PR vs Marketing: What’s the Difference (Infographic)
Everybody knows what marketing means.
Even my 8-year-old son knows what marketing means.
However, the definition of PR (Public Relations) confuses people, even professional marketers.
After reading this article, you will know the EXACT difference between PR & marketing.
Some specialists believe that PR is part of marketing.
This is not true because PR is a totally independent category that merely intersects with marketing.
PR creates a positive reputation as well as good relations between brands and their customers, suppliers, shareholders and government organizations, by using traditional media resources or utilizing social media platforms.
The main purpose of marketing is to earn sales, the main purpose of PR is to extend a favorable view of a brand.
The traditional view explains that marketing brings in sales over a short period of time, whereas PR is a longer project that creates positive brand awareness.
However, the high level of online competition has converted digital marketing into a longer project as well.
Customers usually decide to buy a new product over a period of three months and they need to intersect with a brand about seven times.
A sales funnel looks something like this: awareness, opinion, consideration, preference and purchase.
This is marketing to cover all stages of a sales funnel.
People buy from brands with a positive reputation.
95% of shoppers read online reviews.
Products with a positive rating of 4.0 to 4.7 have the biggest influence on consumer buying decisions.
This is PR to create and support a positive reputation.
The truth is that you can’t advertise your products without a little PR and you can’t provide PR without a little marketing.
Customers don’t buy products without a positive reputation or from unrecognisable brands.
Customers also don’t buy without advertisement that pushes them into buying.
You might be asking: What’s the exact difference?
This brings me to the following chapter.
PR vs Marketing (Infographic)
I combined the full difference into one single infographic:
- Marketing and PR goals.
- Target audience.
- Promotional methods.
- Analyzing results.
Keep on reading.
If you want to build a strong and well-known brand, then you need to consider a PR approach in your marketing strategy.
Many brands haven’t be able to grow their businesses because of this incomplete approach: produce, advertise, sell, without PR.
Customers are smart, they don’t want to exchange their hard-earned money for unknown products.
There is only one reason why people buy something – because they believe that the value of the product they are buying, is higher than the value of the price they are paying for it.
Check out the full difference on the infographic below.
Right. Now you know the difference between marketing and PR.
The main problem is that some companies have separate departments: sales, marketing and PR that don’t cooperate and communicate with each other.
The overall results will be much more effective if they combined their strength and strategy into one common goal.
How would they do that?
Let’s describe this in the following chapter.
Combining PR & Marketing
Successful brands combine marketing with PR approaches.
The main purpose is to improve ROI and create a positive atmosphere with stakeholders.
Even though PR and Marketing have different approaches, they encounter, overlap and interlace each other.
In this chapter, you will learn how to force them to work together effectively.
During promotions, it’s important to collaborate and analyze common results.If you decide to combine PR and marketing approaches, do it at the beginning, while creating your marketing and PR strategy.
Some companies put two disciplines into the same boat by organizing meetings between the marketing and PR department in order to create a common strategy.
It’s important to highlight the strong and weak sides of each approach and avoid any unnecessary competition between marketing and PR specialists in your company.
When the marketing or PR departments organize an internal meeting, it’s better to invite only one attendee from each department.
PR and marketing usually intersects on social media and SEO.
Their content and their approaches are different, but they can link to each other in order to increase their common goals.
Sharing media coverage or sharing your previously-earned collaborations with other stakeholders will assist the other departments in order to use their traditional promotional methods more effectively.
For example, a PR manager currently cooperates with the editor of a popular related blog in their niche.
Cooperation such as this, allows a marketing specialist to use their advertisement in this blog.
It takes a lot of time to find established connections, when starting from scratch.
Another approach is by converting content into other formats.
Content creation takes a lot of time because you need to gather information, combine it and create something new – ebooks, blog posts, videos, audios, email campaigns, webinars, podcasts, social programs, etc.
Converting data into another format saves valuable time.
It’s important to know when a PR department launches their campaign because during that time advertising works much better.
For example, imagine this scenario – usual paid advertisements bring in $100K a day.
When the PR department distributes positive information during that same time, sales can increase twofold and bring in $200K.
Aligning PR and marketing campaigns saves time and earns more revenue.
Customers also research information before buying the products.
PR can share the information with marketers in the exact categories where they have created positive influence, and marketers can launch marketing campaigns there.
Extremely important: marketers and PR managers are not competitors.
If they collaborate and work together as a team, their brand will earn much higher revenue and sales. A win-win situation.
Conclusion
Marketing and PR are separate disciplines with different methods and different purposes.
Marketing supports sales; PR supports positive brand recognition.
However, the effectiveness of a brand’s promotion depends on their collaboration and cooperation.
They need to develop a mutual strategy in order to achieve high results.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask me in the comments section.
Also, read the following articles:
