022 Marketing vs PR: The black, the white … and the grey
Today's noisy digital first world is a challenging one for business owners. How do you get more people to know you, trust you, and to respect your brand? How do you stay front of mind with your target audience, as well as talked about in a positive way in the marketplace? The answer is public relations, but not as you know it. Get ready to unlock the potential of your business through the power of PR, content, and digital communications.
Speaker 1:Get ready to become your own PR machine.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to the become your own PR machine, a podcast. My name is Trevor Young. And in this episode, I'm going to go solo. We're going to talk about marketing versus PR, the black, the white, and the grey. Did you know that much of your marketing, and I'm using air quotes here, is actually PR?
Speaker 2:Let me clear a path here for you. Just like PR, marketing is largely misunderstood, I reckon, in the business world, in the media world, and it's often being equated simply to running ads or any activity that promotes a brand. I can tell you now there's a whole lot more to marketing than that. Think market research, product development, crafting of service offers, pricing strategies, market positioning, sales messaging, public packaging and sales collateral, customer service, sales funnel development, SEO. I mean, the list is really, really long, and it's a complex topic, just like public relations is, which makes it really hard for for us running businesses, that's for sure.
Speaker 2:And, yes, like PR, where people think PR is about generating media publicity, it's a part, but a small part. A lot of people think all the various promotional activities, such as advertising, you know, whether it's digital or traditional media channels or paid search or sponsorship or, you know, branded events, any of that stuff, they think that that is the PR sorry, the marketing remit, and it's, again, just one small part of it. So, obviously, things become a little bit more intricate when it comes to large companies and brands, but for, really, for most businesses that operate on the smaller end of the commercial spectrum. For better or worse, marketing is often consigned to that promotional bucket just like PR is consigned to the media publicity bucket. And while maybe some people will pay a bit of lip service to the crafting of service offerings and brand positioning and that sort of things.
Speaker 2:At the end of the day, when people say marketing, they're talking about promotion. Speaking theoretically, the cornerstones of marketing have been for a very, very, very long time, product, price, placement, and promotion. And that theory has evolved significantly in recent years, obviously, as things the world has changed significantly, and now experts and academics have expanded those 4 p's that have been traditionally known for many, many, many years to 7 p's. So we're talking about product, price, promotion, place, people, packaging, and process. So it's a lot that falls under all of those things.
Speaker 2:Now I'm not gonna get deep into any of that here because that's not my aim, you know, but I think, again, we need to understand to understand PR, we need to understand marketing and where they differ and where they perhaps overlap, and that's gonna be an ongoing theme. But what I wanna do right now in this episode is to provide you with a baseline of what marketing is so I can best illustrate what the PR alternative looks like. And, of course, make no mistake, there is a mountain of gray in between, so, please, let's not get into semantics over this comparison. But I really want it for food for thought, and I'd be really interested in hearing from you on what you think about this particular comparison between marketing and PR. So perhaps let me unpack this a little bit by way of comparison.
Speaker 2:And, again, a little bit of gray, there is some black, there is some white, but I'm going to look at where there's can be significant crossover and where confusion starts and continues. So let's look at social media because marketers use social media, PR people use social media. Do they use it in the same way? Potentially not. So let me I'm gonna do this with a number of different areas and modalities and you'll see that you'll you'll come to understand over in a minute why there are 2 different ways of looking at things.
Speaker 2:Think 2 lenses, same, same, but different. Alright. So social media. Under marketing, how do mar how do marketers approach social media? Or, sorry, in my language, should.
Speaker 2:What should fall under each one of these because they cross over left, right, and center. So under marketing, social media, this is what marketing should should be doing. They should be producing organic content that's designed to sell a product or service with calls to action, etcetera. They should be using social media to showcase products and and creating content that supports the sales process, I e, content that addresses common customer roadblocks and objections, and they also should use social media to provide customer support, to field inquiries, that side of things. When it comes to social media and PR, yes, it's very much around content and participation.
Speaker 2:On content, it's around building visibility, influence, and trust, showing the faces of company leaders, positioning the company, and reinforcing its position in the marketplace and the reputation that it has. It could be about showing people workplace culture and the, and, you know, from an employer branding perspective, what it's like to work at the company. And, you know, thought leadership is a very big thing that PR people do, and they can use content through social media to to build a thought leadership positioning in the marketplace. Okay. When I said there was 2 parts, it was the content and the participation.
Speaker 2:This is about using social channels to reach out to to connect with and build relationships with content creators, influencers, and journalists, as well as brand advocates, people who are really big advocates for your brand, supporters of what it is you're doing, and, as I said, employer branding posts, highlighting workplace culture, etcetera. So reaching out, either creating the content and reaching out to people and building relationships is where PR should be using social media. Alright. Paid social. This really will fall more under a marketing remit, and and that's with ads designed to convert prospects to customers.
Speaker 2:That's it. Whether it's to buy something straight away, to download an ebook, to attend an event, to, you know, click here to book your book in a time to see a product demonstration. That all falls under PR, sorry, a marketing remit with paid social ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever. PR can use paid social, can and does, but I believe where their area starts and finishes really is to use paid social to amplify strategic content, Not get into the ads to convert prospects and customers, that's marketing's role. That's what they're good at doing.
Speaker 2:PR should be there about, you know, we're doing some great content, but we just need to reach more eyeballs, then we amplify through paid means. That's it. SEO, another one which is interesting, it bounces between both marketing and PR can have a have a, a crack at SEO. Now, SEO is largely considered to be a marketing function and I would agree with that. It's around driving traffic to your website to kick off the customer journey towards conversion, get them into the marketing funnel as it as it were.
Speaker 2:When it comes to PR and you might be surprised that there's there's not too many, but there are a a few agencies in England, particularly, who are PR agencies that have bought SEO agencies. So that gives you a little bit of an indication of where SEO fits, from a PR perspective. And where I see SEO being important for PR is is there's really only a couple of areas there. Number 1 is earned backlinks. Now that's a bit jargony, but earned backlinks is if you get a an article up in Forbes Magazine and they link back to you know, you've been able to get a a link in there that refers back to another article you've written on your blog or or and or, you know, your name or your bio and it links back to your website, that is an earned backlink.
Speaker 2:It doesn't just happen. You haven't paid for it. You haven't bought it. You've earned the right by writing that article, being a trusted source of information on whatever this topic is, and they've covered you, but they've sent a link back. Another example might be you're a guest on someone else's podcast, and they do in their show notes of that podcast, they say connect with Trevor and here's a link back to his website, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 2:That's an earned backlink and it is still the idea of that is to show up in search engine, searches. The second part of SEO and PR is owning a thought leadership concept framework intellectual territory that's really important to your business. Now a couple of ideas on what I I call it intellectual territory. Some people talk call it thought leadership concepts, but if you look at someone like Seth Godin, an amazing blogger, a marketing guru, best selling author for, you know, decades, He coined the phrase permission marketing many, many years ago. He wrote the book on it, and now permission marketing is part of the vernacular.
Speaker 2:But, hopefully, you know, if you've written enough about it and you become the, you know, the trusted source and the, the go to resource on that topic, hopefully, you come up highest in the search engine rankings because, you know, it's your phrase. So if strategically you've got a a phrase or a a a thought leadership positioning or an area that you wanna dominate intellectually and people get to know people to get to know you in that respect, then it's you could do some SEO around that. There's other people, Mark Schaeffer has written a book called Content Shock that that grew out of an article that he wrote, that went viral. So, you know, I'm not so sure he's, you know, he's deliberately out there trying to get content shock up up the rankings, but if that was really important to him, he could do that is what I'm saying. He already if you put him content shock, he's gonna come up anyway.
Speaker 2:David Meehan Scott had newsjacking. That to me is an intellectual territory. Amanda Natvedad, she's a marketer. She talks about zero click content. That's her lexicon, her idea, her concept, and if she wants to own that, then she could do some SEO, content around that.
Speaker 2:To me, that's still a PR exercise. So that's SEO. A lot of gray area in SEO, but it, to me, it's really probably more of a marketing function to drive traffic and become known for certain keywords. A sponsorship is a gray area for sure. I guess if you looked at it from a marketing perspective, you you know, when they get involved in sponsorships and, you know, coming from a background where we did my agency did a lot of sponsorship leverage, The marketers, you know, they did a deal with a big sporting event or a a sporting property or an entertainment property, and, you know, they had their name in lights, and they did all this sort of stuff.
Speaker 2:The PR in that respect was to leverage that that sponsorship spend, but, normally, it's the marketing team who will identify the sponsorship, identify sponsorship as a strategy to reach more people, to connect with them, and to be able to associate their brand with a popular sport or entertainment property, for example. When it comes to PR and sponsorship, they're they're probably more niche, more targeted in terms of, for example, sponsoring an industry awards event or partnering with a non profit organisation. PR teams within organizations will often partner with a community initiative or a social initiative as well, So it's more maybe a partnership. Now there might be a paid element to that, but there's just a little bit of nuance between when a marketer gets involved and when a PR person gets involved, and believe me, it can go both ways. I've seen that happen.
Speaker 2:I've worked with both over decades. Events is another one because events and sponsorship can get quite, you know, in similar territory, but when I'm talking about events, I'm talking about putting on events and running events. And there are so many different types of events, let's be fair. Marketers usually do big stuff, so big large branded events or public stunts and that type of thing. That's when marketers tend to get involved.
Speaker 2:Again, I'm probably edging more towards the bigger end of town on this and this is based on my experience, But when PR get involved in events, it's probably more media and influencer type events, road shows, that sort of things, maybe some really strategic industry roundtables they organize, get the, you know, the influencers around the table. Maybe it's they hold breakfast events with speakers and invite clients, that side of things. To me, this is all about building relationships and forging a reputation in the industry. And and PR might also create a public stunt specifically to generate media interest. So one of the companies that I co owned many years back was an experiential PR firm, and a lot of that was creating stunts to get people interested directly, but also give the media something to talk about.
Speaker 2:So that's that's probably the difference between the 2. And, again, there's gonna be some overlap there as well. Don't take this as completely 100% gospel, but, again, I'm trying to give you a bit of a feel for the nuances between how marketing works and how PR works on similar types of, functions like social media marketing and paid social and SEO and sponsorship and events. So testimonials, when when when marketers get hold of testimonials, they love testimonials, short and snappy, social proof, you see them on websites and it serves a purpose. It gives people comfort and validation towards the end of the sales process often.
Speaker 2:Then you get if PR people get hold of testimonials, hopefully, they do more than just get a a sound grab. That's great. That's a good starting point, but I I always urge to go deeper with your clients and cuss you know, your customer stories and your client profiles, and you start talking about them using your platform to promote them. And, yes, this is, again, where the nuance is, yes, they're going to say somewhere along the line when I used your product or whatever, but at the end of the days, it's going to be more about them. Okay.
Speaker 2:Thought I'd just jump in here with a quick promo. Just this episode's brought to you by PocketPR Essentials Volume 1. This is my audio only micro coaching series for ambitious business owners and entrepreneurial professionals. Think, training, and inspiration in your pocket. Listen on the go via your podcast app.
Speaker 2:Go to www.pocketpressentials.com to learn more. And as I record this, a very special launch price is applicable. Now back to the show. So we did talk about, as I said, social media, paid social, SEO sponsorship events, and testimonials, and the differences between marketing and PR when tackling those areas. Now I wanna focus on content because this is a really big play and a lot of what I talk about is content.
Speaker 2:I'm all in on content led communications. PR is all in on content led communications, and content is something that marketers have grasped and jumped onto as well. But a lot of content marketing is done from from marketers, but when it really should be done with a PR lens through it. Doesn't mean they're getting it wrong, but if you put a PR lens on it and all the sorts of things we talk about, you know, reputation, building relationships, and and, you know, getting more people to talk positively about our brand, that is PR. So how can we use content?
Speaker 2:How do marketers use content? How does PR use content? Now when when we look at content, it is just such a big thing anyway, But in terms of marketing and content, let's just look at the the whole notion of the marketing funnel. You'll be aware of that. You know, if you've got the top of the funnel, where you've got people becoming aware of the problem you solve, you got the middle of the funnel, which is prospective clients and customers starting to seek a solution and assessing their options, and then you got the bottom of the funnel, prospects are deciding on a solution and edge towards making a purchase.
Speaker 2:So this is the sort of thing that marketers look at and the content when they do content, it should lock is at top of funnel, middle of funnel, bottom of funnel. Again, quite generalized, different for different businesses, but you get you get the idea. When I look at PR, yes, there's a bit of it's a lot of it is actually top of funnel, but I'm I'm talking about this whole notion of before the funnel. What's some of the things that we need to to create content around before we even start thinking about funnels. And you might not be a funnel person, and I get that because, you know, a lot of people a lot a lot of people running business hate the notion of a funnel.
Speaker 2:But even if you didn't think it of a marketing funnel per se, and you just said, well, I need to, you know, get people's attention first, and I need to draw them in and, you know, create desire for our products, and over time, you know, we can then convert them into clients and customers and, hopefully, advocates. It's a it's a similar sort of a customer journey. So instead of funnel, you might want to place that with customer journey. And the beginning of the journey, as they go through the process of doing research and getting interested in in various solutions and assessing their options, and then they start making a decision. So same deal, customer journey.
Speaker 2:Again, what we do in PR is really before the funnel, just really using content to to create that reputation, to spark conversation and build connection and relationships with not only key influencers, but the public directly, our target audience directly. Also, things such as, you know, building trust and respect and credibility. So that is where content really falls into the PR remit, and that's what PR do really well because it's probably more editorially based versus product centric. So let's break this down even further. Written content, articles, blog posts, for example.
Speaker 2:When a marketer gets hold of this content, it's usually or it should be this is where they should excel, product centered or centric product centric posts, articles that is designed to overcome customers' objections, very much middle and bottom of funnel and could do how to guides there as well. So you can see that it's really locked back to the customer journey. When it comes to written content and articles and blog posts, etcetera, from a PR perspective, it would have a strong editorial bias, could be about thought leadership, opinion pieces, broader industry educational pieces, could be books and ebooks you could throw into the mix there as well. If we look at content from a broadcast perspective, think podcasts and videos, for example. Again, how would a marketer attack that?
Speaker 2:Well, they'd look at it for, you know, product use cases, interviews with clients and customers, or maybe a short run podcast that's designed to onramp people ahead of a big product launch or that sort of things. I've seen that not often, but I've seen it where there's a, you know, 10 10 episodes that ladder up to a launch. So what you're doing is you're doing a short season. You're building a a quick hit audience, and then you launch, and you've got at least people to talk to. So that that really falls into a marketing remit, and video tutorials and webinars are really classic marketing play as well.
Speaker 2:If I looked at what PR how PR would handle broadcast content, I. E. Podcasts and videos, again, it's more editorial in style, discussion of broader industry topics and issues, interviews, and q q and a's with other experts and thought leaders, taking a thought leadership positioning in the marketplace, promoting the the overall category, educating people, sparking conversation, provoking thought, changing the way people think about a topic or issue that's relevant to your industry, your expertise, that sort of things. So, again, nuance either side. There's no right or wrong whether it falls under a marketing or PR bucket banner remit, but what I I still think there is a definite lens that PR people have, and there's a definite lens that marketing people have.
Speaker 2:And what I want you to understand is if you get the PR lens right and you you put the marketing on top, you're all you're ahead of the game by far. And one final one would be, again, more written content. Think about email. So we've all signed up for things and then been smashed over the head with email, newsletter not even email, newsletters, emails that are pitching and selling and adding new you know, here's a webinar and download this ebook and do this and that. They would call that email nurturing.
Speaker 2:I think it's email brutality sometimes, but the gist of a marketer getting hold of an email address and then nurturing, you know, that recipient and working their those prospects, that'd be prospects leads, towards an offer, with a strong focus on conversion or generating sales from their email blast as it were, that's where marketers, you know, come into play. It's it should be or should be if it's cleverly written copy, you know, copywriting that that takes people through the journey and, you know, answers their objections and they if they know their customer really, really well, they'll be able to move them through the funnel or along the customer journey and, hopefully, edge them towards a sale. If you look at email from a PR perspective, it's gonna be email newsletters, and email newsletter's done well, again, with editorial intent. They can have a soft call to action, but that's not the main aim of the email. It is to build familiarity and trust and position individuals and the businesses, genuine experts and thought leaders in their space.
Speaker 2:It's to educate and inform and, you know, start conversations with people, and that's it doesn't have to be a sale off the back of it. It's warming people up for the marketing messages, whereas when the marketers use email, it's about, you know, having an email sequence and nurturing them and moving towards a sale. And, I think there's a there's, you know, very much a black and white scenario with each one of those. So the mistake I think most marketers make is that they look at the top of the funnel and then decide on a set of tactics. Now these may or may not include such things as really general as content marketing events, SEO, SEM, I don't know, trade shows, direct mail, social media, and they will say PR.
Speaker 2:Yes. PR is often thrown in there as a tactic by marketers because they think PR is just about media coverage, and that's where they make that mistake. But I don't wanna get too bogged down in all this. All you need to know is that there are things you should be doing for your business in a PR sense and execute these on a these sets of tactics through a PR lens. And what what I know is that this will help you build brand visibility, credibility, influence, trust, reputation, external third party endorsement.
Speaker 2:All of these things are forerunners to commercial success. So, in essence, PR done well would do a lot of the heavy lifting for marketing and sales. It will be a support to marketing and sales, not an either or, a support. Marketing, on the other hand, is or should be more concerned with the customer journey and what it does, what does that look like, and how can how can they move more people along that journey through the funnel as it were towards a sale and converting someone from a prospect to a paying client or customer. Now any tactic that drives that journey and conversion is likely to fall under marketing, and that should be their focus.
Speaker 2:And, of course, as I've said, there is a fair bit of gray area there, but let's not get too hung up on the tactics and which one's which, but more so the lens through which you apply each tactic. And, again, without wanting to get into semantics, this is more about how you philosophically define your approach to marketing. If you're always in sales mode, you're pitching people at every opportunity, if that is your philosophy and way of doing things, okay, good luck. It's tough to do successfully today when people are running from, you know, companies that are incessantly beating their chest and promoting their ways. It's getting tough to do.
Speaker 2:We gotta be smarter with how we do that. However, on the flip side, it and, again, this is a philosophical approach. If you say, look, I I think the thing to do is to build a base of respectful communications, to go out there and nurture strategic relationships, grow grow my reputation, build our brands visibility and credibility, and build our influence and trust in the place and getting people to talk about us in a positive way in the marketplace. If if that's the way you approach it, then in turn, that's when you're in a great position to unleash your marketing and sales efforts. And whoever's in charge of this aspect, get out there and support them.
Speaker 2:Help them get out there with a solid brief so they can do their thing without worrying about the myriad PR things that might trip them up. This is the best of both worlds. And, again, I think it's a philosophical argument here. Which one do you lean towards? Now I will add here, this is not to say PR does not care about or contribute to sales and revenue.
Speaker 2:Far from it. It's just that its approach is more indirect and ongoing. It's foundational in that it supports many functions of the business, not just marketing. It does support marketing, but it there are other functions of a business, including recruitment and building partnerships and opportunities in new new markets, that side of things. Marketing, however, is more campaign based, whereas PR is more ongoing.
Speaker 2:And marketing, because it's campaign based, it has the imprimatur to chase the sale. It's very hard to be marketing all the time. It's better to be doing it in bursts of campaign off the back of the the trust, the reputation you've built through PR. Suitable tactics, therefore, I think, from a marketer should be picked to ensure that each function operates at its optimum level, and problems occur when everything's mismatched. So that's that's the that's the crux of this.
Speaker 2:Marketing and PR need to pick suitable tactics to ensure each function operates at an optimum level. As a business owner, if you can get this clarity and focus on the things you should be doing rather than trying to do everything in a mish mashed way, that's a technical term, you're gonna be so far ahead of the competition. It's not funny because no one does this. Now, I'll finish on this topic by noting that some of you might disagree with me and that's absolutely fine. I'm sure there's a lot of marketers out there who totally and utterly disagree with this.
Speaker 2:They prefer to believe the PR is media publicity in their eyes and it's a tactic of marketing and will kick it over there. Fine. Go for it. I don't care. All good.
Speaker 2:The winners will be those who do see this bigger picture, who understand the changing landscape, who see the differences between the elements and the functions, and take action accordingly. See you in the next episode.