such as sales, listings, applications or trust, and measure against it.

What is a PR team?

A PR team is the group of people responsible for an organisation's reputation and media presence. In-house, it is the communications department. At an agency, it is the account team assigned to a client, typically an account director setting strategy, an account manager running the programme and one or more account executives delivering it, supported by specialists in digital PR, social, content and creative.

What is a PR consultant?

A PR consultant is an individual public relations professional, usually senior and often freelance, who advises on and sometimes delivers communications work for a client. Consultants suit brands that need strategy and counsel more than day-to-day capacity. Agencies suit brands that need sustained, multi-channel delivery.

How long does it take for PR to show results?

Reactive commentary and social activity can land within days. Long-lead monthly titles plan features months ahead, so print coverage takes longer. Measurable business impact, such as a retail listing or a sales uplift, needs a sustained programme; our Launch Ignition programme, for example, reports across the first three to six months after a launch, and we set tracking up before the first story goes out so that impact can be attributed.

How much of my own time does a PR agency need?

Expect regular catch-ups, quick turnaround on approvals so reactive opportunities are not missed, access to product samples, data and spokespeople, and a monthly review of results. The agencies that deliver most are the ones whose clients treat them as part of the team rather than a supplier.

If you would like to talk through whether your brand is ready for PR support, and what a programme would look like, our PR services page explains how we scope an engagement.