Difference Between PR and Marketing

Since the media world is constantly evolving, the ways that brands maintain and grow their presence have to evolve alongside it. In the past, many companies mainly relied on traditional PR, which included working with media outlets and TV to reach a target audience. However, as the world became more and more digital, PR followed along, and companies had to start working with digital media outlets, websites, and social media platforms.

Soon after everything became digital, content marketing was introduced to the mix, and these days, everyone has come across it in the forms of social media posts, blog posts, infographics, articles, or even resource pages.

At its core, PR is focused on improving a company’s brand awareness with the public, and content marketing is an excellent tool in that regard. With the help of PR, companies are able to create and distribute different pieces of content that can build brand awareness without outright promoting themselves. In these instances, the content is designed to create interest in the brand’s products or services.

There are several main types of content that companies use when utilizing content marketing, and those types directly relate to the target audience that the company is trying to reach.

For example, infographics are an attention-grabbing way to share and display information that can quickly become viral. On the surface, this type of content only appears interesting, but at the same time, it’s used to make the company a lot more trustworthy and reputable with the target audience.

On the other hand, there is user-generated content, which is content that the target audience creates to engage with the company. It ranges from images on social media platforms to blog posts, and even customer reviews can be considered as user-generated content. All of these things can serve as a way for the brand to engage with the target audience, as well as build and strengthen the relationship with it.

However, although the core of content marketing is to build brand awareness, there’s another underlying goal to it, as it’s a very efficient way to build an engaged community around the brand through its content with people that become customers in the long run.

One of the main differences between content marketing and PR is that the former creates content with the goal of establishing the brand and educating the target audience, while the latter has the goal of directly promoting the brand through traditional outlets.

Through content marketing, brands can get attention for the stories it tells to the target audience, in whatever form those stories are told, while with PR, brands develop relationships with people like journalists and writers, who are able to tell the brand’s story through their own content.

However, in the end, they’re both ways that brands can tell stories, whether it’s through the brand’s own content or through the content that journalists and editors create – only with the latter, the story has a bigger chance of getting even more attention from the target audience.