Connecting PR to Marketing

Companies that are looking to expand their reach and expose their products or services to new audiences would greatly benefit from public relations.

Through public relations, a company is able to communicate with different people, from its customers to its employees, partners, journalists, and even the general public. Regardless of a company’s size, practically any business can benefit from PR.

PR businesses are able to leverage media outlets to promote the company and create a positive public image. However, PR doesn’t stop there and can also be utilized to manage a company’s brand and communications – both things that are essential during a crisis.

Although PR and marketing tend to operate separately, especially in big organizations, they are still intrinsically linked together. However, both departments have to coordinate with each other to avoid potentially missing opportunities. That way, when they are working together they’re able to improve the bottom line for the business.

When PR and marketing are working in cohesion they’re able to promote the business on a higher level, which adds to the company’s credibility, and creates a consistent brand image.

Cooperation

To develop extremely effective campaigns PR and marketing should often work together and engage with each other on a frequent basis, starting early on in the campaign’s process.

Goals

When these two departments work together, they should also make sure that both of their goals are aligned with each other. Although they might utilize different strategies, their goals should be largely the same, if not similar. Sharing these goals can lead to creating PR content with a strong purpose and focus on strategies that will inevitably improve the marketing outcomes as well.

Integration

With public relations companies can support paid campaigns and lead generation, especially when, for example, data from consumer surveys are used in PR media coverage, and the same data is also repurposed to create marketing content such as articles, social programs, or email campaigns.

Measurement

Marketers usually gather and analyze a lot of data that are related to leads and sales but they might not include earned media in those analyses. During a big PR campaign, leads and sales can easily increase and when PR and marketing are aligned, the sales can increase even more.

As public relations teams are usually in charge of media measurement, marketers can get a lot of value from monitoring and measuring media coverage as that type of data gives a lot of insights into a company’s customers, leads, and competitors.

These are just some of the reasons why PR teams should be working with and alongside marketing teams. That way they’ll both be able to measure each contribution to the overall corporate goals before, during, and after the launch of a campaign, or an announcement.