PR and marketing? Same difference?
One of the biggest challenges faced by communications teams everywhere is education. It can be a tough gig getting rest of the company excited about your PR and marketing activity. Especially when they might not understand the subtle differences between the two.
So what is the difference – if any – between PR and marketing? Let’s go right back to basics to take a closer look.
What you’ll learn in the article:
- What’s the definition of PR?
- What’s the definition of marketing?
- What do PR and marketing have in common?
- What are the differences between PR and marketing?
- PR versus marketing
What’s the definition of PR?
As we’ve mentioned before, PR is short for public relations. It’s all about managing your relationship with the public, and influencing other people’s opinions.
The PRCA and CIPR – two professional bodies for PR people – both have similar definitions for public relations. Here’s what the PRCA has to say about PR:
“Public Relations, or ‘PR’, is all about the way organisations communicate with the public, promote themselves, and build a positive reputation and public image.
The way an organisation is represented in the media has a huge impact on how people perceive it. PR professionals try to influence the media to represent their organisation positively and communicate key messages.”
And this is how the CIPR define public relations:
“Public Relations is about reputation – the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you.
Public Relations is the discipline which looks after reputation, with the aim of earning understanding and support and influencing opinion and behaviour. It is the planned and sustained effort to establish and maintain goodwill and mutual understanding between an organisation and its publics.”
Both definitions are heavily concerned with the idea of ‘reputation’.
While reputation may not be a measurable KPI, it can make a real impact on a business’s future. According to new research by Moz, businesses risk losing 22% of their custom when potential clients find a negative article on the first page of search results. Forbes says “That number increases to 44% lost business with two negative articles, and 59% with three negative articles.”
While your PR team can’t work magic, they can help shape your brand’s public reputation, and prevent things like that from happening. In some cases, they can even mitigate damage after the fact to help keep your reputation squeaky clean.
What’s the definition of marketing?
The Chartered Institute of Marketing defines marketing as “The management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably.”
The American Marketing Association has a similar definition. According to their experts:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
What do PR and marketing have in common?
No, this isn’t a trick question or a joke. There is some crossover between the two disciplines.
Both come under the big business umbrella of communications. Marketing is about communicating with your customers and being profitable. PR is about communicating with everyone else.
Though they may be separate disciplines, both marketing and PR work better together and complement each other. For example, blogging regularly and achieving relevant PR content makes life much easier for your social media team. It’s much more achievable to use social media to drive traffic to your site when you have content there worth sharing!
Likewise, marketing can support PR by making your business stand out should prospects research your brand following PR coverage. Gaining coverage in your target media sectors is much less valuable if you’re disappearing off the bottom of page 5 – those leads will never convert!
On a more practical level, PR professionals will often have some marketing experience and vice versa. In smaller teams, the same person may even fill both roles. That’s by no means a bad thing. Integrated comms with lots of crossover and consistently aligned messaging is absolutely best practice.
What are the differences between PR and marketing?
While both are vital parts of a business’s communications strategy, there are differences between PR and marketing.
Looking back at our two definitions of marketing listed above, both allude to profitability. If your communications activity isn’t profitable, something’s gone wrong.
Increased brand awareness through PR can boost your sales conversion rates by building your credibility before the marketing even begins. At its core, PR is about brand building, storytelling, and reputation management. It focuses on shaping public perception and fostering trust. Many startups and scaleups choose to do PR for raising investment or supporting recruitment, however there’s much more that can be achieved with a robust strategy. While PR is not so closely linked to generating leads, it plays an important role within your sales funnel. Customers aren’t likely to buy from your business if they haven’t heard of you, or if your brand doesn’t have a positive reputation.
PR is therefore better suited to support long-term, perhaps less tangible goals. For example, a brand could greatly increase their sales in a short period of time. However, to become the market leader or household name, that takes consistent and maintained effort.
Marketing, by contrast, is primarily focused on using research data to target an audience most likely to convert, and then creating a sales funnel to ensure a consistent pipeline of leads. In fact, most marketers are a little obsessed with analytics, data, KPIs, and ROI: they want to know that everything they do is valuable to the business and will ultimately increase sales.
PR versus marketing
So in a battle of PR versus marketing, which wins? Where should you invest your time, resources and effort?
Of course, it’s a false question. PR and marketing are similar but different. Neither is more or less important, it just depends on what you want to achieve. Using them together, however, is when the magic really happens.
Integrating PR and marketing into a cohesive communication strategy is the best way to really build your brand in a way that will connect with your audience. If you cut PR, you lose the opportunity to reach a mass audience and your brand awareness will suffer. If you cut marketing, your sales funnel will quickly dry up.
We’ve always said that the best communication plans should holistically integrate marketing and PR. This way, you’re both building your brand and reaching your audience in a targeted, strategic way. By seeing marketing and PR as partners, with each complementing the other, you’ll not only generate more leads, but your sales calls will also become much easier.
Would you like Luminous to help you with a PR campaign? Get in touch, or connect with the team on LinkedIn.
By Kirsty Jarvis
Kirsty, our CEO and founder, has spent the past two decades in PR and marketing roles, resulting in a wealth of experience leveraging the power of media and creating impactful campaigns for hundreds of startups and well-known brands.
