What Is Public Relations? Do I Need It?

Public relations is not marketing, and marketing is not PR.

However, they are intertwined.

I always say marketing is a wagon wheel and public relations is one of the prongs that, depending upon your product or service, can be a constant part of the wheel (as part of your sales and marketing team), or used intermittently to move the needle on a KPI.

What Is Public Relations Used for? What Should I Know When Adding a PR Team?

Some companies use public relations to pull a direct sales lever and others use it organically for branding and positioning and CEO attention. Some CEOs just like to use PR for their egos with no expectations of quantifying results. However, I wholly recommend you require regular reports out of your public relations folks since they’re actually considered in some industries as “non-revenue generating jobs” when compared to sales and their reports are the way they keep their place at the sales and marketing table.

When seeking a public relations professional to add to their team, people frequently ask me the factors to consider when hiring. My number one rule for sales leaders to consider for a PR practitioner is “Is this person busy?”

You want someone skilled in both traditional and digital public relations who can demonstrate a portfolio of results/clips out of each side. But more importantly, you want someone who is already busy with their own clients or gainfully employed in a PR role because the PR space has no room for those who aren’t truly skilled in the craft, yet call themselves PR people or publicists.

Anyone who is good is busy, since it’s a hard practice to land results in unless you truly know what you’re doing and are skilled in crafting campaigns, solid pitches, and materials.