Large companies have for a long time utilized public relations to promote their businesses. Smaller businesses have yet to fully take advantage of all that public relations has to offer and still rely on traditional advertising to meet their publicity objectives.
Public relations can be a powerful tool to get your business into the public consciousness. After all, brand awareness is the key to success in a business. As long as publicity is positive then virtually all news about your company is good news isn’t it? Public relations can realize a similar result to direct advertising in that more people get to hear about you, but the method of achieving the desired exposure is a wholly different affair.
The difference between advertising and public relations is that advertising is designed to influence the market to behave in a certain way toward your business; usually to entice people to purchase from you. The message of advertising is very direct and one sided – this product is good, you should buy it – there is no room in the advertisers message for people to form their own opinions.
Public relations has a completely different approach to advertising. Public relations is more concerned with raising the company’s profile in the news media. Public relations likes to generate newsworthy items about the company and make sure that this news is fed to the public in a way that creates brand awareness but eliminates the hard sell. Public relations often write the news articles themselves which they dispatch to media houses via press releases. Otherwise they may call press conferences in order to inform the media of a newsworthy story concerning the company.
Whenever you see an event such as an Ideal Home Exhibition or CEO’s conference, 9 times out of 10, there will be some public relations expert behind it. This is because public relations like to use such newsworthy events as means of promoting a company’s agenda which is exposure. Public relations will organise such events and the company are deemed sponsors. The media reports on the events because they know that their readers, viewers or listeners will be curious about it. The best place for the media to get information about the event will be the organisers. So, as well as receiving information about the event, the public is also informed about the company. This information almost always raises public opinion about the company.
The greatest attraction of public relations over advertising is cost effectiveness. Very often coverage of the company is entirely free because it is in the interests of the media houses to report on newsworthy stories. It is not always necessary to contract the services of an expensive PR firm or employ the services of a costly public relations professional. Small and medium sized companies can perform their own public relations. There are many books and online marketing courses that can help them to do this effectively.