Hearing from your customers first-hand gets you a pulse on what makes a great customer experience. Public relations (PR) and communications teams hear from customers when drafting case studies, video testimonials, press releases and staffing media interviews. Capturing the voice of the customer is one of the best tools for informing a customer experience strategy.
The primary difference between that marketing is focused on promoting a specific product, service or idea; and increasing sales, while PR is focused on maintaining a positive reputation for the company overall.
PR’s big focus is anchored in communicating corporate messages. That could be company values, the customer challenges services and products are designed to minimise/fix and/or how customer feedback is improving the business. Open and transparent communication via PR is essential to knowing how to make customer experience (CX) evolve for the better, which ultimately leads to customer engagement, trust and loyalty.
Reimagine the customer journey
Communications play a large role in developing CX strategies by creating campaigns that boost knowledge-sharing among clients. But it’s not just that. We can be a key piece into reimagining the customer journey, turning any storytelling into taking true action. Addressing customers’ most pressing issues starts with assertive communications but gets completed by living the values you promote.
Build strategic relationships
PR and communications teams are on the frontline of customer experiences. They are able to field, guide and respond to customer inquiries across all owned and non-owned communication channels. By building strategic relationships with the customer and influencer communities, PR and communications teams can continually arm businesses with customer insights that inform strategy.
The lines between public relations (PR) and marketing can oftentimes become easily blurred, even by professionals in the industry. While objectives, goals, and even some tactics may be closely related, there is a clear division between marketing and PR.
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To keep it simple, marketing is focused on driving sales and doing so by promoting products, services, or ideas. PR is more focused on the maintenance of a positive reputation of a company, brand, or person.
Goals of PR and marketing
The goals for a public relations team revolve around:
lSelling a product, brand, or person by managing a positive reputation through various communication channels with stakeholders and the general public.
The goals for a marketing team centre on:
lReaching consumers and having them carry out sort of a sales-focused action.
lRevenue is increasingly becoming a key metric that marketing teams are evaluated against
lThere are three differences between marketing and PR.
Function
The two industries have different functions. The function of PR is to build favourable relationships with the organisation’s key publics.
Marketing is about promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
Target audiences
Marketing and PR strategies target different audiences. Marketing’s target is the customer. Marketers work really hard to meet customers’ needs. In PR, audiences consist of a range of publics (customers, employees, suppliers, investors, media, etc), who collectively support the organisation’s objectives.
Strategy success metrics
Both marketing and PR professionals measure the success of their campaigns after their implementation. However, marketing and PR strategies use different metrics to measure their success. A successful marketing campaign would be one that met sales goals and resulted in profit and high ROI. PR pros define success through the mutually beneficial relationships they’ve built with key audiences.
Both marketing and PR industries serve to achieve a company’s goals and fulfil its mission. Understanding the differences between the two helps companies craft their strategies, better aiming them at different target audiences with specific focus and results in mind. Savvy marketing and PR professionals should integrate marketing and PR into their strategies to achieve organisational success.
A happy customer is the best sort of marketing, after all. If they love your product and your process, they will sing it to the hills and back. But with the focus so heavily on CX, many businesses today are forgetting that CX isn’t just smooth integration between technologies and a well-organised office or retail space. Businesses are run by, owned by, and in the service of people. People, as any entry-level salesperson knows, act on perception and emotion before they act on anything else.
When we focus on CX, we leave out an imperative part of the equation. A good CX needs an even better PR strategy. There are many reasons for this, but for the sake of brevity, I will explore the three most important.
Firstly, when PR is done properly, it is next to impossible for the customer to have a bad experience.
Secondly, when CX systems fail, as all systems do from time to time, it’s the PR department that picks up the pieces.
And last, but not least, a robust PR strategy integrated into your brands’ CX systems will mean a seamless positive relationship between your customers and your brand.
Good PR leads to better CX
In 2020, the trend towards digitizing CX was reinforced by business influencers. All the data suggests that consumers are more and more integrated into digital spaces, and so logic dictates that a digital CX system is in order. With the coronavirus shuttering brick and mortar operations in the second quarter of 2020, this trend is only going to increase. Digital systems have their advantages, of course. This is not an argument against the data suggesting businesses move to digital CX systems. Rather it is a reminder that if you only do the minimum, you won’t stand out.
Let’s use the emergence of omnichannel CX as a customer expectation as an example here. The expectations your customers have developed, namely that they can switch from mobile, to the web, to storefront, to phone, and back to mobile during the course of just one visit to your platform are fast becoming the standard. Anything short of this is viewed as unacceptable in today’s market.
With emerging technologies like Customer Service AI, one would think that having a human component will soon be a thing of the past in the customer’s experience.
But without your company’s public image, a smooth integration won’t get the attention you think it will. PR sets the expectations which customers have when they look at the service or product you are delivering. If you don’t set those expectations for them, how can you exceed the expectations they have?
—To be continued next week
- Willard Nyagwande writes in his personal capacity. For more information please contact us [email protected]
