Public Relations for Scale-ups: When to Build, When to Buy

Public relations for scale-ups is not a smaller version of enterprise PR. The stakes are different, the timelines are compressed, and the margin for wasted spend is almost zero. Done well, PR accelerates commercial momentum by building the kind of credibility that paid media cannot buy. Done badly, it burns budget, distracts leadership, and produces coverage that nobody in your sales cycle will ever read.

The companies that get it right treat PR as a commercial function, not a communications exercise. They know what they want it to do, they build the infrastructure to support it, and they measure it against outcomes that matter to the business, not column inches.

Why PR Fails at the Scale-up Stage

I have watched this pattern repeat across dozens of companies. A scale-up raises a Series A or B, the board starts asking about brand, and someone decides it is time to hire a PR agency. They brief the agency on what the company does, the agency pitches a retainer built around press releases and media relations, and three months later the team is sitting on a handful of trade mentions and wondering why nothing has changed in the pipeline.

The problem is rarely the agency. It is the brief. PR without a commercial objective is just content production with a distribution problem. Before you hire anyone, you need to answer three questions with genuine precision: what does this company need people to believe, who specifically needs to believe it, and what will they do differently if they believe it? If you cannot answer all three, you are not ready to run PR at scale.

There is a broader body of thinking on PR measurement and communications strategy in the PR & Communications hub on The Marketing Juice, which covers everything from framework selection to channel integration. It is worth reading alongside this piece if you are building a PR function from scratch.

What Does Good PR Infrastructure Look Like for a Scale-up?

Most scale-ups think about PR as an output problem. They need more coverage, more mentions, more noise. The ones that scale well think about it as an input problem first. Do we have the stories worth telling? Do we have the spokespeople who can tell them credibly? Do we have the content infrastructure to support and amplify what gets placed?

When I was growing the agency in Dublin, we went through a version of this ourselves. We had genuine proof points, a genuinely interesting positioning as a European hub with twenty nationalities on the floor, and a track record of results that most of our competitors could not match. But we were not packaging any of it in a way that external audiences could engage with. The stories existed. The infrastructure to tell them did not.

Building that infrastructure means four things working in parallel. First, a clear narrative architecture: what is the company’s position in the market, what does it stand against, and what is the specific point of view that makes it interesting to a journalist or a podcast host? Second, a content engine that produces material the PR function can use, whether that is data, research, founder commentary, or client stories. Third, a rapid response capability, because the best PR opportunities are often reactive and time-sensitive. Fourth, a measurement framework that connects coverage to something commercial, not just to impressions or domain authority.

Build In-house or Hire an Agency?

This is the question most scale-up marketing leaders spend too long agonising over. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you need PR to do in the next twelve months, not in principle.

If you need rapid access to media relationships in a specific vertical, a specialist agency will outperform an in-house hire almost every time in the short term. Journalists talk to people they know. A good agency brings a warm network that would take an in-house hire eighteen months to build. If you need deep institutional knowledge of your product, your market, and your customers, an in-house hire will outperform an agency almost every time. Agencies rotate account managers, lose context, and charge for time that is often spent catching up.

The model that works best at the scale-up stage, in my experience, is a small in-house function, typically one senior communications person, paired with a specialist agency on a defined scope. The in-house person owns the narrative, manages the agency, and connects PR to the rest of the marketing function. The agency provides media access, reactive speed, and specialist skills the in-house team does not have. Neither is trying to do the other’s job.

What does not work is a full-service agency retainer with no internal counterpart. The agency ends up making editorial decisions they are not qualified to make, the coverage drifts away from commercial relevance, and the relationship becomes a cost centre with no clear owner inside the business.

Founder Visibility: Asset or Distraction?

Founder PR is one of the most consistently mishandled elements of scale-up communications. The instinct is understandable. Founders are often the most compelling spokespeople a company has. They have the story, the conviction, and the credibility that comes from having built something real. But there is a difference between a founder who has a genuine point of view on their industry and a founder who wants to be visible.

The ones who build real profile do it by saying something specific. They pick a position in their market that is slightly uncomfortable, they defend it consistently, and they let the coverage build around the idea rather than around the company. Copyblogger has written well about this, noting that personal brand only works when it is built around a genuine perspective, not a curated persona. The principle applies directly to founder PR.

The founders who struggle with PR are the ones who want to talk about their funding rounds, their headcount growth, and their product roadmap. That information is interesting to investors. It is not interesting to journalists, and it is not interesting to the customers you are trying to reach. The question to ask before any founder media opportunity is: what will the reader believe about this market after reading this that they did not believe before? If the answer is nothing, the opportunity is not worth taking.

How Do You Connect PR to Pipeline?

This is where most scale-up PR programmes fall apart, and it is also where the most commercial value sits. The gap between a piece of coverage and a commercial outcome is not inevitable. It is a design problem.

I spent years sitting in agency reviews where clients would ask whether PR was working and the answer would be a media report showing coverage volume and estimated reach. That is not an answer. That is a deflection. The question is not whether people saw something. The question is whether it changed anything.

Connecting PR to pipeline requires three things. First, you need to be placing coverage in publications that your actual buyers read, not publications that look impressive in a media report. Second, you need a content pathway that takes someone from coverage to a deeper engagement, whether that is a piece of owned content, a newsletter, a tool, or a conversation. Third, you need to track whether people who have been exposed to your PR activity convert differently to those who have not. That last step is imperfect, but imperfect tracking is better than no tracking.

One practical approach is to treat major pieces of coverage as content assets rather than one-time events. A profile piece in a relevant trade publication can be repurposed into social content, referenced in sales conversations, included in outbound sequences, and used in pitch decks. The coverage itself is the starting point, not the end point. Tools like Buffer make it straightforward to systematise the amplification of earned media across owned channels, which is a step most scale-ups skip entirely.

Earned Media and Owned Content: Why You Need Both

There is a tendency in scale-up marketing to treat earned media and owned content as competing budget lines. Either you invest in PR and get third-party coverage, or you invest in content and build your own audience. The reality is that they are mutually reinforcing, and the companies that treat them as separate programmes consistently underperform those that integrate them.

Owned content does two things for a PR programme. It gives journalists something to reference when they are writing about your space. And it gives you a destination to send people who find you through coverage. A journalist who is considering writing about your company will look at your website, your blog, and your social presence before they decide whether you are worth their time. If what they find is thin, they will move on. If what they find is substantive, it validates the pitch and makes the story easier to write.

The reverse is also true. Earned media gives owned content distribution it cannot achieve on its own. A piece of coverage in a publication your audience trusts will drive more qualified traffic to your owned content than most paid campaigns. The compounding effect of building both simultaneously is significant, and it is one of the clearest competitive advantages a scale-up can build in its category.

Copyblogger’s perspective on content outsourcing is relevant here. The argument is that outsourcing content entirely disconnects it from the genuine expertise inside the business, which is the thing that makes it worth reading. The same principle applies to PR. The best scale-up communications programmes are built on real institutional knowledge, not on generic industry commentary produced at arm’s length.

The Measurement Problem Nobody Wants to Solve

PR measurement has always been uncomfortable territory. The industry spent decades hiding behind AVE, which is a metric so fundamentally broken that most serious practitioners stopped defending it years ago. The frameworks that replaced it, including the AMEC model and the Barcelona Principles, are more intellectually honest but require a level of discipline and commercial alignment that most scale-up PR programmes do not have.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years, and one of the things that experience clarified for me is how rarely communications programmes are built with a clear theory of change. The best entries could articulate precisely what they needed people to think, feel, or do differently, and they could show evidence that the programme had achieved it. Most PR programmes cannot do that, not because the data does not exist, but because nobody asked the question clearly enough at the start.

For a scale-up, the practical approach to PR measurement is to pick two or three metrics that are directly connected to commercial outcomes and track them consistently. Share of voice in target publications, inbound enquiry rate from target verticals, and sales cycle length for accounts that have had PR exposure versus those that have not. None of these are perfect. All of them are more useful than a media report that tells you how many people theoretically could have seen your coverage.

There is more detailed thinking on PR measurement frameworks and how to apply them practically in the PR & Communications section of The Marketing Juice, including coverage of the AMEC framework and how to adapt it for businesses that do not have enterprise-level measurement infrastructure.

When Is a Scale-up Ready for a Serious PR Programme?

The honest answer is later than most scale-ups think. The signals that you are ready are not about funding stage or headcount. They are about commercial clarity and internal capability.

You are ready when you can articulate a specific commercial objective that PR can contribute to, when you have at least one spokesperson who has a genuine point of view and the availability to act on media opportunities quickly, when you have owned content that gives journalists something to reference and gives readers somewhere to go, and when you have someone inside the business who can own the agency relationship and connect PR activity to commercial outcomes.

You are not ready when you are doing PR because a board member asked about brand, because a competitor got a piece of coverage you envied, or because you have budget left at the end of a quarter. Those are the wrong reasons to start a PR programme, and they produce the wrong results.

The scale-ups that build genuine PR momentum are the ones that treat it as a long game with short-term proof points. They invest in the narrative before they invest in the distribution. They build the infrastructure before they hire the agency. And they measure against outcomes that matter to the business, not against outputs that look good in a monthly report.

PR is not complicated. But it does require the same commercial discipline you would apply to any other investment. The companies that treat it as a communications exercise will get communications results. The companies that treat it as a commercial function will get commercial results.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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