The best way to choose a PR agency in St. Louis is to ask fewer questions about awards and more questions about how the work actually gets done: who stays on your account, how deep their crisis experience really goes, whether they can produce video in-house, and how well they know the local reporters you want to reach. Many companies skip these questions and regret it later.
St. Louis has an unusually dense communications market for a mid-sized city. You have your pick of firms, from large global shops to boutique specialists. That density is good for buyers, but it also makes evaluation harder. Everyone has a nice deck. Everyone claims to have the right strategy. The differences that matter show up in the questions most companies don’t ask.
Here is the list I would use if I were sitting on your side of the table.
1. Who will actually work on my account, and will they stay?
Agencies win business with senior people and staff the work with junior people. That is the oldest bait-and-switch in the industry. Ask directly: who is on my day-to-day team, what is their experience, and how long have they been at the firm?
Team continuity is a fair gauge for whether an agency is a good place to work. High turnover means you will re-explain your business every few months to a new person. In a relationship built on trust and institutional knowledge, that is expensive.
Ask to meet the people who will do the work, not just the pitch team. Ask how they handle coverage when someone leaves. A confident agency answers this plainly.
2. How deep is your crisis experience, really?
Every firm lists crisis communications on the services page. Very few have actually stood in the fire at 11 p.m. with a client’s reputation on the line. There is a difference between writing a holding statement and managing a live, fast-moving situation with reporters, employees, and regulators all pulling at once.
Ask for specifics. What kinds of crises have you managed? What was your role in the room? How fast did you move? What did you get wrong and learn from?
Also ask what they think you should do *before* anything happens. The good answer involves preparation, not just response. We wrote about why in Do You Need a Crisis Communications Plan Before a Crisis?, and the short version is yes, you build the plan when things are calm, not when the phone is ringing.
3. Can you produce video in-house, or do you outsource it?
This one gets overlooked constantly, and it matters more every year. Communication is increasingly visual. Thought leadership, executive positioning, social content, and media pitches all lean on video now.
Many PR firms subcontract video, which adds cost, slows timelines, and creates a gap between the message strategy and the production. When the same team owns both the messaging and the camera, the work is tighter and faster.
Ask: do you have your own production capability? Can you shoot, edit, and repurpose content across platforms? A single shoot should feed TV, social, web, and internal channels. We break down the logic in How to Maximize Your Organization’s Video Content and in Thought Leadership Video: How CEOs Use Video to Build Authority.
If video is an afterthought for the agency, it will be an afterthought for your brand.
4. Do you actually know the St. Louis media landscape?
A national firm might have impressive logos and no idea who covers business at the Post-Dispatch or which producer books guests at the local TV and radio stations. An out of the loop firm Google searches the hot local podcast, a solid local shop has a relationship with the podcaster. Regional media relationships are earned over years, and they are worth a lot when you need a story placed.
Ask: which St. Louis outlets and reporters do you work with regularly? When was the last time you placed a story locally? How do you think about earned media now that newsrooms are smaller?
That last part matters. Local news has changed dramatically, and any agency worth hiring should understand the shift. Our team has written about it in What is happening to local news? A story decades in the making. The firms that get results today know how thin newsrooms have become and how to earn attention anyway.
5. Have you run advocacy or issue campaigns?
If your work touches public policy, community stakeholders, or a contested issue, you need a firm that has run advocacy campaigns, not just product publicity. Advocacy work requires coalition thinking, message discipline across audiences, and the patience to build support over time.
Ask how they approach a campaign where the goal is to move opinion, not just generate coverage. Ask how they measure progress when the win is a vote or a policy change rather than a press hit.
6. How do you measure success, and how do you report it?
Weak agencies count clips. Good agencies tie the work to business outcomes: awareness in the right audiences, share of voice, message pull-through, leads, reputation shifts. Ask what a monthly report looks like and what you will actually learn from it.
Be suspicious of anyone who promises to make anything “go viral.” Attention spikes are not a strategy. As our team put it in Everyone Wants To Go Viral. Few Want To Be Consistent, sustainable results come from showing up consistently, not from chasing one big moment.
7. How do you use AI, and how do you keep the work human?
AI is now part of every serious communications shop, whether or not they admit it. Ask how the firm uses it, and just as important, how they keep quality and judgment in human hands. The answer tells you whether they are thoughtful operators or just cutting corners. A firm’s use of the tool also needs to work with your own beliefs about it. There are a lot of views on AI and you need to be in sync with your partners about its use.
A simple way to compare firms
When you have your finalists, score each one honestly:
- Team: Are the people doing the work senior enough and stable?
- Crisis depth: Real experience or a line on a slide?
- Video: In-house or bolted on?
- Local relationships: Do they know St. Louis media by name?
- Advocacy: Can they move opinion, not just place stories?
- Measurement: Do they report outcomes or activity?
- Fit: Do you trust them in the room when things go wrong?
The firm that answers all of these cleanly is the one that will still be delivering value in year three.
Ready to compare us against your list?
We publish this guide because we are confident answering every question it poses. If you are evaluating PR agencies in St. Louis, put us on your list and ask us these questions directly. Schedule a discovery conversation with Chemistry and see how we answer.
