You’ve launched your first business, and now it’s time you started thinking more seriously about your marketing. You’re in the middle of a tunnel, so which way do you go? Do you hire a company to do that for you, or should you go all in and hire an in-house marketer?
These are tough questions to answer, especially if you don’t know what your business really needs right this moment. A marketing manager or a public relations (PR) manager? Before we dive into that, you need to know what marketing is, what PR is, and the difference between the two!
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What is Marketing?
If you want the explanation to the word marketing, then that is really straightforward. But marketing is much more than that. The best way to ‘define’ marketing is this: marketing is something that means different things to a lot of people.
What you need to know is what marketing means to you and your business needs. For you, marketing will be your best friend if you want to put yourself in front of an audience of your potential customers. Of course, there is more than one way of doing this, but the end goal is the same: making yourself and your brand known to more people interested in using your services or buying your product.
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Whether you choose to go with digital or traditional marketing, that depends on many factors, which is why you will hire a marketing manager who will assess you’re the needs of your business and act accordingly.
This only brings us to our next question:
Who is a Marketing manager, and with what are they tasked?
The word manager in the title is enough to tell you that this is a job that comes with many responsibilities. The following are some of the duties a marketing manager is tasked with:
Developing strategies to reach your targeted audience and bring them straight to you.
Creating and running successful campaigns that positively portray your business ().
Producing engaging content for your business’s online platforms.
Seizing marketing opportunities whenever possible.
Putting together monthly, quarterly, and yearly marketing budgets and allocating funds accordingly.
Identifying and working with marketing agencies to fulfill the marketing strategies.
Building relationships with key industry partners.
Reviewing and approving of marketing material before they are shown to the public.
Adjusting campaigns based on audience behavior.
What is Public Relations?
Public Relations or PR is a term that often rides along with marketing, which is why the two are sometimes used interchangeably. Doing that as someone running their own business isn’t wrong; it’s catastrophic.
The first sentence you’ll read about PR on is that the public relations industry “does a terrible job of public relations”. This should make you feel a little better about confusing PR with marketing, simply because unless you’ve used a PR agency’s services before, then chances are you have no idea what their job is.
Enough talk. What is PR?
As the above Forbes article explains, PR is the Persuasion Business. A PR agent or agency will engage with your audience in a convincing or persuasive manner to promote your company’s ideas, celebrate your accomplishments, buy or use your products, and sometimes forgive your mistakes.
The last part is what generally sets PR apart from marketing.
Unlike marketers, PR companies usually steer away from using paid channels to promote their agendas or try to use them for ‘free’. They will rarely try to sell you a product or a service subscription, but they excel at creating, advancing, and protecting reputations through all media channels.
Suppose your company is holding a launch event or generally has a positive message to spread. In that case, a PR company or manager will do wonders when it comes to spreading the word about it, and it will all seem natural and organic.
If your company has some bad news or is facing a scandal, that same PR company will do its best to keep damage at a minimum by formulating the best response, or in some cases, no response at all.
A public relations marketing example would be the team at Apple releasing a public statement when documents revealed the company was actually aware of the iPhone 6 ‘Bendgate’ issue even before the smartphone was released.
In this case, the PR team was working on damage control in the situation of a crisis.
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Who is a PR manager, and what are they tasked with?
Hiring a PR manager in your company means that you need someone who will be responsible for some of or all of the following tasks:
Coordinating PR activities.
Planning and implementing publicity campaign strategies.
Putting together monthly, quarterly, and yearly PR budgets and allocating funds accordingly.
Analyzing the people’s, media’s, and organizations’ perceptions of the company and planning accordingly.
Writing or reviewing press releases.
Organizing necessary events to further the company’s agendas and/or marketing strategies.
Providing followers and targeted audiences with positive, engaging content.
Managing PR aspects of crises.
Providing the company with damage-control strategies in crises.
Creating and managing the distribution of online and offline content.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way let’s talk about the difference between Marketing and Public Relations!
What is the Difference Between Marketing and Public Relations?
A direct, to-the-point answer to what’s the difference between the two would be that marketing is the business promoting and selling products and services, while PR is the business of creating, enhancing, or maintaining a positive reputation of a company or brand.
PR can sometimes be a part of marketing, especially if you’re trying to save a company’s reputation before launching your new product.
The two industries can work hand-in-hand and do cross each other’s paths. But they are different in the way they operate and the goals they work to achieve.
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Here are some key differences between marketing and public relations:
Marketers do not manage crises.
Marketers do create talking points for senior officials.
Marketers do not write press releases.
PR agents do not create advertising campaigns.
PR agents do not target new audiences to promote products or services.
PR agents do not buy advertising slots on various media channels.
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