We frequently meet marketing professionals who know very little about public relations. For those who study marketing, PR is often taught very superficially. Most of the time, our marketing friends’ careers have meant developing brands and, above all, driving sales. The “consumer appeal” aspect, which involves getting them to choose your products over your competition’s and should be part of any good marketing plan, is often overlooked. If there’s any discipline that can provide that “fantasy” element, it's public relations.
But what’s harder to understand here is the time it takes to get the desired impact: an article about your company may or may not generate instant sales. What’s often left out of all this measuring is the impact of a series of articles over time. For our friends in marketing who just want to generate sales, the compound effect can seem unpredictable. But PR will have a direct effect on your search engine optimization or SEO.
One essential is true, and that is that the press release is indeed the #1 tool in any announcement or campaign. But there are a few more questions that should be part of this discussion:

What do you want to accomplish by sending out this press release that you can’t accomplish with an ad campaign?
What's the strategy behind issuing this press release?
Who will answer journalists’ questions?

We have an A-to-Z list of questions that go even further, especially if we add an “influence” component to the campaign.
Let’s focus for a few moments on these three questions and their possible answers:
Answer 1 – You want to reach new consumers, reach out to future investors, get your expertise out there, and so on.
Answer 2 – You can decide over time which approaches to take: is TV your priority, or the major newspapers? Are women’s magazines your top target?
Answer 3 – PR = simple: Obviously you can do a lot to simplify PR operations, and that's what I teach you at NATA PR SCHOOL, if you choose to do it yourself. But if you’re looking to hire a public relations agency, then you should draw on all its expertise and resources. Sure, you can come up with a list of media outlets and send them all a press release, but you’ve got to know which news and images you want to put out front – and when. Have you thought about the effects and the demands of issuing that press release?
As you can imagine, “we just want to send out a press release” can have major impacts for your company, and it can irritate journalists if it doesn’t answer their questions or give them what they want in terms of sensitive information, content or images.
I hope I’ve convinced you: public relations is highly strategic, and it means a lot more than just a press release.
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