We often get asked the difference between PR and Paid advertising. This business blog discusses the differences and how each can benefit your business differently.
The Difference Between PR & Paid Advertising
Simply put, paid advertising is your business telling everyone how great you are. PR is someone else telling everyone how great you are.
PR also takes a long-term approach to your brand awareness and does give the same ROI measurables that you would get, for example, from a social media advert, where you would serve an advert and see a direct return of sales on spend.
A PR’s job is to raise your brand’s profile, help manage your online reputation, and help to develop your brand loyalty but not directly generate sales.
What Is Traditional Advertising Verses Digital Advertising?
Traditional advertising includes physical posters, billboards and magazine print; Traditional advertising generally takes on a physical element. Digital advertising encompasses website advertising, Google Ads and social media advertising. Many businesses still see traditional print advertising as necessary today, and targeted advertising can work.
Digital advertising offers huge scope and, in some cases, can be considerably cheaper than print but not necessarily more focused than print titles.
Which Is Better? PR or Paid Advertising?
As an award-winning PR agency, we would say that PR will always be better for a brand in the long term. To have an Editor profile your product(s) or business within their publications will always have higher value and authority than putting a paid advert out there.
Editorial is said to be three times the value of advertising because of the perception by the consumer that editorial is more truthful than obvious paid advertising.
PR has also evolved over the past ten years to embrace digital opportunities. These days, we have a dedicated in-house copywriter who writes blog content with an SEO focus for our clients. We also focus on helping to build and help grow backlinks through digital PR.
So Why Do I Need PR & Paid Advertising?
An advertising budget should always support your marketing and PR goals. Even with the best PR outcomes, you won’t necessarily get every aspect of your marketing messaging out there.
Advertising lets you control exactly what and how you want your brand represented. In advertising, you choose the look, feel images and words. In PR, you present the media with your pictures, words and angles, and they decide how and what they want to run with.
In advertising or advertorials, you will sign off your creative before it appears in the public domain. The journalist or editor rarely shares the PR editorial with you before going to print. Serving both advertising alongside strong PR is the perfect combination to get your brand seen and heard in front of the right audiences.
