Building your PR Skills

Once upon a time, PR and Marketing were distinct functions.

Today, the lines are blurred.

For marketers, marketing departments, and business owners, PR is becoming an indispensable weapon in the battle for awareness, and ultimately sales. As a result, marketers with PR skills are more valuable to employers and are more effective in promoting their businesses.

Some reasons for the rise of PR as a marketing tool:

• Everybody’s a journalist – there are 112 million blogs online, and the number of reputable news sources that are “online only” has also increased dramatically in recent years.

• TV Ratings are down – your audience is more fragmented than ever, as people turn to their favourite Internet sites for entertainment more than they are tuning in to prime time network TV.

• Nobody trusts advertising – the credibility of advertising has fallen in recent years, as people are increasingly suspicious of the claims they see in paid marketing.

• Nobody sees advertising – well, “nobody” is an overstatement but with the vast number of messages consumers are exposed to every day, it’s getting much much harder to break through the clutter.

PR represents a good solution for some of the challenges noted above:

• If "everyone’s" a journalist, your ability to reach them with good story ideas and positive messages about your brand and your products will determine how much positive coverage you generate in blogs and through traditional news sources

• If TV Ratings are down, go where your target market is by getting stories about your brand in the right online publications

• If nobody trusts advertising, the third party credibility that comes with positive publicity presents a great opportunity to bolster the trust factor that consumers will assign to messages from your company

• While it's true that breaking through the clutter is much harder these days, it's much easier when readers/viewers are finding your message as part of their daily routine of seeking out information on their favourite sites or through trusted news sources         

As PR and Marketing continue to converge, maintaining skills on both sides of the fence is becoming increasingly important for marketers. I would strongly advise marketers who are short on PR experience to get some - it will make you more effective in delivering your message to the market, and can provide a boost to your career/business.