PR, Advertising, Integrated Marketing Communications… How it all Comes Together

For those who don’t work in a corporate communications capacity, there seems to be a mystique around the different marketing and communications channels and how they intertwine. Each channel has a distinct and important role to play and how these different channels are integrated together will influence the commercial success of an organisation or brand. In this blog, we will explore each channel and how they work together to benefit a brand on a holistic level.
As we know, Public Relations is the cultivation and management of your external messaging and reputation in relation to key stakeholders – namely via the media. For the purposes of this blog, we’ll explore in greater detail the relationship PR has with other channels and how integration drives greater success.
Advertising, distinct from Public Relations, involves the overt promotion of goods or services for sale, but the traditional model has been slowly changing. This is where it gets interesting. Famously, Mastercard CMO and President of the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), Raj Rajamannar, claimed at the 2021 Cannes Lions awards that, “classical advertising is dead.”
Not to be taken too literally, what we can derive from that comment is that advertising as we previously knew it – think Mad Men – is no longer as effective as it used to be. Advertising in a more evolved sense has an important role to play in integrated marketing communications but not when operated as a standalone function. This is where the other communication tools come into play to create integrated marketing communications.
In simple black and white terms, the definition of integrated marketing communications is the synergised use of communication tools, including PR, advertising and social media, used to achieve the outcome of a promotional campaign. Let’s dig deeper. Over the last decade, it has become evident that the best way to reach and communicate with your target audience is by employing a mix of traditional promotional tools including pure PR and media relations, advertorial content and social media, known as integrated marketing communications.
For example, if the product or service your brand is promoting is limited in its brand awareness, using only a single promotional tool is unlikely to resonate with your target audience. Instead, using a mix of paid advertorial content, media coverage from PR efforts and social media amplification will result in more exposure and, subsequently, higher brand awareness and recognition.
Considering how all the different marketing communication channels integrate together, measuring the success of any given promotional campaign must consider all these different channels and their touchpoints. From a purely media relations standpoint, this would include how many journalists and reporters your PR team spoke to about your brand and the subsequent media coverage this generated. When considering both paid advertorial content and social media content, you would look at engagement, impressions and click through rates.
Every brand, every product and every service is, at least to some degree, unique, and therefore demands a unique and bespoke integrated marketing communications plan to maximise its commercial impact.
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