If your brand identity and the value of your products are communicated through your amazing marketing campaigns, you may think you have public relations covered. But the reality isn’t always that cut and dried. While there should be some overlap between an organization’s public relations (PR), marketing and advertising efforts, a strong communications strategy will include PR and marketing efforts with separate goals targeting different audiences.
In the age of information, the way businesses interact with the public has changed. Anyone from potential customers to stakeholders can quickly access a wealth of information about your organization that you don’t always control. As a result, today’s brands have to be savvier than ever before. Based on consumer demand, many modern businesses feel they have a social responsibility to perform in a way that positively affects the world—and to consistently communicate about the output of their impact. Ensuring public recognition of that work requires companies to increase their investment in both PR and marketing channels. By understanding the roles of marketing and PR, and how they work together, you can more effectively communicate the value of your brand to your essential stakeholders.
The Role of Marketing
The purpose of marketing is to promote your products or services to encourage customers to make a purchase. There are many factors that go into a customer’s decision to make purchase from a specific company—purchasing behavior can be driven by factors ranging from searchability to long-term market reputation.
According to a 2019 survey by Aflac, seventy percent of Americans believe large companies have a special responsibility to make the world a better place, and 77% are motivated to make a purchase from companies committed to doing so. To attract the attention of this consumer base, marketers have to evolve their strategies beyond basic product advertising. Building a public image for your organization based on investment in social giving campaigns can have a real impact on your bottom line—and create loyal ambassadors for your brand.
The Role of Public Relations
While marketing is defined by customer transactions, public relations is an exercise in relationship maintenance—specifically, the relationship the public (or relevant stakeholders) have to an organization. While many marketing efforts are targeted at very specific subsets of customers through direct contact channels, public relations efforts are often broader-spectrum—ranging from traditional media relations to thought leadership to social media and events.
A good PR strategy will proactively communicate your company’s unique value proposition to your most important stakeholders, including shareholders, employees, partners, customers and the broader community. Just like customers, shareholders and employees have repeatedly demonstrated that they care about the public impact of the organizations they work with. One field often used by major corporations to communicate these efforts is the company’s environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) measures. Eighty-nine percent of investors consider ESG measures when developing their investment strategies, and 83% of employees would consider quitting their jobs if their company displayed irresponsible social responsibility practices.
Where Marketing and PR Converge
Modern technology offers businesses more ways than ever before to share messages with the public. From traditional communications channels like print, television and billboards to digital advertising and social media, companies can (and should) interact with the public in many ways.
In the most basic sense, marketing is about information sharing, while PR is about managing the information that is shared with the public—and many new advertising and communication methods blur the line between the two. For example, over half of customers expect businesses to efficiently respond to negative feedback online. Maintaining a clean landscape of digital reviews is one of many places a company’s marketing and PR efforts can intersect.
Effectively Using PR in Your Marketing Strategy
Social awareness has pushed the value and reputation of a business far beyond the products and services it delivers. Although marketing and PR had largely separate purposes in the past, these fields are pushing ever closer together toward a shared focus on brand messaging.
The following tips can help you align your PR and marketing goals and build a happier and healthier customer base.
- Outline long-term objectives. By pinpointing long-term marketing and PR goals, you can strategically plan objectives to build brand awareness and target multiple audiences at once.
- Identify areas of overlap. Not every marketing effort will align neatly with your PR objectives. Where possible, identify and prioritize where your PR and marketing goals come together to create strong campaigns that achieve multiple purposes.
- Add value with content. Providing content that has value not attached to a specific customer ask can help you establish domain authority within your industry and build trust.
- Do double duty with press releases. While press releases seem like direct PR activities, those that share information about new products are a great way to assist marketing efforts, providing much-needed air cover for your sales and business development teams. A well-written press release gives you the opportunity to market the product and your organization in one fell swoop.
- Take advantage of earned media. Communications moments that aren’t hosted through your business’s channels, or otherwise sponsored, (like paid media coverage or earned bylines in trade publications are often viewed as more trustworthy than paid advertising. Just like with other PR efforts, a strong piece of earned media coverage is a great tool to share with potential customers through your direct marketing channels, allowing you to control the narrative and close the deal.
In the same way that many business processes have been transformed by technological innovation, the face of modern marketing is rapidly changing. Today, companies need to be more proactive and transparent, with a greater focus on public good, than their counterparts 50 years ago—and brands will continue to find that a negative reputation in these spaces can stick with them for generations. As the preferred PR and marketing channels evolve, communications efforts can be streamlined by building overarching strategies that deliver on common goals. Smart and successful entrepreneurs will continue to take advantage of the blurring lines between marketing and PR to build more impactful campaigns that reach multiple target audiences and create repeat customers that boost your bottom line.
