The Cost of Digital PR: In-House vs Agency

We often hear of digital PR experts going “in-house” or clients attempting to recreate a mini digital PR agency within their own company. This isn’t without good reason! Having an internal team look after your digital PR needs can be really beneficial:

Faster sign-off & input

Direct access to stakeholders means quicker approvals and expert quotes.

Always on-brand

Your team lives and breathes your tone, voice and messaging.

Tightly aligned with business goals

Campaigns can support internal priorities and long-term vision more closely

Full creative control

You own the media lists, campaign angles, and outreach strategy.

So, why would you want to outsource this to an agency?

In-house vs agency: An overview

We’ve summarised some of the factors you may want to consider when deciding whether to go in-house or use an agency for your digital PR services.

Factor	In-house	Agency
Specialist Skills Access	❌ Hard (and expensive) to hire for data, design, outreach, ideation, native language speakers etc.	✅ Full team of seasoned specialists across campaigns
Scalability	❌ Limited by headcount and capacity	✅ Easily scale up/down depending on goals and seasons
Campaign Improvement	❌ Smaller sample size means limited learning loops	✅ Runs dozens of campaigns weekly across industries, applying learnings in real-time
Reactive PR Capabilities	❌ Often lacks bandwidth to act on breaking news	✅ Always-on teams ready to jump on newsjacking and trending topics
Campaign velocity	✅ Faster internal approvals and stakeholder access	❌ May require brief development and alignment phases at the start (although velocity will then be much faster than in-house after this phase)
Tooling & Tech Stack	❌ High upfront costs for software (e.g. Muck Rack, BuzzStream, Ahrefs)	✅ Access to premium tools is included in monthly fee
Media Relationships	❌ Takes time to build, often limited to a few verticals	✅ Established network across multiple sectors and publications
Cost Efficiency	❌ High initial cost (salaries, overheads, recruitment, software)	✅ Lower upfront cost, especially for smaller/lean teams
Brand & Product Understanding	✅ Deep, embedded knowledge of brand voice, tone, and culture	❌ Requires detailed onboarding, brand ‘immersion’and collaboration
Bench Strength & Redundancy	❌ One person off sick can pause an entire campaign	✅ Multiple specialists available – no delays due to absences or leave
Alignment with Business Goals	✅ Digital PR can tightly integrate with internal OKRs and vision	❌ Can align, but may lack access to sensitive strategy
Cross-Channel Integration	✅ Easier to align with internal SEO, content, and brand marketing	❌ Requires clear briefing to sync with other channels
Performance Confidence	❌ May lack benchmarking or data-driven reporting	✅ Data-backed forecasting, reporting, and guaranteed link outcomes
Content Quality & Creativity	❌ May be limited by internal bandwidth or experience	✅ Proven creative formats, campaign ideation systems, and high editorial standards
Control Over Campaigns	✅ 100% control over every aspect	❌ Shared responsibility - requires strong communication
Creative Innovation	❌ May lean on familiar formats and internal bias	✅ Constant exposure to industry trends and creative formats from a broad client base

Find out how our Digital PR experts can start building brand authority for you today.

How much does building an internal Digital PR team cost?

The “cost efficiency” line in the table above may be of particular interest to business owners.

Agency digital PR packages ARE an investment. But when you break down the true cost of digital PR, it remains much better value for money than starting your own digital PR team from scratch.

To match the scale, quality, and speed of campaigns delivered by a specialist agency, you’ll need more than just a digital PR Executive.

Here’s the minimum viable team and tools we suggest you’d need to run effective, always-on digital PR.

Your baseline internal team

A recent survey by Superlinks found the most popular skills that companies needed in order to be successful in digital PR:

Unsurprisingly, no one person can possibly be an expert in all the skills needed to execute a successful digital PR campaign. We suggest a minimum team of around 6 professionals:

Role	Typical Salary Range
Digital PR Strategist	£45,000 – £60,000
Outreach Specialist	£30,000 – £40,000
Data Analyst	£38,000 – £50,000
Copywriter	£30,000 – £40,000
Graphic Designer	£35,000 – £45,000
SEO & Link Analyst	£40,000 – £55,000

Total salaries: £215,000 – £290,000 per year

Must-have tools and subscriptions

Our recent digital PR statistics research suggests that 83% of digital PR pros rely on media databases to find journalists.

We’ve listed just a few you will need in order to manage your campaigns, outreach them, and track their performance.

Tool	Estimated Annual Cost for 1 Seat
Media database (e.g. Muck Rack)	£8,000
Link tracking (e.g. Ahrefs)	£2,400
Outreach software (e.g. BuzzStream)	£4,000
Project management (e.g. ClickUp)	£500

Tool stack total: Around £15,000 per year for one user

uSERP recently conducted a survey and discovered the following to be the tools most commonly used among digital PR professionals for link building.

A subscription to most of these, however, would be included in any reputable digital PR agency’s pricing.

Hidden costs

Of course, there are other factors to consider here too, such as regular team upskilling and training, attending industry conferences and events, and even the cost of replacing staff when they choose to leave.

Item	Estimated Cost
National Insurance, pensions, and benefits	£100k – £150k
Recruitment, onboarding, and HR admin	£30k – £50k
Team training and conferences	£10k – £20k
Attrition and rehiring costs	Variable… but a lot!

Estimated all-in cost of an in-house digital PR team: £300,000 – £450,000+ per year

The benefits of working with a digital PR agency

Let’s compare this figure to the cost of hiring an agency for your digital PR needs.

The majority of companies surveyed by uSERP (46.5%) stated that they spend in the region of £3,700 and £7,400 a month on digital PR and link-building services. Incidentally, less than a fifth (18%) claimed to spend more than £7,400 a month on acquiring digital PR links for their business.

If you take the upper budget, this still only comes in at £88,800 a year. A fraction of the yearly £400,000 estimate of building your own team.

It soon becomes clear that the costs related to outsourcing your Digital PR to an agency partner are likely to be fairly consistent and significantly lower on an ongoing basis than those you will face when looking to replicate the level of quality when setting up an in-house team.

However, the benefit of hiring a digital PR agency isn’t just financial. The real advantage of outsourcing is the wealth of expertise and sheer scalability you can tap into.

Years of experience, accessible immediately

Our research shows 1 in 5 industry experts cite Digital PR as their most successful link-building strategy - and that’s not by chance! It takes time to learn what works and what doesn’t in order to guarantee success and hit link KPIs.

Agencies can act as an extension of your team, bringing with them experts who do this day in, day out - usually on a varied roster of clients and industries. Not only will you get dedicated digital PR talent, but you will also have access to unrivalled resources like

Country specialists with native-language fluency and cultural insight to secure coverage in global markets.

Data analysts who can extract authority-giving stories from complex datasets, enhancing credibility and link-worthiness.

Designers, developers and creatives on standby to bring campaign concepts to life visually or technically, without external delays.

Tech SEO and strategy support to ensure every campaign aligns with broader search objectives (not just link volume).

You might be wondering how necessary really are the above skills in digital PR - well:

According to data analysed by Reboot, on average, a strong data-led campaign returns twice the number of links versus campaigns that don’t include a data set.

Adding to this, you are likely to see more high link earners, with around 25% of all data campaigns earning anything between 11-40 links.

Speak to a Digital PR specialist today.

Scalability without growing pains

Just over half (54%) of digital PR employees send follow-up emails between 3-6 days after their initial outreach. (Superlinks)

This often means that one campaign requires weeks, and sometimes months, of management. So if you’re wanting to land links at scale, you will need to be juggling multiple press releases, follow-ups, re-angling and answering journalist questions. Multiply this by the number of campaigns you should be doing to hit link targets, and you soon realise that you’ll need to continuously grow your headcount to stay on top.

You may also find your own needs are growing faster than you can expand your resources.

Initially a simple link-building strategy may be all that is needed, but the larger you get, the harder it is to beat the competition and the more time, resources and output are needed. In-house teams often struggle to keep up, however, agencies can adapt quickly - pulling in additional creative, design, or outreach resources to match a strategy that is growing in complexity.

Guaranteed success with link KPIs

In an analysis of 11.8 million Google search results, Backlinko found that brands ranking first in the SERP have around 3.8 times more backlinks than those in positions 2-10.

Backlinks, particularly those from hyper-relevant link building which can provide you with quality links with a high Domain Rating (DR), remain one of Google’s strongest ranking signals.

“Gaining backlinks from sites with a higher domain rating (DR) is beneficial for many reasons. These sites are usually more authoritative, making your campaign/content more likely to gain links from other reputable sites. This, in turn, creates a stronger backlink profile, which should have a positive impact from an SEO perspective – bolstering your search engine rankings and increasing your visibility for new and existing users.”

James Olliver

Head of Digital PR, Reboot Online

But hitting ambitious link KPIs consistently isn’t easy. Digital PR campaigns often require long lead times, multiple outreach waves, and reactivity to news or journalist feedback. For in-house teams with limited resources, maintaining a steady pipeline of high-quality links can quickly become overwhelming.

This is where agencies excel. They’re built to deliver link KPIs at scale and on schedule.

Unlike in-house teams, where salaries remain fixed regardless of outcomes, most digital PR agencies are accountable to performance. If your agency doesn’t hit the agreed link targets, they’ll typically continue running campaigns until they do (often at no additional cost). That kind of commitment to delivery makes agencies not just scalable, but results-driven by design.

Not only can top-performing agencies guarantee link numbers, but they can also guarantee quality. Markers of quality that you can guarantee with an agency in your contract include:

Links from sites with a high domain rating (DR)

Topical relevance

National and tier-one coverage

Links that aren’t all from syndication

Final verdict: You can’t afford NOT to do digital PR

The real cost here lies in missed opportunities by not getting started with a link-building strategy.

SEO tool Ahrefs recently found, in its study of 14 billion pages, a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and the amount of traffic it gets. In short, links matter.

By not investing in digital PR (in-house, agency or otherwise), you’re putting at risk:

Your rankings
Your traffic
Your brand authority

You are also risking being left behind in the rapidly evolving world of AI search optimisation (also known as AIO or GEO), by not utilising the skills of a GEO agency.

Agencies like ours operate at a significantly larger scale, often with 30+ specialists spanning strategy, ideation, data, content, design, and outreach. That sheer volume of talent creates a powerful ripple effect: more campaign ideas, more industry insight, more media contacts, and ultimately, more opportunities to land coverage.

The search popularity of the phrase ‘digital PR’ has been on an upward trend since 2008. In fact, it has more than doubled (145.2%) in the space of 12 years.
Don’t be left behind.

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