Understanding PR: what it can and cannot do
In this article, you’ll learn which business goals PR can handle and which it can’t. And why for some of those you simply need a marketer or a salesperson.
By the way, this is also the reason why many are confused about what different things like PR, SMM, advertising and so on mean.
In a nutshell:
Marketing – to understand, attract, and satisfying consumer needs
PR – to create and maintain a positive image and reputation.
Advertising – to get your message across and promote your offerings
SMM – to engage and build community
Why do you need PR?
In short, businesses need PR to:
PR -manager doesn’t sell the product or build a full-fledged plan for product promotion. A salesperson and a marketer should be responsible for this.
But a PR manager ensures that your business gets positive mentions in the media and stays constantly in the info field: he thinks up topics for articles, seeks contacts with journalists and writes comments on editorial requests.
Sometimes companies see a PR manager as a wizard and expect him to publish articles in the “top” media in his first month on the job. Few consider that Forbes isn’t interested in materials (even if they’re of the highest quality) from an unknown company.
Breaking through the information noise is tricky: You must constantly work on your public presence.
PR isn’t a short-term action.
As you have already realized, you need to invest time and money.
What PR can’t do?
A PR specialist cannot influence all things in your business. You need to know that before you go to PR:
- Improve the quality of the product
PR can’t ensure customers don’t write hundreds of negative reviews about a bad product. It’s up to other specialists to monitor the quality of the product.
- Improve the work of other departments
PR can’t to improve the work of the sales department and customer service. If there is a constant flow of leads but no deals, the problem is within the company. Not in external communication.
- Do advertising instead of a salesperson
Selling a product is the job of advertising, not PR. Media articles familiarize people with the company, but they can’t sell them the product. PR influences buying indirectly – by building trust with the target audience.
Everything in the business should work like clockwork: PR is only one of the marketing tools. You mustn’t forget the others.
How to evaluate the work of a PR manager?
You can evaluate the work of the PR department using simple calculations of indicators:
- Number of publications – how many articles, comments and other texts mentioning the company were published in a month, for example.
- Reach of all and each of the publications – the total number of users who saw the content in which the company is mentioned.
- Advertising cost equivalent – an indicator of how much a company would pay for a publication on the same site.
- Number of clicks to the site – how many users and from what source have reached the company’s site. Analyze it via Google Analytics.
However, there is a difficulty: a user may read an article, remember the name of the company and visit the site via a search engine the next day – the impact of the article can then no longer be tracked.
Managers often ask customers how they learned about your business to assess PR effectiveness. Usually, the customer says: “I don’t remember, I heard it somewhere”.
This means he might have read the company’s articles or heard the name from colleagues in the forum.
Therefore, in practice, customer surveys as one method of calculating PR effectiveness usually don’t work.
Conclusion
If you place more hope on PR than it can justify, you’ll get a painful result: whatever it may be, the goal won’t be achieved.
PR is one of the marketing tools that only works if the business has a comprehensive idea of why it needs publications in the media. If there is no insight, but you want to make sales, it’s better to think ten times before investing money and time in PR.
In other words, this article is a reminder:
You can always write us to help you with PR efforts.
