Marketing Vs. Public Relations – What Is More Important for Business?

Marketing and public relations (PR) are useful strategies that can help small business owners promote their businesses, products, and services.

However, most business owners use these terms interchangeably in a conversation as if they are one and the same. While marketing and PR share some similarities and are part of your overall business communication strategies, there are also distinct differences.

For a small entrepreneur, the lines between marketing and PR may seem blurred and may even overlap at some point. Understanding the differences and how to apply each strategy can help you build a stronger brand and increase lead generation.

What Is Marketing?

The traditional definition of marketing is the process or action of promoting and selling your products and services, including advertising and market research.

But marketing entails more than that. It encompasses a wide variety of business goals and practices, including public relations. The end goal of marketing is to ensure your business reaches your target market and increases sales.

Marketing can also refer to a company’s efforts to ensure products are not only available to the consumer, but they deliver value to those consumers.

The various marketing strategies at your disposal include:

• Email marketing
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Influencer marketing
• Traditional marketing
• SMS marketing

These strategies are used to introduce a product or service to a customer to solve a problem or pain point they have. If the consumers like the product or service, a relationship is formed with the company, and they become repeat customers.

What Is PR?

Public relations or PR is the practice of cultivating and maintaining a positive public image for a brand, organization, company, or individual. The goal is to organically promote brand awareness and customer loyalty.

PR focuses on controlling the narrative around news stories or doing damage control to show the company in the best light possible. Basically, PR’s main objective is to build beneficial relationships and partnerships between the business and the media.

Importance of Marketing for Business

Marketing is a valuable tool for business growth and success. When implemented properly, it can support your efforts to stay competitive and ensure maximum return on investment. Its main purpose is to help businesses grow by promoting products and services.

But that’s not all. Here are five main reasons why marketing is essential for your business.

Promotion

Marketing employs several strategies to create promotional campaigns to build brand awareness, educate the target audience about product or service offerings, and lead generation.

These strategies include email marketing, content marketing, social media, and influencer marketing and they enable a business to get the word out about what they offer.

Often, promotional efforts often overlap with activities like advertisement and public relations, all of which are aimed at building awareness.

Increase sales

One of the marketing department’s main goals is to get people to buy products or services – that is, to increase sales. It starts by nurturing leads, guiding them through the sales funnel, and ultimately converting them into paying customers.

Once customers are happy, they become brand ambassadors, further improving company sales.

Building engagement with customers

Marketing is a communication tool used to keep the customer engaged. It involves providing customers with relevant information about products and the company. It’s telling customers what they don’t know about what you offer and how you can solve their problems.

One way to engage your customers is through social media platforms, where you can use short videos and other media to keep conversations going.

Analytics

Sound marketing decisions are made from data used to identify market trends and consumer behavior. Marketing analytics can prove valuable when creating future marketing campaigns that address a specific audience.

Marketing analytics can also be used to document a company’s growth and success rate, as well as inform expansion decisions.

Pricing

Market research enables a business to set the right price for its products. By learning who your target audience is, what they like and dislike, and how much they value your brand, you’ll understand how your pricing strategy will impact their purchasing decisions.

Help a company stay relevant

Marketers make every effort to ensure that they stay at the top of their consumer’s minds. While they focus on attracting new clients, they also focus on efforts to retain the current ones.

Marketing allows you to build trust and maintain good relationships with consumers, which in turn improves customer loyalty.

Importance of Public Relations for Business

Just like marketing, public relations can help businesses grow, expand, and increase their bottom line. Here are the top reasons why you should do PR for your business:

Generate new leads

Public relations improves your company’s or product visibility to potential customers and prospects when they are featured in target media. This was mainly done through advertising, but consumers – millennials in particular – have developed a deep distrust of traditional advertising methods.

They prefer genuine messages, something PR professionals are good at.

Build strong relationships with stakeholders

To successfully run and grow your business, you’ll need to cultivate trust and credibility among key stakeholders. Powerful PR strategies can help businesses establish good relationships with strategic stakeholders.

Build trust and maintain consistency

Building trust isn’t a sprint. It’s a marathon. PR helps amplify your company’s purpose and value, as well as marketing efforts, to consumers. Public relations acts as the golden mouthpiece of your business, giving you an edge over your competitors that allows you to thrive.

The more people know about your brand messaging, the more you build trust. PR helps ensure consistency, which is key to sustainable business growth.

Communicate brand values

The public relations department focuses on creating added value. PR people first identify the values a company supports and believes in. They then align the company’s mission and objectives with these values.

Eventually, consumers will associate these values with the brand. 

Compliment marketing efforts

PR and marketing go hand in hand. While the marketing team aims at promoting the product/services and increasing sales, the PR team will provide additional information (educational, inspirational, or compelling content) about the brand.

PR helps increase a brand’s online visibility and manage the company’s reputation. It helps get valuable news to target consumers and build credibility.

Differences Between Marketing and Public Relations

To understand how these two terms differ, let’s look at the day-to-day activities of marketers and public relations professionals.

For marketing professionals, the main goal is lead generation. They spend most of their days:

• Focusing on initiatives that align directly with the company goals, such as increasing sales and profit margins.
• Scoping out the competition so they can develop better strategies that will attract new leads and retain customers.
• Developing buyer personas to help them identify more opportunities to market the business to that type of buyer.
• Creating marketing campaigns and conducting market research, looking for ways to extend the company’s reach.
• Planning for product launches to promote more sales. They can do this by creating supporting material, such as website landing pages, brochures, FAQs for the sales team, etc.

For PR professionals, the end goal is to build mutually beneficial relationships between the company and the public. They spend most of their days:

• Writing press releases about upcoming product launches or new company initiatives.
• Building relationships/partnerships with the media, company stakeholders, and other influencers in the industry.
• Pitching positive stories about the organization.
• Building a company’s credibility and increasing visibility for executives, including securing speaking opportunities for executives at industry events.
• Managing and controlling company messaging.

Another main difference between marketing and PR is how both departments measure success.

Marketers look at:

• ROI from a marketing campaign
• Whether they met their sales goals

PR department looks at:

• Positive press in relevant media outlets and trade publications
• Awards won at high-profile industry events
• Lots of buzz from social media followers, influencers in the industry, and the company in general
• Invitations to speak at high-profile industry events
• Invitations to write or contribute content in leading publications

Marketing vs. Public Relations

The relationship between PR and marketing is cyclical. When you improve a brand’s standing with the public, it helps the marketing department drive more sales. When a company’s sales increase, PR becomes more effective through increased public awareness.

With increased sales and a good spotlight, stakeholders and influencers will want to partner with you. In essence, these two tools support each other to help a business establish better relationships with the public and boost its sales growth. 

How Marketing and Public Relations Work Together

As we’ve mentioned, marketing and PR might use similar tactics, but they have different objectives. The fact is, you can’t succeed in marketing without injecting some PR. Likewise, your PR efforts won’t succeed without a little marketing.

In other words, marketing goals – selling – and PR goals – to make people love a brand – are intertwined. These departments can’t exist in silos. They need to work together for the good of the company.

As a business leader, your best approach is to align both the marketing and PR strategies, so you can maximize efforts of building relationships with your target audience and increasing sales.

Factors to Consider When Choosing Between Marketing and Public Relations

As a small entrepreneur, your choice of whether to implement marketing or PR in your business will be determined by these factors:

• Business goals. First, you want to establish what stage your business is at. As a new business owner, you may want to create more brand awareness for your target audience before introducing your products/services to the market. In addition, you may want to generate leads, increase organic traffic, and boost sales. If that’s your goal, you’ll want to focus on marketing. On the other hand, if you’ve already established your place in the market, you may want to manage crises or announce the launch of a new product. In such a case, PR will be your best option. Business goals allow you to determine what you want to achieve.
• Brand message. Ask yourself: What message do I want to convey to my target consumers? If it’s introducing a new product to the market or creating more awareness around what you offer, you’ll excel with marketing strategies like content marketing and social media marketing. If it’s to build relationships and partnerships with stakeholders and influencers, then you’ll want to do PR. Public relations helps to define your company’s message.
• Target audience. Do you know who your target audience is? Do you know their preferences and tastes? Where do they spend most of their time, and what are they looking for on search engines? Performing market research will provide answers to these questions. If, on the other hand, you want to improve your brand’s credibility or increase its visibility, PR will be a more effective strategy.
• Resource availability. A good PR campaign creates unpaid, organic contact between your company and its target audience, making it a more cost-effective strategy to manage your branding and image. Marketing campaigns are not cheap since they involve paid ads on various media platforms, including social media, radio, and TV. Therefore, your choice will be informed by the resources available to you.

From a business perspective, no one option is more important than the other. At the end of the day, mixing the two communication tools will prove more valuable and beneficial to your business ventures.

Wrapping Up

While marketing is more about identifying your target audience and offering a solution to their problems by showing the value in your products/services, PR focuses on maintaining a positive image to the public.

The truth is that you can’t really separate the two. A good reputation will attract leads, while good marketing efforts will promote your products and brand. It’s how you align the two departments that will determine the rate of success.