Ask most cybersecurity founders what serious PR looks like and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: hire an agency, sign a monthly retainer, and let the machine run. The retainer has become shorthand for commitment – proof that a company is taking its reputation seriously.

It’s worth questioning that assumption before you sign anything. A retainer is one way to buy PR, and for some companies it’s the right one, but it’s a structure agencies sell by default, and the default isn’t always what your business actually needs.

The market context makes this question more pressing, not less. Forrester projects global cybersecurity spending will rise 13.1% in 2025 to $174.8 billion, which means more vendors, more funding announcements, and more noise competing for the same editorial attention. At the same time, Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets holding flat at 7.7% of company revenue. Visibility matters more than ever, and the money to buy it isn’t expanding to match.

So the real question isn’t which agency to hire. It’s what kind of PR support you actually need – and only then, who’s best placed to deliver it.

The first question is not which agency – it’s what kind of PR support you need

PR support for a cybersecurity company generally comes in three shapes, and confusing them is the most common way companies overspend.

The first is ongoing strategic PR: an always-on program covering media relations, analyst engagement, executive visibility, and message development, typically delivered through a monthly retainer. The second is project-based campaign PR: a defined engagement around a launch, a funding announcement, or a concentrated push for category awareness. The third is targeted placement support: focused work to land your company or executives in specific publications, with most of the surrounding strategy and execution staying in-house.

These are different products with different price points and different failure modes. A retainer applied to a placement-shaped problem burns budget on meetings and reporting. Placement support applied to a category-creation problem leaves you with a few nice clippings and no narrative momentum.

The honest starting point is an internal audit, not an agency shortlist. What can your own team already do? What’s the specific visibility outcome you’re missing? The answers determine which of the three models fits – and that decision matters more than any agency’s client list.

When a long-term PR retainer actually makes sense

Retainers exist for good reasons, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

If you’re creating a new category, you need sustained narrative work over quarters, not weeks. Analysts, journalists, and buyers have to hear a consistent story repeatedly before it sticks, and that repetition is exactly what an always-on program delivers. The same logic applies to analyst relations: Gartner and Forrester coverage cycles run on their own calendars, and staying visible to analysts is a continuous discipline rather than a one-time event.

Retainers also earn their keep when executive visibility is a core growth lever – a CEO building a public profile across podcasts, conferences, and bylined commentary needs ongoing pitching and preparation. And in cybersecurity specifically, there’s the crisis dimension. If your company handles sensitive data or sells into regulated industries, having a comms partner who already knows your business before an incident happens is genuinely valuable. You don’t want to be explaining your product architecture to a new agency while a breach story is breaking.

If several of those describe your situation, a retainer is probably the right structure, and the rest of this article is about choosing a good one. If none of them do, keep reading before you commit to one anyway.

When a retainer may be overkill

Here’s the scenario the standard agency pitch tends to skip: a cybersecurity company with a capable in-house marketing or comms team, a clear message, and a handful of specific visibility goals.

That company doesn’t need an outside agency to develop its positioning – it already has one. It doesn’t need weekly status calls or a quarterly comms strategy refresh. What it usually needs is narrower: authority in particular outlets its buyers read, third-party validation to support a campaign, or coverage around a defined moment like a product launch.

The buying behavior of your own customers explains why this narrower goal matters so much. Research from firms like Gartner, TrustRadius, and 6sense consistently finds that B2B buyers do most of their evaluation independently, before they ever talk to a vendor. For a cybersecurity buyer – professionally skeptical by definition – the question during that self-directed research isn’t whether your website says you’re credible. It’s whether anyone else does.

That’s an argument for earned, third-party visibility. It is not automatically an argument for a retainer. If the gap in your buyer’s journey is “they never see us mentioned anywhere credible,” the fix is presence in the right publications, and there’s more than one way to buy that.

Companies with a limited news cadence face a related problem. Retainers assume a steady flow of announcements and angles to work with. If your company has two or three genuinely newsworthy moments a year, an always-on agency spends the months in between manufacturing activity – contributed articles nobody asked for, commentary pitches on tangential news – to justify the monthly fee. You end up paying for motion rather than outcomes.

Why targeted placement support can be the better buy

For companies in that second camp, focused placement support is often the more efficient purchase, and it’s worth being concrete about why.

The outcome is clearer. Instead of a monthly fee covering a broad set of activities, you’re paying for a defined result: coverage or placement in specific publications that matter to your buyers. Success and failure are visible. That clarity is hard to come by in PR, where retainer reporting often measures effort – pitches sent, journalists contacted – rather than anything a CFO would recognize as a result.

The overhead is lower. There’s no standing meeting cadence, no account team to manage, no monthly reporting deck to review. For a lean in-house team, the management cost of an agency relationship is real, and it rarely shows up in the budget conversation.

And the cost control is structural rather than aspirational. With budgets flat – that 7.7% of revenue figure again – a project or placement engagement lets you spend against specific goals and stop when they’re met. A retainer, by design, doesn’t stop. Most agencies require a minimum commitment of several months, and the burden is on you to notice when the value has tapered off.

This model works best when you already know your narrative and need external validation more than external strategy. Plenty of strong in-house cybersecurity marketing teams fit exactly that description. They can write, position, and run campaigns – what they can’t easily do is conjure credible third-party visibility on their own, because that’s a relationships-and-access problem, not a skills problem.

What to look for in a cybersecurity PR partner, regardless of model

Whichever structure you choose, cybersecurity is an unforgiving category for generalist agencies, and the evaluation criteria are more specific than “years of experience.”

Technical clarity

Your partner needs to understand what your product actually does, at least well enough to explain it to a journalist without embarrassing you. Cybersecurity coverage is written by reporters who deal with vendor exaggeration daily, and an agency that pitches your endpoint detection product as “revolutionary AI” will get politely ignored. Ask a prospective partner to explain your product back to you after the first briefing – the answer tells you most of what you need to know.

This matters double in a category where overclaiming has consequences. A security vendor caught inflating its capabilities loses something it can’t easily buy back, and your PR partner’s judgment about what claims to make is part of what you’re paying for.

Cybersecurity media relationships

Trade press, the security desks at major business outlets, and the researcher-adjacent publications your buyers actually read form a relatively small world. An agency with genuine relationships in that world can get a pitch read; an agency without them is cold-emailing the same inboxes you could. Ask for recent, named examples of coverage they’ve secured in the outlets you care about, and ask who on the team holds those relationships.

Analyst and category credibility

If analyst relations matters to your sales motion – and for most enterprise security vendors it does – probe whether the agency has actually run analyst programs in security, not just media relations with an analyst line item attached. The two disciplines look similar on a proposal and work very differently in practice.

Trust-sensitive communication judgment

Security companies communicate under constraints most industries never face: responsible disclosure norms, customer confidentiality, the risk that a marketing claim becomes an attacker’s roadmap. A good partner understands when not to publicize something. If a prospective agency has never had to navigate a disclosure timeline or an incident communication, that inexperience will surface at the worst possible moment.

Stage fit

A seed-stage startup needs scrappy, founder-led visibility work; a public company needs process and risk management. Agencies are usually optimized for one. Ask what their typical client looks like in terms of size and stage, and be honest about whether you match it – being an agency’s smallest client tends to mean getting its most junior team.

Questions to ask before you sign anything

A short, direct list does more good here than another page of prose. Before signing with any PR partner, get clear answers to these:

1. Do we need ongoing PR, a campaign, or specific placements – and which is this proposal actually built for?
2. What exactly are we paying for each month, and what happens in a month with no news?
3. What does success look like at three months and at six, in terms we can verify?
4. Who will actually work on our account day to day – the people in this pitch meeting, or others?
5. What parts of this scope could our in-house team handle if the agency focused only on what we can’t do ourselves?

That last question is the one agencies are least prepared for, and the answer is revealing. A confident partner will happily carve scope down to where they add unique value. A partner who insists everything must stay bundled is telling you something about how the engagement will go.

The mistake many cybersecurity companies make

The pattern repeats across the industry: a company signs a retainer because it feels like the serious, grown-up option, then spends six months mistaking activity for outcomes. The monthly reports are full – pitches sent, briefings held, contributed articles drafted – and the actual business impact is hard to locate.

Usually the underlying error happened before the contract was signed. The company outsourced a whole function when it only needed to fill a gap. Its in-house team could already handle strategy, content, and execution; what it lacked was access and placement, a much smaller and cheaper thing to buy.

None of this makes agencies villains. It means the burden of scoping falls on the buyer, because no agency’s proposal template defaults to “you need less than you think.”

The honest takeaway

The best PR agency for a cybersecurity company isn’t necessarily the biggest, the most expensive, or the one with the longest security client roster. It’s the one whose model matches the job – and the best model isn’t always a retainer.

If you’re building a category, courting analysts, or managing enterprise-scale reputation risk, an ongoing program with a partner who knows your business deeply is worth the standing cost. If you have a strong internal team and a few specific visibility gaps, targeted placement support or a defined project will usually deliver more per dollar, with less overhead and a much clearer view of what you got for the money.

The discipline that makes either choice work is the same: define the outcome first. Decide what trust and visibility result your business actually needs in the next two quarters, work out what your own team can deliver toward it, and then buy the lightest external structure that closes the remaining gap. Agencies will always be glad to sell you more – the companies that get real value from PR are the ones that knew what “enough” looked like before the first pitch meeting.