What happens in your first 90 days with a PR agency?
Expect your first placements around month three, not month one. The first 60 to 90 days are a ramp: the agency builds your target media list, sharpens one story, and opens reporter conversations before pitching at scale. Judge those weeks by visible activity, because the coverage has not had time to land yet.
A healthy first quarter looks like this:
| Phase | What the agency does | What it needs from you |
|---|---|---|
| Weeks 1 to 4 | Onboarding, messaging, target media list | Your real story, your data, one named decision-maker |
| Weeks 5 to 8 | First pitches go out, relationships open | Fast approvals, a spokesperson, an open calendar |
| Weeks 9 to 12 | Pitches land, first placements, briefings | Show up for interviews, stay on message |
Two of those inputs only you can supply, and no agency can fake them:
- Raw material - a real launch, a funding round, a number, a customer outcome worth a reporter's time.
- Speed - responsiveness is the single best predictor of how an engagement goes, because a reporter on deadline will not wait two days for your quote.
The weeks 1 to 4 work is shared, not delegated. Your role in the messaging sprint is covered in the messaging-and-positioning page, and you should agree on success metrics before the ramp ends, which the goals-and-kpis page walks through.
Learn to tell a slow ramp from a stalled one. A slow ramp is quiet but visible: you can see the pitch log, the named reporters, the replies. For a sense of real volume, our team sends 7,000+ targeted pitches a year to 2,500+ reporters, and any agency working at that kind of scale can name the reporters on your list by week five. A stall is a summary deck with no names and no sends. By day 90, ask for the activity log and the first placements. If both are thin and nobody senior takes the call, escalate or leave.
Set these expectations in writing before you sign. Then the early quiet is exactly what the plan predicted, and you can hold the agency to the day-90 checkpoint instead of guessing at month two.