“I want to land a hit in the New York Times in the first month.”
“I want to go viral.”
“I need to generate more backlinks.”
These are a few of the goals we hear from prospective clients perhaps a little more than we’d like. It’s good, of course, to have lofty or ambitious goals, but understanding the time, cost and role of a PR team in accomplishing each is important before you sign a retainer.
We see many of these misconceptions during negotiations or in RFPs. In many cases, misunderstandings are evident in the goals potential clients have outlined for their PR team. With that in mind, we’ve listed some of the most common misconceptions we encounter—as well as how to correct them, because everyone benefits from transparency and realistic expectations.
PR IS NOT MARKETING
While PR and marketing are adopting traits from each other at greater speeds, the two are not yet considered the same, and asking your PR team to act only as a marketing team (and vice versa) will likely create fundamental problems and disagreements. That’s because marketing tends to be more directly sales-focused while traditional PR is more reputation-focused. With that said, many PR firms, including ours, offer marketing services like content writing for sales enablement and always want to be a part of conversations between sales and marketing. Another crucial difference is in measurement: Because marketing is more sales-focused, success metrics tend to be linked to sales figures. Not so with PR, which tends to measure success by media placements, share of voice, web traffic and more.
PR IS NOT SALES
Your PR strategy can’t and shouldn’t be the only thing that drives sales. While PR is an irreplaceable component of a sales strategy, it can’t be the sole lead driver for your brand, and should sit alongside an informed and connected sales team, a comprehensive digital marketing campaign, a thoughtful social media strategy and strategic ad buys. PR can carry customers to different layers of the sales funnel, but it starts at the top with awareness.
PR IS NOT BACKLINKS
Gaining more website traffic is one of the most common goals for any business. Your company is looking to PR as the primary means of increasing awareness, building brand equity and establishing or maintaining reputation. In recent years, however, securing backlinks in media placements has been the core success metric for many companies.
This mindset fundamentally misses the point, and asking reporters for backlinks is dangerous. As Red Fan president and founder, Kathleen Lucente, wrote in a Forbes piece earlier this year: “Making such a request can often backfire, as it sends the wrong message. It could suggest your company is mainly interested in the link, not the journalistic coverage itself. It might alienate the writer, who may see the query as intrusive — akin to asking her to doctor a direct quote — jeopardizing the potential for a beneficial media relationship down the line.”
Instead of predicating success on backlinks, executives should encourage their PR and marketing teams to identify creative ways to redistribute, repurpose and promote content across channels. Similarly, PR and marketing should be working closely with sales teams to identify the content that resonates with target audiences, keeping the feedback loop open between all three to maximize a communications campaign’s impact.
