Why You Should Bother With PR

For various reasons lately, I have been in discussions about the use of Public Relations within a company.

PR is an interesting area. It's dogged by a relatively poor reputation outside of its own industry: if marketing is "The Poster-Making Department", then PR is the "IT Girls and Champagne Thursday Slackers". Even if PR is seen as effective, then the broad stereotype is one of a 'charm and smarm' offensive via networking with the 'old boys' out of reach of mere mortals.

One of the biggest issues I've found is that PR Agencies are a little like Italian restaurants: it's it's rare to get a bad one, very easy to get a mediocre one, but quite tough to get an outstanding one, and unfortunately, until you've had a good experience, you don't know what you're missing. Which means that many companies have employed PR agencies due to not having the expertise in house and have been disillusioned by uninteresting results, tainting their view on the whole exercise.

According to Wikipedia, Public Relations is all about managing the flow of information between a company or an individual to the public. This is a pretty broad and consequently not that useful.  Personally, I think that The Chartered Institute of Public Relations' definition is more punchy. Paraphrased, PR is all about reputation: the result of what you do, what you say and what others say about you. The goal is earning understanding and support, and influencing opinion and [buying] behaviour.

But surely that's just marketing?

Well, yes, communication does come under the remit of marketing, and PR is part of the marketing tool kit. And every marketing campaign should have a communications plan.  But beyond that, PR has a very different scope and skill set to a more traditional marketing campaign.

Marketing is by it's nature is targeted to specific, limited segments. Audiences are categorised by multiple parameters, with the intent of creating messages that will appeal.  One of the first rules of marketing is that you can't be all things to all people.  Every day, marketeers have to make calls on 'Opportunity Cost' of their limited budgets - a term economists use for the next best thing you sacrifice.  In the same way that if you buy a new phone the opportunity cost might be a television upgrade, every marketing campaign you run to one audience is another one you can't create for someone else.  This is where ROI (Return on Investment) calculations often come into their own.  Brutally put, will my company get more money if I do option 1 or option 2?

Communication/PR works in the other direction.  It is much wider and aims to talk to as many of your business stakeholders as possible; often ones which have less of an immediate ROI but still have a say or influence.  It's using as many channels as possible to get the widest range of messages out there.  Whilst marketing funnels messages down the key people, PR is there to widen the net and aid your potential growth in the longer term.

PR has other advantages too: due to getting the right information to the right contacts, mentions of products, people or services are often seen as more credible coming from a third party.  It builds trust, and allows stakeholders to feel more engaged with you and the various audiences.  It speaks very much to a brand's image if the language and messages are consistent that fixes it without needing advertising.  It's also usually cheaper: whilst there is a people/time resource cost, press releases, phone calls, contacts and social media management are often free or low cost.

So if it's so great, why isn't everyone doing it?

Well, the main downside of PR is hard to measure.  Ultimately it is there to help communicate messages, and unless you do mass market surveys, you can't always tell if your attempts have been successful.  Looking at increases in sales over a PR campaign duration will always be hit by confounding factors, and even the actual measurables on something like social media (clicks, likes, shares, views and so on) only goes so far, and falls short of a convincing argument in a boardroom.  It can be difficult to get someone good to do the PR, and assigning it to the marketing assistant or the cheapest local agency without thought as 'it's just press releases' is a sure-fire way for it to fail.  All of this means that it can be hard to justify a spend on an agency or on an in-house PR person when you cannot see an immediate result or have gotten bad results in the past.

Plus, sometimes you do just need the money elsewhere.  PR is always one of the first cuts in any budget rationalisation.

In the end, it all comes down to personal judgement on questions like:

• Where are your audience and do they already buy from you?  
• Do you need to start developing different segments in the market and seeding ideas before going into a marketing push? 
• How clear are your messages in the market place? 
• What is your brand awareness? 
• Are there key audiences you simply don't have the time to engage with? 
• Can I measure at least some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for success?
• Can you defend the choice to use PR to the senior management?
• And most important: what is the opportunity cost of PR for the company?

It's not an easy choice, despite my pro-PR stance here, because it will always be hard to defend even with analysis and ROI calculations, and can leave you personally exposed.  At the same time, sometimes you just have to put your money where your mouth is.  Wish me luck!