Public Relations is all about building good and fruitful relationships with the target audiences and media. The brand must connect with the audience to attract them to it. With the help of this strategic communication tool, the professionals of the PR agency help in creating a long-lasting relationship between the brand and its target audiences. By using the PR techniques, the PR firm spread all the positive information about the brand to the target audiences and tries to create a healthy communication between them. The complete procedure is done with the help of unpaid or earned media.
The work done by advertising agencies is also somewhat similar to that of PR agencies but techniques and tools differ from the ones used by the professionals of any PR agency.
If you are looking for something interesting that will help in making you understand the differences between a PR agency and an advertising agency, you are at the right place. We have listed some pointers below that will help in making you differentiate between the strategies and techniques used by a PR consultancy and an advertising agency.
1. The first difference between both of them is an advertising agency is completely dependent on paid media. The professionals of an advertising agency gain the attention of the target audiences with the help of paid media. On the other hand, Public Relations use earned media like press releases, social media, etc. to help the brand or an individual reach in front of the target audiences.
2. The major aim of any PR firm is to generate revenue for the business by building a positive reputation for the brand or services in the market. They aim towards earning the trust of the consumers and provide the information accordingly. Consumers will love to bond with the brand which they trust completely and this is the job of the PR professionals to maintain that trust as long as they can. The major of an advertising agency is to target a particular set of people who are more likely to buy the product. They skip the part of trust and relationship building with the customers and directly focus on generating more sales through paid advertisements.
3. As PR takes the help of earned media to reach the target audiences, they cannot control it. Earned media only helps the genuine content and if they feel like publishing it then only the content will be kept in front of the target audiences. But as the advertising agencies pay the media for running the advertisements for their products, they have complete control over it. The agencies create the strategy by doing certain market research that where the ad is going to publish, till what time, and what type of content is to be shown to the public. The ads run for a certain duration of time decided by the amount paid to the media agencies.
4. Hence, by looking at all these scenarios, you can conclude that PR focus on long-term goals. The relationships built between the brand and the target audiences last for a very long time without spending much money on it. Whereas advertisements are a short-term goal.
