What is the real point of PR? Driving a business forward? | Perfect ...

There has been a lot of talk in 2012 of the PR industry?s identity crisis. Is PR dead? Are traditional PR agencies old hat? Are advertising people taking over? Ultimately, I?m not into all that navel gazing and I don?t waste a lot of time worrying about how PR people want to define themselves or why they may or may not feel threatened by other creative industries.

What most concerns me is making a positive difference to my clients? businesses. It has become abundantly clear that the media industry is becoming less and less powerful and that consumers? media consumption habits are changing fast. PR used to be about getting in the papers but it?s not as simple as that any more and this has been the case for a long time. Forget about measuring PR purely in terms of the amount of newspaper and magazine coverage. What really matters is changing behaviour, changing perceptions, driving online activity and generating leads.

PR now has to stand shoulder-to-shoulder alongside digital marketing, SEO, sales and advertising. It has to prove its worth in terms of contributing to business development and show that the money spent on PR activity is giving a good return. There is so much crossover now with other disciplines, that ?a good PR service should be integrated with marketing, social media, SEO and advertising and a PR practitioner should have a thorough understanding of those disciplines.

PR should not be a cookie cutter approach though, in the sense that different businesses will have different objectives and challenges, and therefore the role of PR is not simply to issue press releases. What I do for one client completely differs from what I do for another, depending on how large the company is, who the target customers are and what the goals are. In some cases it might cover social media, and not others. Same goes for traditional media relations and again for copywriting.

Ultimately, I believe the point of PR is to drive a business forward, whether that is to help generate new customers from a wide consumer base, or to develop corporate partnerships or clients from a niche business base. A word of caution though, PR cannot operate in a vacuum ? in other words, you can?t expect to only spend money on PR and rely on it as a silver bullet to solve all you business growth needs. Great PR is PR that works in tandem with other marketing activity. Great PR also relies on good content, and that content requires time, planning, creativity and a bit of money along the way too.

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Source: http://www.perfectcirclepr.co.uk/2013/01/what-is-the-real-point-of-pr-driving-a-business-forward/

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