Frequently asked questions
Straight answers, no PR waffle
The questions brands ask us before they get started, answered the way we would answer them on the phone.
- What does marco/richards do?
- We are a PR consultancy based in Manchester. We run consumer and B2B campaigns across six services: media relations, digital PR for AI search, SEO and GEO, brand and reputation management, social and influencer, founder and CEO profiling, and crisis management, and we guarantee results on every programme.
- Where are you based and who do you work with?
- We are a Manchester PR agency working with clients across the UK and beyond, from local and regional brands to national and international businesses. We are particularly well known for our campaigns for companies operating in health and wellbeing, automotive and legal, as well as ecommerce, property, finance and technology.
- What makes you different from other PR agencies?
- Every strategist here is a former Fleet Street journalist. We have sat on the other side of the desk, so we know what a national newsdesk will run, what it will spike, and how to build a story editors actually want.
- What kind of campaigns do you run?
- Around half our work is consumer campaigns aimed at buyers, and the rest is corporate, trade and founder profiling aimed at investors, partners and industry press. We also represent high-profile actors, presenters and business leaders.
- What does guaranteed results mean?
- We agree KPIs at the outset, whether that is a volume of media coverage, authoritative links, share of voice or an increase in domain authority. We are judged purely on results and, if we don't deliver, you don't pay.
- When were you founded and how big is the team?
- marco/richards was founded in 2013 and has been building brands and protecting reputations from Manchester ever since. The team is eight senior consultants, every one a former journalist, and you work with those people directly rather than being handed to an account executive once the pitch is over.
- What is digital PR?
- Digital PR gets your brand noticed online and shapes how people see you. The gist is this: you earn coverage on authoritative websites, national news titles and the like, with links pointing back to your own website. But journalists don't link to just anything. You have to give them a good reason, which is why digital PR stories tend to be built on data or original research. Our campaigns work because we supply journalists with genuinely exclusive content from surveys, FOI data and commentary from clients who are experts in their field. By building links from high-DA, highly regarded news sites, your search rankings should follow. That matters, because strong rankings are what bring in the traffic, engagement and leads. Where digital PR parts company with traditional link building is simple enough: the story has to stand up in its own right as a piece of news.
- What is GEO, and is it the new SEO?
- GEO stands for generative engine optimisation: getting your brand mentioned, cited or recommended in AI-generated answers from Claude, ChatGPT, Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode, Perplexity, Gemini and the rest. Is it the new SEO? Yes and no. The term comes from a 2023 academic paper, but it has exploded because the way people find things is visibly shifting: AI answers now sit on top of many Google results, chatbots are becoming a research tool in their own right, and brands are noticing that being invisible in those answers hurts even when their blue-link rankings look fine. You will also see AEO (answer engine optimisation) and "LLM visibility" thrown around; the industry hasn't settled on a name, which tells you how young it is. In truth it is more an evolution than a replacement. Google still handles vastly more queries than any chatbot, and a large chunk of GEO advice is just good SEO wearing a new badge: clear structure, crawlable content, actual expertise, answering questions directly. Some of it is meaningfully different, though. AI systems lean heavily on what trusted third parties say about you, from news coverage and trade press to Reddit, Wikipedia and comparison pieces, and mentions matter even without a link. Measurement changes too: instead of rank tracking, people track share of voice in AI answers, which is spawning a whole cottage industry of tools. This is where PR earns its keep. When an AI assembles an answer, it retrieves and cites authoritative sources, exactly the kind of coverage digital PR delivers. Muck Rack's ongoing What Is AI Reading? study, based on more than 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, found that earned media accounts for 84% of all AI citations, with journalism alone making up 27%.
- How do we start working with you?
- Tell us about your brand, the sector and the goal, and we will come back with an honest view on what PR can realistically do for you, which of our six services fit and what it would take to get there, rather than a generic sales pitch. If we don't think PR is the answer, we will say so. Once we agree the outcomes and the KPIs, the senior team you met in the pitch is the team that runs the programme. Start on the contact page.
- How do I get in touch?
- Email hello@marcorichards.co.uk or use the contact page. Tell us a little about your brand and your goals and we will take it from there.
- How much does PR cost in the UK?
- UK PR is usually bought as a monthly retainer, a fixed-scope campaign or crisis support charged as it is used. As a rough industry guide, retainers run from around £2,000 to £3,000 a month for smaller regional programmes to £10,000 or more for national consumer and digital PR campaigns, with one-off launches priced on their own. The range is wide because the work is scoped to the outcome rather than a set number of hours. We do not publish a rate card, so tell us the goal at hello@marcorichards.co.uk or on the contact page and we will give you an honest figure for what it takes to hit it.
- How long before we see results?
- Expect first coverage within the opening weeks and meaningful momentum within the first month or two. Media relations can land quickly when the story is ready and the timing is right, but a programme needs longer to show its full effect: authority, links and share of voice build over a quarter and compound after that. We agree the outcomes and the timeline at the outset so you know what to expect and when.
- What is the difference between PR and digital PR?
- Traditional PR is about earning coverage and shaping the way your brand is talked about in national, regional and trade media. Digital PR uses the same newsroom judgement but is measured on the search and AI-visibility outcomes it produces: authoritative links, brand mentions, share of voice and the citations that answer engines pull from. Most programmes use both, because the story that lands on a national newsdesk is usually the story that earns the link.
- Do you guarantee coverage?
- Yes. We agree the outcomes at the start of every programme and build the work around delivering them, and if we don't deliver, you don't pay. Because our strategists are all former national journalists, we only commit to what we know a newsdesk will run, and if a story is not strong enough we say so before it goes out, not after.
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Still got a question?
Email us with the specifics and we will come back with an honest answer, not a sales pitch.