PR and marketing - which is more important in this digital age?

More than a decade ago, if you worked at a public relations (PR) agency, you might find yourself on the phone with journalists pitching stories or busy mailing out press releases. Meanwhile, if you are in marketing, you would probably be looking to place your products via advertisements on television or newspapers.

In this digital age, the roles of PR and marketing professionals have evolved, giving rise to the terms digital PR and digital marketing. Their roles have also become more intertwined that it is sometimes easy to mix them up.

“The most important difference between the two is their main purpose. PR is focused on managing a favourable public image of the company, brand, or organisation. Marketing entails promoting products or services for the purpose of generating sales,” said Marsha Imaniara, General Manager of Maverick Indonesia, a strategic communications consultancy firm based in Jakarta.

“So, PR is about making the audience love the company as a whole, usually by getting others to say how good you are, while marketing is about making the audience buy their products or services, by telling them how good the products or services are,” she explained.

Digital platforms, however, are only a channel through which PR and marketing achieve their purposes, Marsha said.

Traditionally, press releases and press conferences are the most effective way for companies to get their message out. “In today’s digital era, PR engagement has also evolved into creating thought leadership blog posts, publishing corporate video stories on YouTube, or even pushing content on TikTok,” she said, adding that, “the same is true for marketing. In the past, they might be focused on brochures, salespersons in points-of-sales and newspaper and TV ads. Now, they can push Instagram Story ads with a swipe-up feature that leads to e-commerce sites."

As consumers, we can hardly escape from the plethora of digital PR and marketing campaigns. Scroll through Instagram for a few seconds and you’ll see a sponsored post. Watch videos of Uncle Roger, the wildly popular YouTube sensation, and you’ll see an advertisement of Sasa, Indonesia’s largest MSG brand, by Nigel Ng’s character Uncle Roger. Sasa has pounced on the opportunity presented by the character’s love for MSG, putting its brand in front of millions of international audience.

With digital marketing being more omnipresent in our lives, the role of PR has become more crucial, according to Marsha.

“There is so much information out there, and so many platforms of communication, that consumers have difficulty figuring out whom to listen to and to trust. Ultimately they listen to and trust corporations and brands that are relevant to their needs, that sound authentic and that appeal to their sense of purpose,” she said.

“Much of marketing relies on interruption. They interrupt the attention of consumers to beam them marketing messages listing out reasons to buy their products. These reasons sound less than compelling because, in the age of commoditisation we live in, their products are essentially alike,” she added.

The sheer volume of similar messages tend to get ignored by consumers. PR creates the differentiation through winning the trust of consumers, which makes it more likely for them to be more receptive to a company’s marketing messages.

“Corporations and brands that have won the trust of consumers by being authentic and relevant to their needs will have a better chance of securing their attention. This gives them an opportunity to establish a relationship with their consumers and convince them to buy their products,” she said.

PR or digital marketing?

While there are overlaps in functions between PR and digital marketing, the focus should not be on choosing one over the other.

“PR and digital marketing is a false dichotomy. What’s more important is to recognise the strategic role communications plays in helping a corporation or brand achieve its business objectives,” she said.

Maverick Indonesia, for example, works with businesses through several steps for the success of their communications strategy.

First, they identify and articulate the business and communications objectives of the campaign. Next, they identify the audience and their information ecosystem that they use to get information. “Because so much now happens on the net, digital marketers are very good at profiling their consumers and their information ecosystems,” Marsha said.

These insights then provide the basis to craft a communications strategy which must be deployed across Paid, Earned, Shared and Owned channels in order to be effective. “There are overlaps between what PR and digital marketing does in all these channels, so it often comes down to the strengths of each agency in that particular channel. PR also ensures that messages are aligned across all channels,” she explained.

Influencers, for example, is an increasingly popular platform for PR and marketing, and their purpose depends on how the influencers are engaged.

If they are Paid, they function very much like advertisements. They usually have a wide reach and are good at creating a buzz, but not necessarily very successful in influencing the choice of consumers.

Then there are the Earned-media Influencers or KOLs, who feature you primarily not because of payment, but because there is shared value between them and your corporation or brand. A conscious influencer, for instance, may endorse your brand because of your sustainability initiatives. Such content has much more credibility and influence among consumers, although they may not always have the same reach.

After the implementation, the performance of the strategy should then be evaluated against the objectives. “This can be done through methods such as backlinks, lead generation, customer surveys and media perception audits,” according to Marsha.

WhatsApp is an example of a brand that has successfully implemented digital PR and marketing strategy seamlessly.

It recently introduced a programme called Pasar JuWAra in Indonesia, where they onboarded thousands of traditional market merchants affected by the pandemic onto the WhatsApp business.

“They communicated about the program across both traditional and digital channels, from press drops and TV appearances to working with content creators to produce educational posts on social media. And as you can see from this mishmash of tactics, with the advent of digital and social media, the lines between PR and marketing have blurred,” Marsha said.

“So, the question is not whether it is traditional or digital, PR or marketing. It is how you integrate seamlessly and strategically,” she said.

“Like WhatsApp, you can start with a Shared Value – for example, empowering anyone, especially those suffering from the current conditions, to benefit from the digital economy. By doing so, they managed to promote the use of WhatsApp Business from a marketing perspective, while addressing real needs in the society and solidifying its public image from a PR perspective,” Marsha concluded.