What Is the Difference Between Marketing and PR and how can they work together?

As a public relations company, we at PRP are often asked what the difference is between PR and marketing. While the former is about creating and maintaining your organization’s good reputation and the latter is about selling products and services to people, there’s still a fair amount of overlap and no bright dividing line.

To help understand the overlap and shed a little light on the differences between the two, I invited two members of the PRP leadership team, Kristen Plemon and Chris Piehler, to join me for the latest episode of the Education Insider podcast.

What is PR?
“I think there are just some misconceptions by business leaders and organizational leaders on what PR really is because historically we haven't done a good job of defining it to others outside of our industry,” Plemon said. “Or people only really see a portion of it because they see interviews on TV or they see quotes in a newspaper article.”

Plemon said that while the words and messaging you put out there are important, PR encompasses much more.

“People don't necessarily realize it's really everything that you do,” Plemon explained. “It's the perception that you give from your actions and from your words, and that can be from your customer service reps or your spokespeople or your sales staff.”

Marketing has different goals and objectives than PR, according to Plemon, but in the end, it’s pretty similar to PR and it certainly contributes to the overall perception that organizational leaders should be trying to shape with their PR efforts.

“There is an overlap between PR and marketing and sales and pretty much everything that you do as an organization,” Plemon said. “Marketing's purpose is to try to sell products. It's to try to get people to want to purchase and to renew that purchase or buy additional products from that company or organization, whereas PR is trying to build a brand. It's trying to create a specific idea in people's minds of what that company or organization represents and the value that they offer.”

“PR is an ongoing story,” Added Piehler. “It's a narrative that you're building about not just your products, but your company, your people, all of that stuff put together. And I think that's why we call ourselves storytellers because that's one of the things that we build is that larger story.”

Marketing, on the other hand, “is “a little bit more direct,” added Piehler, pointing out that marketing messages are generally focused on the benefits of a product, how they will help customers, and information about how to go buy it, which they all suggest, in one way or another, you should do very soon.

How has PR Changed Recently?
The main way that PR has changed in the recent past is the proliferation of social media, according to Plemon.

Social media has “really expanded how you can tell your story,” Plemon said, “the ways in which you can tell your story, the various channels you can use to reach people so that they hear the story that you want to share.”

Sharing your stories through all those new social channels may be PR work, but it also does some lifting on the marketing front because it can bring people into your marketing experiences. When someone from your company is featured in a meaningful op-ed in TechCrunch or cited by a reporter at District Administration, potential customers see that and then some of them are going to go look at your website and encounter your marketing at precisely the moment that they are primed to think of you as a credible expert solving challenges in their field.

“Oftentimes PR is helping to open the door so that they're more amenable to that marketing message,” Plemons added. “Really marketing PR are collaborative. They support each other.”

Is Marketing or PR More Valuable?
Organizations really need both PR and marketing, according to Plemon, and that...