Public Relations and Marketing are two important components of any successful business. While a business's goal is to get more sales and revenue, these two components do not serve a business in the same way. Below you will read the differences between public relations and marketing.
What Are Public Relations?
Public Relations is the process of building relations between a company and other people in your industry. Public Relations want to create a positive reputation for the company, but it is not limited to the customers.
A public relations professional would help a company to build a better image for the brand or the products. They could use various unpaid communications, including social media, personal connections, and traditional media. They also protect the reputation of a company in a time of crisis.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is about delivering the right message to the customers, getting sales, and increase revenue. It also includes the process of researching the target audience and taking action to gather more data.
A marketing agency or professional would create advertisements that focus on generating more sales. Public relations could be a part of marketing because you may need to build a reputation or a positive image for the company to get more sales.
3 Main Differences Between Public Relations and Marketing
1. Day-to-day Activities
Public relations tasks include opportunities to reach other people in the same industry. These tasks include the following:
• Writing and publishing press releases
• Managing the message of the company
• Building the company and brand reputation in media
• Managing relations with individuals
Marketing includes tasks that reach the target audience and add more value to them. For example:
• Creating adverting campaigns
• Performing customer research
• Publishing advertisements in traditional and digital media
• Creating content for websites, social media, and other platforms
• Creating educational content for the customers
2. Target Audiences
Public Relations focuses on reaching people that are relevant to a company or a brand. These audiences include customers, suppliers, investors, media, employees, etc. Anyone who can affect the strategy of a company can be on the target audience of public relations.
Marketing focuses on the customers. Any action that focuses on reaching more customers, creating sales, or generating more customer data is a part of the marketing. In this category, we can add content creation on different platforms to educate and reach potential customers.
3. Metrics Measured
We use different metrics to figure out if our efforts are successful on not. Public Relations include metrics like the number of press releases, mentions on social media, or media coverage.
Marketing includes any metrics that give details about how many leads, sales, earnings a company gets from specific actions. For example, we measure sales, ROI, and revenue. But we can also include metrics that we get after product promotions like social media followers and traffic.
As you can read above, Public Relations and Marketing are two different things. Both of them affect the long-term strategy of a company, but they focus on different parts. Public Relations is only about the reputation of the company or brand, while Marketing is about getting more customers.