Should Businesses Consider Marketing and Public Relations during Pandemic?
The COVID-19 pandemic affected every single industry, and the businesses that stayed afloat usually had marketing and PR on their side. Many of the lessons we’ve learned the past year have underscored the importance of authenticity, transparency, and being together. Here are some key insights we’ve learned after a year of COVID.
Public relations and marketing are often mistaken as the same thing and in smaller companies, sometimes one department would do both. Any company, brand or person would benefit from both fields of public relations and marketing especially if they have a product or service to sell. Although these two may seem similar, there are a few differences setting public relations apart from marketing.
Before we jump into the differences between public relations and marketing, we need to know what they both are. Marketing is the overall strategy of increasing the public’s awareness of a product, service or an individual. Commonly, advertising and public relations may also be grouped under marketing as well.
On the other hand, Public relations ensures that a company or person maintains a good reputation in the media. Larger companies would usually have their own in-house PR team or there might be PR personnel in a general marketing team. There are also specialist PR consultancies which are contracted by companies in order to manage their public relations messaging and media communications.
PR ensures that their employers or clients are noticed by both traditional and now, digital media. With consumers becoming much smarter when it comes to advertising, positive press coverage is a form of subtle promotion that’s much less ‘in their face’.
Although it sounds like PR and marketing are exclusive of each other, they actually work together to successfully conquer the media world. These two departments influence each other in a few ways.
If the product or service your company or client was advertising has limited brand awareness, then it’ll be difficult to build a successful brand reputation or relationship with consumers. This could result in a decline in sales. Thus, the PR and marketing department would need to work together to increase brand awareness via press for the product or service (PR) then creating social media ads or performing targeted ads around that press.
These days, social media and influencer marketing are jointly managed by both the PR and marketing departments. In addition to brand-building messaging (PR), the marketing department can then work on keyword marketing campaigns or promotions which may be parts of the company’s customer acquisition strategies.
So, public relations and marketing are always better together. Streamlining a company’s public relations and marketing strategies to play off each other could amplify content across all channels, optimise opportunities, maintain and also promote brand messaging consistency and increase revenue.
Key takeaways:
After a year when we learned the importance of being together and have faced so many challenges with more yet to come, there’s room to be bold and to be human. Customers will notice. Having a robust public relations strategy that works in tandem with marketing efforts ensures that a company’s messaging is well-received by their target audience during and after the pandemic. This in turn, would enable the company to gain and retain customers which increases revenue. Thus, although public relations and marketing may seem to be different entities that make up the communications structure of a company or brand, these two departments are integral in the success of any company.