The Difference Between
Advertising & Public Relations
Public relations and advertising enable you to promote your business and build your company’s image. Small businesses can use both to promote a product or an event, but continuing advertising or public relations campaigns will net lasting benefits and extend the business’s brand.
While advertising is exclusively focused on promotion of products or services encouraging a target audience to buy, PR communicates with the public and media not just to increase sales but to create positive publicity about a particular company, organization, product or individual—all to maintain a good reputation with the public. By doing so, PR helps create a relationship between a company and its customers who are more likely to choose products or services from a company they have a good opinion of over those from a firm they have never heard of before or have heard something negative about it.
Advertising Includes
- Free ads available on community calendars and other online bulletin boards
- Co-op advertising with suppliers who will share ad costs
- Paid advertisements placed in specified print and online media to appear at certain times and targeted to certain audiences
- Signs on the office building, at events, or on cars and trucks used in the business
- Ads supporting local non-profit organizations
- Paid search, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
PR Is More Organic
A PR campaign, on the other hand, creates unpaid, organic contact between a business and its audience to build brand awareness.
For example, a sponsored post on Facebook, Yelp, or Instagram is advertising. However, when you send a blogger a product to use, and the blogger genuinely likes it and posts about it, that is PR. Sending press releases regarding products or company announcements has been a staple of good PR for years. It can result in being quoted as a source in a newspaper, featured in a magazine or appearing on a talk show.
Press releases or information sent to media can be about new products, new services, new business relationships, new personnel, events, or community involvement. The list is endless, and often overlooked because business owners never see the media value in what they take for granted.
Create A Positive Image
Both advertising and PR, used separately or in combination with each other, or by combining online and other media, can create the most positive images of your products and company—extending your company’s brand.
