If you’re wondering how to find a Digital PR consultant to get press coverage for your startup, you've come to the right place. Whether you're looking for a B2B tech PR specialist or someone to help with travel PR, hiring the right public relations person to handle your project can be tough.

Who doesn't want a robust digital marketing outreach program with SEO, content marketing, digital PR, and social media strategy? 

But instead of diving in all at once or hiring a team of PR and SEO consultants, it’s critical to prioritize from the get-go. 

Here to help you ask the right questions and hire the right PR agency is Jay Baer, Founder of Convince & Convert, hall of fame marketing and customer experience keynote speaker, and author of 6 best-selling books, including Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is About Help, not Hype.

Jay has years of experience creating winning marketing strategies, much of which was spent in agencies. 

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In our recent interview, he shared why companies shouldn’t hire a one-stop-shop agency, the important things you need to know and have before hiring, and one major red flag to look out for before you hire a PR agency for your startup.

Knowing if you need to hire a PR agency, a digital marketing consultant, a PPC agency -- or all the above

As a company, you need to determine the business objectives you want to achieve and make sure you are seeking out the right partner. Jay was able to provide some great explanations to help you match outcomes with the right type of content agency.

So, let’s look at the first question I often see come up when discussing PR for startups. Is it better to hire a digital marketing agency who can do some PR or to hire a PR agency that can do some digital marketing?

If you want an end-to-end solution, a digital agency may be the best bet.

However, if you accept the premise that public relations is about influencing the public and incentivizing behavior change -- which trails belief change -- an all-in-one approach probably won’t cut it.

Though there are digital marketing consultants and agencies that know digital public relations, there aren’t many digital firms that do it well.

Really, if you want to do both you do need to hire both.

You need to separate these efforts and hire for individual outcomes, instead of thinking about PR and digital marketing as two sides of the same coin.

When you’re looking for earned media, you are looking to hire a PR firm.

When you’re looking for shared media or an owned media strategy, you should be looking to hire a digital marketing consultant or agency.

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You may then be asking: Is it better to hire a PPC firm that does organic, or an organic marketing agency that can do PPC?

Not surprisingly, Jay’s response was much the same here.

You don’t want to lose sight of the fact that PPC is a media buy. And organic content is not that.

“Are you looking to achieve your goals by spending money (PPC) or creating content (organic)? Both can get you there, but you have to choose. The idea that organic and paid are very closely related is also misguided,” said Jay.

How to know if a particular PR agency will be worth the investment

The questions you could ask an agency before hiring them run the gamut from,