For any organisation, having a strong marketing and PR team can be an essential part of ensuring the continued success and growth of your business. However, whilst both deal with communication, there can be confusion between the roles carried out by marketing and PR professionals.
In the simplest terms, marketing is about focusing on promoting your business, service or product and attracting clients to your business. Whereas, PR is primarily about building and maintaining your brand reputation.
Marketing
Marketing is all about attracting clients to your business, a virtual shop window if you will. This can be done through activities such as advertising, social media, marketing events, branded materials, promotions and mailouts.
Essentially, a marketing professional does everything to get your name known, your product or services talked about and follows a campaign or product/service-based schedule.
Marketing campaigns use both free and paid-for channels. However, they keep a very close eye on the ROI (return on investment) to ensure the campaign activities are ‘working’ towards the campaign goals.
Public Relations
Public Relations (PR) is pretty much what it says on the tin, ensuring the public image and therefore relationship between the public (consumer, business or investor audience) and the business are positive. PR professionals really come into their own when there is a ‘PR disaster’, including some bad news, a data leak or legal dealings.
But PR is not all about fixing reputational damage. The majority of the work is about building the reputation in the first place by ensuring your business appears in local or national press, organised events (which will help to build the positive reputation of the brand ). Above all else, maintain a positive relationship with customers, sponsors and investors.
PR is not about ROI, it’s about reputation. So often a PR professional will use free or low-cost channels and the KPIs for measuring success will be different from that of a marketing campaign.
Goal setting
When trying to decide whether you need PR or marketing it is key to identify the goals – what you want to achieve as well as who the intended audience is. Marketing is about targeting potential clients. Whereas PR is more wide-reaching looking at media, publicists, customers and investors.
If you would like to talk about your communication plans and discover the best fit for your organisation contact Priddey Marketing today.