5 Tips for Choosing a B2B PR Agency

Key Takeaways

• Alignment with Your Needs: When selecting a B2B PR agency, it’s crucial to understand your own business goals and to choose an agency with experience in your specific industry and growth stage. Reviewing relevant case studies can help determine if the agency has successfully worked with businesses that share similar objectives.
• Experience of the Team: The experience level of the PR team matters. Ensure that the agency has seasoned professionals overseeing your account, ideally with 15-20 years of experience. An experienced team is better equipped to navigate media trends and execute effective strategies tailored to your business needs.
• Measuring Success and Budget Fit: Work with your PR agency to establish clear KPIs that align with your goals, such as sales impact or brand awareness. Additionally, ensure that your budget aligns with the agency’s client base; larger firms may not provide the attention and experience needed for smaller budgets, while mid-range agencies can offer a more consistent and engaged team.

Choosing a B2B PR agency can feel overwhelming. Promises sound impressive, but what really sets agencies apart is how well they understand you. It’s not just about pricing, it’s about partnership. Here are  five tips can help you find the right PR partner for your goals.

1. Do They Work With B2B Companies Like You?

Choosing a B2B PR agency means knowing who you are now and where you’re going. Where you’re headed may be more important than who you are now.  Your agency should understand not just your current position but your growth trajectory.

Ask for B2B PR examples or case studies. When you look at the case studies, look to see how they are like you, if they’re where you want to be – and if the growth measurements are ones you can identify with. Yes, you can be impressed by tier 1 coverage in outlets like Bloomberg, or TechCrunch, but dig deeper and look at the situation and the outcomes.

Tip: Every PR agency has an ideal client with whom they work best. Don’t be afraid to ask: who do you work best with? For example, here at Avaans Media, we’re very clear. We work with very ambitious and fast-growing companies; for us that typically means companies that are pre-IPO startups. Some agencies specialize in tech PR, and some niche into industries like AI PR, cleantech PR, or cannabis PR.   Some agencies prefer to work with publicly traded companies, some prefer to work with clients in a particular sector (for us, that’s emerging industries).

My personal advice to my entrepreneurial colleagues: choose a PR agency who has experience with companies that have the same goals as you.

 

2. What’s the Experience Level of Your Team?

Experience is everything in PR. An experienced team is skilled at scanning the horizons for the media trends, spot risks, and build opportunities faster.

Why It Matters

Many agencies pitch with their senior executives, but those leaders rarely touch day-to-day client work, and that wise exec is not the one solving your problems. Ask who will actually manage your account and how experienced they are.

I really believe one of the top reasons Avaans Media is a top-rated boutique PR Agency is because our team is executive-level experienced. Everyone on our team has a minimum of ten years of experience in PR, many of them with much more than that. As importantly, they can all discuss B2B media trends and their impact on your business; we’ve been through IPO PR, and our clients are better off for it.

Bottom Line

My advice to my colleagues: make sure your team includes oversight from someone with at least twenty years PR experience. Your day-to-day person might be more like 15-17 years of experience, but you want someone who has been through funding rounds, recessions, wins and failures who oversees the strategy.

3. How Will They Measure Success?

Measurement reveals whether your PR investment is paying off, and whether your agency is thinking big enough.

Setting KPIs That Matter

Collaborate with your agency on business-driven KPIs, not vanity metrics. These might include sales impact, inbound leads, website traffic from earned media, or time-to-decision reduction.

PR can absolutely influence major business outcomes. If your agency can’t connect media outcomes to real-world growth metrics, they may not be ambitious enough for you.

Open Communication is Key

Choosing a B2B PR agency that builds programs based on your goals is paramount, and for that, you need to be clear on your goals; and if you want to really maximize your investment, open the kimono a bit.

If your goals are sales-oriented, have your salespeople talk to your PR agency about the problems they face in the marketplace. If your goals are related to an IPO, then share with your PR agency more information about your timeline, your targets, and your concerns. A great B2B PR agency can help you avoid pitfalls. If you’re looking for more venture funding as a PR goal, then make sure your PR team knows that and can share their experiences with you.

Pro Tip: Hold your agency accountable to results, but give them access to the data they need to deliver.

4. B2B PR Pricing: Where Do You Fit In?

Yes, it’s essential to know your PR budget – but what’s equally important is to know the budgets of your agency’s clients.

Budget Alignment

This is one of those moments where bigger isn’t always better. For example, if your budget is under $175,000 annually, a boutique or mid-size firm is likely a better fit than a global agency.

Why? Because that global agency is likely to shoe-horn you into a PR team with little experience and a lot of turnover. But at a mid-range agency, you can expect a consistent, experienced, and highly engaged team for that budget.

And if you’re paying $5K/month at an agency, you simply aren’t paying enough. Agencies can’t do outstanding work for that budget; a freelancer can make it work, but a team of experienced, engaged, proactive PR executives can’t do the work needed for that budget.

Bottom line: When choosing a B2B PR agency, align your budget with the experience you’re looking for. You might not get the best for your team if you’re at the bottom of an agency’s scale. If you’re at the top of the scale, you can expect a white glove experience.

5. What’s the PR Plan?

One struggle we most commonly hear about hiring a PR firm is not knowing what you’re going to get. That’s true. The way most B2B PR agencies work is they provide you with a proposal about their program without having a firm grasp on the details of your business.

Avaans Media solves this issue with our unique strategy-based PR pricing. This enables you to know exactly what you’re going to get before you make a massive commitment to a PR agency. Because you should always know what success looks like before signing, and have a clear idea of how your PR plan will help your company grow.

Bottom-line advice: Get to the numbers fast. What does your PR agency realistically hope to accomplish?

Final Thought: Choose Experience and Alignment Over Hype

Choosing the right B2B PR agency isn’t just about who sounds best, it’s about who understands your business best.
When you find a partner who aligns with your vision, measures what matters, and brings seasoned insight, you’re setting your company up for lasting visibility and credibility.