STA Marketing & PR gives you the experience of a larger firm with the attention of a dedicated partner. We work with a trusted network of specialists, bringing in the right expertise for each project without losing the personal connection that makes our client relationships work.

At the center of STA Marketing & PR is Monika Bernthal, the agency's founder. She built this agency from the ground up, and she knows firsthand what it takes to grow a business, build a reputation and keep pushing forward. That experience shapes everything we do. It's why we bring the same care, creativity and commitment to your business that we bring to our own.

Monika didn't set out to build a marketing agency. She set out to tell good stories, and that pull led her here.

She started out in journalism, graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill and working as a business editor and then a reporter for a regional business journal. She loved the variety of the subject matter, but wanted to do more than write about other people's work. That pull toward strategy and collaboration led her into the agency world, and not long after, into a new role as PR and marketing director for her husband's business, Ocean Sailing Academy.

After the business sold and her three kids came along, Monika created b Marketing & PR and took on project work to stay connected to the field. When she was approached to produce a festival in St. Augustine, she said yes and built Made in St. Augustine Fest from the ground up. The festival drew more than 7,000 attendees and became the turning point that brought her back into marketing for good.

That festival showed Monika something important: dozens of incredible local businesses needed real marketing and PR support, but the cost of hiring an agency put that support out of reach. So she launched STA Marketplace, an online platform that gave local businesses a home online and a presence on social media, along with a series of in-person Sampler events to showcase local makers.

As STA Marketplace grew, clients started asking for more: logos, websites, copywriting, media relations, event production and everything in between. The agency that STA Marketing & PR is today grew directly out of that demand. STA Marketplace still exists too (some people still know the company only by that name), and it remains a form of community service, a way to make it easy for people to find and support local businesses.

Since then, STA Marketing & PR has grown well beyond St. Augustine, working with clients across a range of industries and markets. Almost all of that growth has come through word of mouth and referral, which tells Monika everything she needs to know about the kind of work STA Marketing & PR is doing.

She built this agency because she saw a need and knew how to fill that need. That same instinct still shapes every client relationship at STA Marketing & PR: understand what a business actually requires, then bring the right people and strategy to make that happen. It's also why, all these years later, she's still as hands-on as she was at the very start, treating every client's business as if it were her own.