What is PR, and why use it?
By John D. Palmer, co-founder/owner of Parks & Palmer Public Relations, LLC
Since founding Parks & Palmer Public Relations a few months ago, we’ve repeatedly been posed these two questions: “what is PR,” and “why should businesses hire a public relations firm when they could simply purchase advertisements?” As professionals in this field, we relish the opportunity to enlighten our clients with a thorough answer. But more than just that, we will be taking a brief deep dive into why the field of PR exists and how it functions in the greater commercial ecosystem.
First, we must describe the difference between “earned media” vs. “paid media.”
The most common form of paid media that comes to people’s minds is advertising. Advertising (and paid media in general) has become so ubiquitous and linked to our understanding of marketing that we’re often asked, as a PR firm, if we specialize in advertising. Many assume that marketing always boils down to paying a company money to place an ad, getting them to wear your clothing, or putting your product in one of an upcoming movie’s scenes. Your company is paying another company directly to feature your product—hence the term “paid media.”
Yet, despite the seemingly never ending paid media options available today, we find that many businesses are dissatisfied with the ROI (Return On Investment) of paid media alone. They often say they are left with few options to effectively reach their targeted audience, whether that be new customers, investors, or even potential buyers for their company. In the B2B (business to business) sector, especially, this is where public relations, which provides earned media, can shine. Now, we don’t want to say that advertising is without a place, but there is certainly a difference between these fields and the results they yield.
While not in direct competition with brand marketing and chasing clicks (as PR and paid media can and often do work together) earned media is often considered more effective due to the concept of third-party credibility. Public relations focuses on angling your brand in such a way that media channels promote it without being paid to. Since you’re not paying these companies directly, it’s called “earned media,” and this tends to be trusted significantly more than paid media counterparts. Due to this trust, PR campaigns can shape the public perception of a business, as well as influence the conversation happening around topics related to your industry in a way that advertising alone can seldom achieve.
Advertising is incredibly useful for getting a business’s name into the public discourse. It’s loud. It’s catchy. And when consumers are left in front of two products, one with a strong ad campaign and one with no ad campaign at all, customers will choose the one that’s been advertised solely based on the fact that they are familiar with it.
But this “loud” form of marketing has its downsides. For example, when you read, watch or listen to the news to be informed on a particular topic, you are statistically likely to skip the advertisement, or mentally tune it out. Furthermore, many people use ad blockers, or even have a paid subscription to bypass ads. In fact, a 2023 Neilsen study reports that 64 percent of consumers “intentionally take actions to avoid ads on free, ad-supported video services,” and 59 percent are “somewhat or very likely to subscribe to a streaming service that allows them to bypass ads completely.”
Meanwhile, some have called public relations a kind of “guerilla marketing,” and we believe there is much truth in this. PR helps to secure coverage of your company by independent content creators. Because of this, it’s often seen as more credible than advertising because it plays into a common marketing phenomenon called social proof. The idea is that having others say good things about you is more powerful (and trustworthy) than saying good things about yourself. A well-placed article in Financial Times or TechCrunch, for example, is worth its weight in gold for a startup looking for more investors or even looking to sell. The same can be said for strategic placements on podcasts and even television.
You can also use PR to influence the public’s perspective on current events, industry trends, and other topics that can influence the profitability of your business.
For example, let’s say your business acquires another company. You might want to use the news of this merger as a way to increase the company’s stock price (or, at the very least, to prevent blowback in the stock price). The first step is to make sure the public is aware, and the best way is to get the news covered in the media. The second step is to pitch stories that show the general public (i.e., your investors) what makes this acquisition– typically seen as nothing more than a change of variables from one side of the ledger to the other– a game-changing business move.
There is more to the story, however. Public relations is what we like to call a symbiotic field. As PR pros, we stay in business by scoring media hits for our clients, but we’re also providing quality and highly informative content for the media outlets we pitch. If you ever listened to a podcast and learned about a new author or interesting person, or read an article informed by an expert source, there is a high likelihood that a PR pro was responsible for introducing this person to the host or writer.
Once a PR rep establishes this relationship, it’s sometimes easier to reach out to this journalist again. If you have an engaging, value-added interview with them, it’s possible that the journalist might even reach back out in the future to get more insight on topics in your industry. Journalists have an important job to do, and if we can help make their job easier while earning publicity, everybody wins.
At the end of the day, PR and advertising are both valid forms of marketing and both essential for a prosperous business, but the nature of each is very different. Advertising can be much more predictable than PR but is somewhat limited in scope. Advertising helps a business tell consumers who they are. PR is about the conversation being held between all of the stakeholders, with each interested party bringing their own voice to the conversation. But whereas good advertising enables those parties to hear your voice far and wide, with good PR and a little bit of luck, you can convince them that it was their own voice they heard all along.
If you are interested in letting us help your company achieve a publicity lift off, we invite you to reach out to us today! For more information about us and our services, as well as contact information, please refer to our website. Also, stay tuned for more blog posts coming soon! The next post will be on the inspiration and meaning behind our logo.
