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The role of public relations in your marketing strategy is something you have probably thought about numerous times. You're not alone. People tend to juggle the words marketing and Public Relations (PR) around whenever discussing customer/client acquisition-related matters. While PR and marketing have their shared similarities, they are meant to serve different functions. In this post, we will discuss what PR is and what role it is supposed to play in your marketing strategy.
What is Public Relations?
Public Relations or PR is the methods or processes that every organization has to implement as a way to maintain good relationships and a positive persona in external groups and communities.
When we talk about PR, organizations do not have to pay outside parties to advertise them. This is because the focus of PR is to earn the confidence of people through pro-life initiatives or campaigns.
When a company or group decides to create a press release on its recent donation to charity, that is a form of a PR campaign. The same goes if a company feeds the poor for a day. PR means that an organization will go out of its way to do something for goodwill. As a result, they will earn positive feedback from certain communities. In a certain way, we can even consider this as free advertising.
How Does PR Compare to Marketing?
Let’s just say that PR is more focused on making sure that people and groups see a certain organization or company in a good light. The job of a PR department is to ensure that the organization has more fans than haters.
Meanwhile, a startup marketing agency concentrates on something a bit different. Instead of focusing on communities, marketing aims to create the same positive persona towards customers and prospects.
Customers and prospects are part of an organization’s funnel. Other people’s communities aren’t. So, PR is here to make sure that people and communities outside of its funnel see the organization in a beneficial way. Meanwhile, the task of marketing is to keep a positive branding of the company as a way to find and retain customers.
What is The Purpose of PR?
Similar to marketing, PR also serves to tell a story with regards to the company as well as its products and services. But instead of having sales as an end goal, the objective of PR is to create and maintain relationships.
Refer below for the most common purposes of PR:
- Build and maintain a positive image around the organization brand
- Have good relationships with famous influencers
- Stimulate demand for a product, service, or idea
- Inform the public about positive associations with other brands and products
- Ward off critical or negative coverage about the brand
When is it a Good Time to Delve in PR?
There is never a perfect time to start doing some PR work but the role of public relations in your marketing strategy is something you need to be thinking about. While certain even triggers should signal you to run a PR campaign, it is suggested that you continually do PR campaigns as a way to consistently build a positive image around your brand.
For instance, you have to consistently seek out events that you could potentially sponsor or get involved in as a way to boost your company morale.
You could also look for celebrities or influencers that are closely related to your niche with whom you can collaborate to boost your company’s popularity with the masses.
If you’re not doing that, you could refer to the following event triggers that call for PR attention:
- New product launching
- You create a new method or procedure that is unique from other organizations
- You become partners with a new organization
- The organization sponsors an event or a group
- A positive and impressive review from a customer
- The company is going to have a new CEO or a new executive assignment
- When you receive bad press
What Role Does PR Play in Your Marketing Strategy?
We have just set the division between PR and marketing. Despite that, these two still sit in the same department. Without PR, your marketing strategy would have little to no effect on your audiences. Below, we are going to talk about different ways PR could play a role in the positive reinforcement of your marketing strategy.
Reputation Management
Reputation is very important in the business world. When you have a strong reputation, you will have endless opportunities to make a sale and scale your business. Unfortunately, the opposite is true if seen in a negative way.
Let’s say that you have been making good money consistently for the first five years of your business. It will only take one horrible review to ruin your reputation. When this happens, the incident could have a significant impact on your sales. Your ability to make new customers will also become questionable when this happens.
With that, all your previous marketing attempts will be wasted. To prevent this, you need a PR team set in place assigned to combat these types of accusations. The PR team could run an article showing facts about the issue or simply an apology letter and a proposed solution addressed to concerned parties.
Value Awareness
In the world of business, it is not just about selling a product or service. Ultimately, it is about selling your entire brand.
People will cling to your brand not just because of your products or the high-quality materials you use in creating these products. Oftentimes, they do so because you and your customer share a certain value.
Let’s say that your company donates food to abandoned animals. In that sense, you have a brand that most animal lovers will naturally want to purchase from.
In the case of value awareness, the PR team needs to work closely together with the marketing team. It is the job of the PR team to make these values materialize in your domain. And the task of the marketing team is to ensure that the attempts of the PR team arrive at the target audience through advertising and digital marketing.
Enhanced Online Presence
One of the jobs of the marketing department is to create a strategy so cut through that you come out on the first page of every Google SERP (search engine results pages).
But it is a different thing altogether to market and advertise real events set by PR. This is because PR events are usually socially concerning which means that people will be more inclined to interact and engage with your content.
For instance, if a storm has rendered a certain group of people homeless over the last week, your PR team could work with organizations and volunteers to send help to the victims.
Creating content centered on your involvement will touch the hearts of many people.
Just a single content created that is centered on this storyline will trigger many likes and shares. This will impact both your SEO and social media reach tremendously. Over time, PR campaigns can help your brand awareness in the long haul. This is something that your marketing strategy won’t be able to accomplish on its own.
PR Gives You Social Proof
In our digital age where people can practically get information in a single click, good sales skills aren’t enough to keep businesses sustainable anymore.
It’s because before people could be convinced to purchase anything, they’d want to see proof that it will be worth their money.
When this happens, they look for product reviews. They look for blogs that could fill them on the experiences of other people regarding the product or service.
This means if product reviews reflect people’s bad experiences with your brand, you will most likely have a low conversion rate.
You should also beware of reviews that are neither bad nor good. People may not have any reason to avoid your brand but they also wouldn’t have a reason to buy the product either. Besides, in today’s business, social proof is everything.
An example of social proof is when you get a positive review or when a customer posts brilliant feedback about your product or service on social media or even on their blog.
How can PR help? One of the jobs of the PR team is to gather proof of the efficacy of your product or service. Let’s say the team was to create a case study on certain customers proving the efficiency of your brand.
Public Relations in Your Business
The rise of the digital age makes it seem as if marketing is the end-all-be-all of businesses. While this is true to some extent, unless your strategy is implemented perfectly, it will give you very little results. This is because marketing alone does not convince people to become customers. What you need is a more genuine way for people to see the good side of your business. That’s where PR campaigns come in. The role of public relations in your marketing strategy is an important aspect of your overall strategy. Ensuring these intertwine seamlessly will take your business to the next level.
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