DIY PR by Penny Haywood Calder

Sales, marketing and PR are all essential elements in business success, but the price of not running all three promotional disciplines together is losing out on business.

Research shows that PR boosts sales and marketing by up to 50%, but 50% of zero sales and marketing is still zero. You need to get them working together to boost business brilliantly.

PR creates the right conditions for great results by raising your profile and your reputation. Marketing gets the benefits across and ensures your offerings are the right combination of benefits and price, plus availability, for your various markets.
Sales clinches the deal, and produces as few barriers as possible to effective sales, especially online.

Trouble is: sales, marketing and PR have become so complex, they have evolved into different disciplines where the people are all trained and accredited separately by different institutions. Each practitioner knows a little about the others, but often views them as competition for the promotional budget.

The sales man will point out that without sales, there is no income, but few salespeople would relish selling or managing an online sales system that wasn't backed up with good marketing communications materials. And most would find their job a lot easier against a background of reputation-enhancing, profile-raising PR on and ofline to drive traffic to the sales channels on and offline.

Now there's online PR, the distinction between PR/marketing/sales is breaking down. It allows you to create content that actually interests people so you can interact directly with your market. And selling online is the perfect example of this. Instead of reeling off the marketing features & benefits of your service or product, we all are having to become publishers with good stories and content to interest our customers.