How do you tell advertising and public relations apart? When and why should you use one or the other—or both? This is the third episode in which I help you answer those questions and continue to share what I know to help you tell them apart. The ultimate goal is to have you integrating public relations and advertising into your marketing plan.
Are you wondering whether public relations lasts? Know that any journalist who grants you the privilege of talking about you or your product leaves traces, especially online:
- An article published online stays online, especially if it’s shared.
- Clickable links shown in an article will bring traffic to your platforms.
- The key words specific to you that are used by journalists and bloggers will also bring visitors to your platforms.
- Your story, told by a journalist in a paper or a magazine, stays online as well as in the mind and memory of everyone who reads it.
When you spend your time and your budget on public relations and influencer awareness, it can take time to see results, and they’re not always immediate—but they do last. Anyone doing an online search for your product will see those articles pop up and will get information about you.
I recall an exchange with a young marketing professional, to whom I was explaining what it is we do, and he told me: “We have a client who does exactly what NATA PR offers its clients. Journalists and influencers regularly talk about this brand, which brings a steady stream of visitors to the website. And what they ask us to do is simply “retarget” their visitors.
In other words, the brand in question had hired this digital marketing professional for a retargeting campaign, to offer the brand’s products again to all visitors to the company’s website. Here again, you see advertising becomes much more effective when you offer potential customers the products of a brand they’ve already heard of.
And this digital marketing pro went on to say: “That’s exactly what’s happening, they’ve integrated public relations into their plan; it’s the best organic part of their marketing plan!”
This means that the brand succeeds in getting talked about without paying journalists and influencers.
So advertising is much more transient, although it’s very powerful in this case:
- Advertising is effective over a short period.
- Advertising hits the “want it now” button.
- Advertising is seen by consumers as a sales tool, so they may be leery of it.
At NATA PR, we’re not anti-advertising—quite the opposite. We believe that combining PR, advertising and social media can produce amazing results.
So it’s up to you to take advantage of this, and include PR in your marketing plan. If you want to discuss it in person with us, get in touch now at www.natapr.com.
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