It is common for entrepreneurs to conflate public relations (PR) with marketing. While they are cousins and related, the evolution of digital communications, including social media, has increasingly obscured their differences, and a bottom-line mentality might mask these distinctions from startups struggling to justify every penny of expenses. It is typical for founders to ask, “how can I determine how much revenue PR has generated for my business?” However, the relationship between PR efforts and revenue is not as direct as marketing is to sales.
Understanding the fundamental distinction between PR and marketing can help entrepreneurs better craft and execute PR strategies, refine marketing campaigns, and effectively allocate resources between the two.
Public relations is managing how others see and feel about a person, brand, or company; whereas marketing refers to activities a company undertakes to promote sales of their products or services. PR broadly addresses perception through efforts to get your company in the news organically, crafting and spreading your brand narrative through original content, and positioning your company as a thought leader in your sector.
Who is talking about a company, where the company is being mentioned, what the company’s reputation is among investors, and which venues and publications a company is speaking and writing in are all considerations for effective PR. A typical marketing campaign, on the other hand, may be limited to paid advertisements, product exhibitions, and sales promotions that are designed to get consumers interested in a company. An investor, for example, would be the target of a PR campaign, whereas a customer would be the target of a marketing campaign.
Promoting sales and fostering positive relationships for a company can often intertwine, hence the confusion. Nike’s promotions, for example, blurs the line between marketing and PR. The brand’s adverts often address social issues along with promoting their products. Marketing campaigns are used to reinforce their brand narrative around issues like racial justice and inclusion. Similarly, for most startups, social media can overlap as an effective tool to create brand affinity (PR) and also to drive sales (Marketing).
Another major difference is the audience. Marketing focuses on customers and potential customers while PR has a broader audience that includes investors, policymakers, media, and partners. PR is focused on aligning the company’s messaging to generate goodwill with various stakeholders — a PR campaign could be targeted at potential employees to help a business attract choice talent. People are more inclined to choose the companies they work for based on their perception of the company’s values, practices, and people rather than their love for the product.
Success in marketing and PR are also measured differently. Whilst marketing ties directly to sales generation with metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), PR success is gauged based on quality and quantity of media coverage and public sentiment, measuring things such as SEO ranking, views and impressions, share of voice, backlinks and social mentions.
To illustrate, a startup that has just raised funding and is exploring expansion into a new market would require PR services to establish broad awareness of its presence and create goodwill with the ‘publics’ including policymakers, potential partners, employees, and the media. Marketing, however, will focus on impacting sales by targeting the business’ customer base. In this instance, all things being equal, investing in marketing will be the priority to gain some market traction, after which PR can consolidate the company’s brand authority in the market.
TL;DR
- PR is not marketing. PR focuses on maintaining a positive brand reputation; marketing promotes sales of products.
- PR has a broad audience but marketing is targeted at customers.
- Success for marketing is tied to sales; PR success can be measured by positive media coverage and public sentiment.
- Startups should consider investing in PR when establishing a brand identity, creating buzz following a market entry, or when raising capital, for example.
- Nosike Nwigene, Social Media Manager.
