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The blurry lines between Marketing and Public Relations can often make it difficult to distinguish between the two functions. Hence, it is important to focus on metrics like activity umbrella covered, audience definition, end goal etc. to understand the difference.

Traditional PR was once viewed as a process of charting strategic communication to build mutually beneficial relations between a company and its stakeholders. But PR in the 20th century is an all-encompassing term, that goes way beyond managing just your reputation.
At the core, communication still takes a center stage in what a PR firm can offer you, from publicity to messaging on social media, having a focused and measurable strategy is a must.

Your PR team will work on unifying communication across all online and offline platforms that your brand is associated with, keeping your vision, mission and core values in place, while leveraging a favorable position for your brand against your competitors.

Core PR Services offered:

• Media Management
• Issue & Crisis
• Management
• Press Conference &
• Press Release
• Events & Promotions
• Sustainability & CSR
• Digital PR & Media Monitoring
• Social Media Management

While both PR and Advertising serve a similar purpose of helping brands build favorable image in front of their target audiences, the roles played by both are varied.
Advertising as a medium makes use of paid media such as print, radio, TV, online and more while PR is an earned media that uses a more human approach by building strategic relations with the stakeholders through carefully crafted communication.

The key advantage that PR has over Advertising is all about credibility. Paid Ads tend to have less credibility as the audience is aware that a brand has paid for the communication shown to them. With PR, the key communication is sent to journalists and media houses who then go on to publish the content with their own take, which makes it not only reach a wider audience base but makes the message more effective.

The landscape of PR has seen many changes, especially in the last decade. Not only it is more inclusive now, but also a lot faster and cheaper, owing to the digital space in India blowing up exponentially.

Keep traditional PR in place, online PR has become more prominent and preferred, as news is both created, shared, and responded to, faster than ever. Forming positive public opinions through online forums, and social media platforms makes targeting the audience too more worthwhile.

Thanks to the digital space, decision making process as to which platforms should the PR efforts be focused on is now data driven. Data, analytics, and tracking tools helps determine real time responses which are incredibly helpful to plan and target, and for quicker damage control.

For small businesses number crunching is very crucial, in both sales and expenses, understandably so, and a spend on PR can be viewed as a costly affair.

However, compared to Advertising, PR being an earned media will not nearly cost as much as it’s counterpart. It does take longevity and more focused efforts to build a positive brand image but the trust and credibility built overtime is worth investing in a PR firm.

Instead of relying on your own communication space and word of mouth publicity, which affects small businesses more than industry giants, it’s better to involve a PR firm that will help mitigate crisis early on and drive your communications in a more systematic manner.

Building a brand perception is a long process, not an overnight problem solving mechanism because it works on building relationships with people who can put in a favorable word for your brand. PR uses a long term and more comprehensive strategy that builds loyalty and rapport with the public.

Because PR needs to be done over a longer time period, it needs to be well budgeted. A press release here or a brand mention there will quickly vanish from people’s mind. A more continued and sustainable effort using varied platforms in your domain yields better results.

Another point to keep in mind is to have a clear goal of what you expect out of your PR agency so that your agency can chart out a strategic plan and work on achieving the goal. The end result will vastly depend on how well measurable your objectives are!

The success through PR depends largely on your company objective.

Is your goal to mitigate crisis? Are you looking for brand association with influencers?

Each objective will have a different way of measuring success, but in hindsight the metrics should look something like this:

• No. of Press Mentions from Targeted Publications
• Impressions from social media campaigns
• Increase in website traffic
• Engagement with a release
• Backlink, shares and higher ranking

Your brand’s success directly depends on the brand image in public eye. 

Image building is a crucial exercise that PR professionals undertake on your behalf, to garner trust, support and invoke loyalty from people. The good faith and rapport cultivated between a PR agency and journalists makes tools accessible to quickly get an item published or mitigate crisis. This same access is difficult for an individual or a business to get through. 

Hiring an in-house PR specialist is not only costly but also time consuming, hence hiring a PR Agency is the optimum solution to building a ‘well liked’ and ‘positively perceived’ brand.