For the growth of a business, many people get confused about which one to contact – a PR firm or a marketing firm. This is all due to the lack of information about the concept of both techniques. Although some of their techniques are the same, their goals are entirely different. But there are some points where they overlap with each other.
Let us understand the concept of Public Relations and marketing in detail, how they differ, and where they overlap each other.
Public Relations
The major focus of PR techniques is to build a positive image of a brand, service, or individual among the potential customer and maintain a healthy relationship with media based on facts and figures. The information shared with the media contains all the necessary information about the brand so that the relationship becomes stronger and more trustworthy.
PR majorly deals in the following areas:
- Building good media relations.
- Managing the positive reputation of the client and dealing with the negativity on their behalf.
- Managing events by organizing and participating on behalf of the client.
- Brand journalism
Marketing
Marketing is all about selling the product and increasing sales by using various strategies. The experts use various techniques to spread the right information at right time among the interested buyers and convince them in becoming their potential customers. By doing various research on the customers, the experts try to understand their demand and present the product in front of them accordingly.
Various marketing strategies used by the experts are:
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Influencer Marketing
PR vs Marketing
From the above points, it is very clear that the major difference between both the techniques is that marketing focuses on selling the product, while PR is more focused on maintaining a positive image of the product and building healthy relations with media and customers. Let us check out a few more differences.
- To start with the daily activities, PR experts spend most of their daily time writing press releases, building more media relations and maintaining the existing ones, and pitching positive stories about the client’s brand and services. On the other hand, marketing professionals stay busy all day creating new strategies for launching products, selling them to potential customers, doing marketing research about the competitor’s performances, and creating new marketing campaigns based on the research.
- Another major difference between the two is the target audiences. PR professionals always try to find out the people interested in their client’s brand and services and try to focus on maintaining a relationship with them by providing all the necessary information using trusted media sources. While marketing experts are focused on reaching all types of audiences and prospects.
Where Both Strategies Overlap
Both PR and marketing strategies are focused on the growth of the organization. There comes a time when one strategy is used to support others for example you cannot increase sales without spreading awareness of the brand. Also, both of them require social media marketing for their campaigns. Hence, every organization requires joint efforts of both strategies to succeed in the goal.
