How Online Marketing Blurs Lines Between Advertising and Public Relations

To a certain extent, it’s always been difficult to completely separate public relations work from marketing. Digital communications agencies can help make sure that people even hear about your company or services in the first place. Once you have any of the public’s attention, PR management services can help you with the exact image that you want to project at a certain time. Their efforts can also help businesses get more customers and not just keep the ones that they do have, and advertising projects would have a similar function.

Of course, that means that all communications have to be focused on certain tasks and outcomes. Organizations that concentrate on marketing might still have media relations training needs themselves. Businesses also have to understand the “PR vs publicist” divide to make sure that they’re prepared and that they’ve assembled the right team.

Advertising isn’t just about making sure that a business gets noticed. You might not communicate with the public effectively if that’s your only goal. If a company gets misrepresented at the wrong time, it can have a severely negative impact on that organization’s growth over time. Positive publicity is potentially capable of helping a company expand almost overnight.

Did you know that the commercial known as “1984” launched the Apple Macintosh Computer and ran just a single time on American television during the Super Bowl? Yet, despite the lack of repetition, it had a lasting impact on advertising. The art of advertising and public relations marketing stretches as far back as 1742 with Benjamin Franklin’s own General Magazine. Nowadays, they’ve plunged headfirst in to the digital age, as evidenced by the fact that marketers spend 24% of overall marketing spending last year on digital and online marketing.

One of the most successful, modern digital and public relations marketing strategies is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Of the lead generation marketing tactics, SEO has been rated the most effective with 34% of professionals saying it’s “very effective,” while 41% of B2C markets say that SEO makes the biggest impact on their lead generation goals.

The strongest SEO tactic is known as content marketing. This is when a marketing company creates web content, like articles, blogs, infographics, videos, news stories, etc., for distribution over websites and social media. In the early days of SEO, much of this content was just key word dense little articles, but with recent improvements in Google’s algorithm, to have the same effect, these articles need to be relevant, high quality, and unique.

One might disassociate public relations marketing and online advertising, thinking that their spheres of influence are relatively separate. One reaches out to the public, and the other deals with the public’s outreach. However, Internet marketing has blurred the borders between public relations marketing and advertising. Nowadays, for one to succeed, it must work with the other.

For example, a public relations marketing company might put out a press release online, but without utilizing SEO strategies, such as keyword placement, it simply will not do as well. By employing SEO tactics in the press release, it will receive more traffic resulting in a higher click through rate. If three million people read it, then never mind that only a handful of journalists pick up the press release. By putting SEO strategies to good use, the public relations marketing company seemingly cut out the middleman.

There is indeed a synergistic and symbiotic relationship between public relations marketing companies and online marketing companies. In today’s techno-saturated business world, each depends on the other not only for survival, but for maximum efficacy. Hopefully these marketing and advertising tips have helped, but if you have any questions about these tips for advertising or about public relations marketing in general, feel free to ask in the comments! Or if you have any online advertising tips and tricks, feel free to leave them in the comments! See this link for more.