By Kelly Richardson, co-founder of Infobrandz. She likes to help people build businesses through visual communication & her influential blogs.
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For the uninitiated, marketing and PR are interchangeable. Some PR firms sell marketing services and vice versa. But while they can sometimes serve similar purposes, they’re different and do not mean the same thing. Let’s consider this in detail.
The Case For PR
Public relations is earned media. Apart from your investment of time and money (for a PR team or in-house PR person), there are no associated costs compared to all the money you’ll spend to run marketing campaigns in addition to paying your marketing team. Sure, there are pay-to-play press release directories, but that’s only a small subset of public relations.
Public relations is concerned with managing a company’s reputation and controlling its public perception. It’s not directly promoting a company’s products and services, but the brand, values and goodwill. A boost in sales or revenue is only a byproduct of PR campaigns, not the primary success metric.
With stiff competition nowadays, earned media is tricky. Research by EstablishCred shows that less than 10% of all pitches ever get a reply. Yes, you will pitch sites for sponsored posts and ads during marketing campaigns, but placement is a breeze when you follow their guidelines and have the proper budget.
MORE FOR YOU
Additionally, with online marketing campaigns, you can appear on the front page of Google’s search results instantly via Google ads, and you can appear on the feeds of millions of potential customers via sponsored posts or ads. For a great PR campaign, you may only get a handful of placements per hundred pitches.
Marketers often target specific demographics for marketing campaigns, but PR campaigns are more public-facing.
The Case For Marketing
For some, marketing is simply the promotion of goods and services to potential customers. For others, marketing means buying and selling.
I like to think of marketing as the entire process of ensuring the production and delivery of goods from the producer to buyers. So we can say marketing involves product creation and design, shipping, storing, advertising, selling and everything else in between.
This concept is closely tied to the four (or five, six, seven, etc.) Ps of the marketing mix, depending on whose camp you’re in. From that perspective, it’s easier to see how broad the marketing “umbrella” is. Still, marketing’s most significant impact is often seen in a company’s finances.
When a company pays for ads on TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards and the internet, they’re trying to see how much financial ROI they’ll get from such spending. Tracking offline ROI can be tricky, but a company can tell when they’re getting a bump in sales or website visits because of a marketing campaign.
Online marketing campaigns are easier to track, but that isn’t very easy. It’s easy when you’re judging a campaign’s success by revenue or return on ad spend (ROAS). Otherwise, you’re looking at metrics like:
• Number of leads
• Cost per lead
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Website traffic
• New customers
These aren’t exhaustive, but you get the point. It’s the entire premise of marketing: acquiring the next customer efficiently.
What You Need
Marketing and public relations have come a long way, but marketing is the go-to for many businesses. This explains why, at the time of this writing, a Google search for “marketing” returns over 2.5 billion results, while a search for “public relations” returns over 938 million results.
I don’t think this is because one is more important than the other, but because if it comes down to it, in the short term, most businesses will choose marketing campaigns that will more likely directly affect their bottom line over PR campaigns. PR comes as an afterthought, especially when a company goes viral for the wrong reasons.
Besides, PR and marketing are not set-and-forget affairs. They need a continuous investment of time and money for the best results. The amount of time and money they have will largely define each company’s needs. Whatever your budget, the right balance of both is necessary for running a successful business.
