We all need help with marketing, right? But what exactly does that mean? Does it mean that we need help getting our name out to potential customers? Or that we want to share how necessary our product is to their life? The thing is that — marketing is a lot of things. It encompasses many ideas and needs that a business entity requires, but at the end of the day, each aspect of marketing is striving towards one goal – getting more customers. Regardless of HOW you need marketing to appeal to them, you are always using marketing to draw them in.
Today we are going to begin a series that will help address the ever-looming, dark, ominous cloud of marketing needs.
BONUS: This is all from a millennial’s perspective.
Regardless of your opinion on my generation, there’s no denying the fact that you can benefit from sufficiently marketing to us. After all, we are the largest generation ever in history, even bigger than the baby boomers (so, if you are able to get money from all of us, you can basically take over the world, right? Score.) Anyway, in this series we will look at two of the main sub-sects of marketing: Advertising and PR (public relations). Breaking it down in this way will hopefully make the term a little less daunting, while still reaching into the various depths of what is needed to sufficiently market your company.
To begin, let’s just give a little overview of the two areas.
We’ll start with advertising. Advertising is typically what most people mean when they say “marketing.” By definition, advertising is the activity or profession of producing advertisements for commercial products or services. In simpler terms, this is the way you persuade an audience to follow a specific action. This is showing the audience the “what” that you are trying to sell or promote. But, even though we see ads every day, they don’t always come right out and say, “Hey! Buy my product!” Rather, they try to subconsciously persuade you to feel like its your idea to need the product. Or at least that’s what good ads do. So, the thing with advertising is that it’s becoming more and more obvious on the daily that we are being advertised to ALL THE TIME. With social media analytics, it seems like everything we see is someone trying to sell us something. And millennials aren’t falling for it as easily as most would hope. More on that next time.
Next, we have PR.
Public relations is the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other
organization or a famous person. So basically, PR is the act of keeping a reputation positive. PR is an aspect of marketing that tends to get overlooked and underestimated. It is unpaid, earned advertising, in a sense. It’s more credible because a third party has been convinced to write highly of you or your business without you paying them to do so. If advertising is the “what,” PR is your “why.” PR is monumental because it shows the dirty (or hopefully, clean?) truth behind a brand, that the brand doesn’t necessarily choose to show the world. Millennials are super into PR because often you can’t tell if what is being advertised is the truth without the PR side.
With these two sections combined and well-executed, you can have a totally kick-butt marketing plan.
But, if you are lacking in one or the other, you won’t be able to sufficiently reach all of your possible customers, and that’s just a waste of a good product. Next week, we will begin to dive in a little deeper to what each sub sect entails, and what I think appeals to the crowd you are looking to serve.
