PR.Digital

Switching PR agencies doesn't have to cost you coverage, links, or journalist relationships — if you manage the handover properly. This episode breaks down exactly what to extract, protect, and transfer before your new agency walks in the door.

Show Notes

Agency transitions fail quietly. The new retainer is signed, the kickoff deck looks promising — and then a quarter passes and the coverage report is worse than it was before anyone made a change. The culprit is almost never the new agency and almost never the old one. It's the handover itself. This episode walks marketing and comms leaders through a structured approach to switching PR agencies without haemorrhaging the link equity, journalist trust, and institutional knowledge that took years to build. It's based on this detailed guide to switching digital PR agencies without losing momentum published on PR.digital.

Here's what the episode covers:

  • Diagnosing the real problem before you give notice — separating a weak strategy from a poor brief from genuine execution failure, because only one of those is actually fixed by firing the agency. Industry benchmarking puts the switching cost at a 20% resource lift in the first three to six months, and paying it twice because the root cause wasn't addressed is entirely avoidable.
  • What to extract before the relationship turns adversarial — the specific assets to request in writing during the notice period: segmented media lists with journalist response history, a full pitch log with outcomes, a complete placement record noting dofollow and nofollow status, and login credentials for any tools or accounts registered in the agency's name.
  • The single most expensive handover mistake — if research assets or data pages were built on the agency's domain rather than yours, every backlink pointing to those pages leaves with them. The link equity was never really yours, and you won't know it's gone until the links disappear.
  • Protecting journalist relationships through the gap — requesting documented handover calls for every tier-one contact, sending a short note from in-house comms introducing the incoming agency, and letting any in-flight stories run to publication with the incumbent rather than yanking coverage mid-pitch.
  • Auditing your link profile before you hand over access — exporting a full backlink snapshot to a location the outgoing agency doesn't control, then flagging links on agency-leveraged domains, links pointing to agency-hosted assets, and links hitting 404s (the most recoverable category, and a strong week-one task for the new team).
  • Compressing onboarding so the new agency can pitch in days, not weeks — standard onboarding runs four to six weeks; a transition window gives you two or three at most, which means the briefing document, tone-of-voice guidance, and approved spokesperson bios need to be ready before the contract is countersigned. If you're evaluating what a structured engagement looks like from day one, PR.digital's digital PR services set out how coverage strategy is built and maintained over time.

For more on what the early weeks of a new agency relationship actually look like in practice, the episode What a Digital PR Agency Actually Delivers in the First 90 Days is a natural companion listen — it picks up roughly where this one ends. If you're also thinking about how earned media fits into a broader search strategy, why digital PR is the new SEO is worth a read alongside this episode.

PR.digital

What is PR.Digital?

Digital PR at scale — the reporting, relationships and repeatable process behind coverage that keeps paying off long after the news cycle moves on. Story angles that survive an editor, data studies worth running, newsjacking without the cringe, and how PR and search reinforce each other.

Every episode takes one working problem — a study that got no pickup, a spokesperson nobody quotes, a campaign that won links but no customers — and reasons through what to change. Written for PR and content teams measured on outcomes, not clip counts. Five or six minutes, one idea, properly explored.

Topics include story angles that survive an editor, data studies worth running, newsjacking without the cringe, spokesperson positioning, journalist relationships, crisis basics, and how earned coverage compounds with search.

Produced by PR.Digital, digital PR built for scale. Full details, services and further reading at https://pr.digital