How does PR affect marketing?

PR is one of the aspects of marketing that makes up the marketing strategy. The marketing strategy is made up with advertising, public relations, and promotions. A good marketing company typically has all three factors, working together in a cohesive environment. Many people feel that marketing is an indirect expense to a company because it is hard to measure which part of marketing efforts are successful and which part were wasted. The value of a company can be judged by its PR department. Having a poor PR department leads to many problems for a company and can cost millions of dollars to repair. Starting off on the right foot with your PR department will help benefit your company in many ways.

PR and Marketing
A large chunk on PR is devoting time to reaching people through the media and opinion letters. PR focuses on influencing how people perceive their company and react to situations. Think back a few years to a PR disaster. The fast food chain, Wendy's, had an incident when a customer found a severed finger in her chili. The PR department for Wendy's took a long time to react to this situation and it turned into national media news before the PR department even had a chance to react. In order to have PR and marketing go hand-in-hand you need to think of a few important key questions.

1. Find out who is talking about your company.


2. Listen to what people are saying about your company.

Here is PR and marketing at their best. The customer is key to marketing; any good marketer will tell you that. Knowing your customer and finding out about their wants and needs are so important to establishing your company in the market. So how do you find out who is talking about your company and what they are saying? Here are some great places to begin.

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• The internet. Chat rooms, blog spaces, and new articles are a great place to begin. Read their blogs and focus on their podcasts. From here you can formulate a content strategy. How about doing a keyword search? If you put yourself in your customer's shoes, it's easy to know what they want.


• - Business Conferences and social networking. Hearing about your company through your business associates is also a good strategy. Attending conferences and listening to potential client's conversations helps to identify what they are searching for and what their likes and dislikes are.


• - Surveys. Sending out survey's to your existing clients is a great way to have good and negative feedback come in. Your PR department should sit down with the marketing team and go over their answers. Find out ways you can fix problems with products and services and then let your PR team do their job.

How PR helps marketing
As mentioned above, PR is a huge chunk of your overall marketing strategy. Along with advertising, PR is responsible for how you look in the marketplace. With a bad PR group, certain situations will not be handled properly and it could spell disaster for your company. Be sure to take the time to have your PR team sit down with your marketing team and discuss how you can market to benefit both teams. Come up with some situations and how you think they should be properly handled. Designate one person on the PR team to be the official spokesman for the department. They will be in charge of facing the media in bad times and good times. Designate 2 or 3 individuals to send out press releases on the good marketing and handling bad PR for the company as well. Just be sure to keep open communication between the departments to keep everyone on the same page.