Whether a public relations professional, marketer or advertiser, the communication professional must work as a team to ensure their company’s success.
Despite being considered a support body within a company’s organizational chart, the Communication Office or Department plays an important role in meeting its objectives. Thus, in this space it is common to see the coexistence of specialists in various areas such as: Social Communication, Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising.
What is each of these professionals in charge of? Can they do each other’s work? Or do they simply complement one another to form a unit focused on driving your company’s goals, strengthening its reputation and giving it a good corporate image?
The truth is that the communications professional, whatever specialty they master, must know a little about each field in order to do a better job. However, it is worth clarifying what tasks each of these people performs, from their own fields of action, for the benefit of the company.
SOCIAL COMMUNICATOR
They are the company’s fundamental axis when it comes to communication. They are the strategist who knows and masters corporate and institutional communication in order to interpret every event that could affect the company’s image and perception among its internal and external audiences.
The social communicator, although they can work in the media, can also work on the organizational communication side in the private and public sectors through fields such as: Internal Communication, Communication Training, Marketing, Institutional Communication, Public Relations, among others.
PUBLIC RELATIONS PROFESSIONAL
James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt, two communication theorists, said that Public Relations (PR) was: “The direction and management of communication between an organization and its publics”.
Based on this definition, the public relations professional must know their company’s reality, its mission and vision in order to communicate to internal and external audiences what their organization does; in this way, they become a manager who establishes ties of cooperation with the company’s collaborators, community representatives, interest groups, the media and other actors. The tools they use to send their information are: press notes, newsletters, events, press releases, etc.
The PR professional must also be an effective advisor in crisis situations that could affect corporate reputation and image. To do so, they must constantly monitor what is said about the organization in offline media, online media and social networks, thus preventing the emergence of any conflict or rumor that impacts the organization.
MARKETER
The marketer is the Marketing specialist. They are the professional who, with a well-studied strategy and creative ideas, gets their product or service positioned in the market with added value.
Among this specialist’s functions is market research, which leads them to establish the needs and wants of their consumers so they can offer them a tailor-made product. Knowing their target audience or market segment is essential to the success of their product’s positioning.
The marketer works with the 6 tools that make up the Marketing Mix: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Processes and Physical Evidence. The right combination of these elements will make it easier to succeed when implementing their Marketing Plan.
ADVERTISER
Their main virtues are persuasion and creativity. They are in charge of researching, coding, tabulating and interpreting information about a particular brand in order to craft a message that simply captures the attention of their target audience.
Based on the study related to the product, the market, the consumer and the competition, they are able to produce an advertising piece to capture the attention of their audience and stand out from the rest.
The advertiser uses various methodologies to organize creative groups and generate ideas to shape a creative concept for their graphic, visual or audiovisual proposals.
The joint work of these professionals, with proper direction, defined objectives and goals and a mindset open to innovation, is a valuable human resource that will strengthen the work of everyone in a company and create new opportunities to give it visibility before its audiences.
