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Marketing and public relations are both used to improve business performance, but they use completely different approaches. While marketing is easily understood, public relations is frequently overlooked among small business marketing ideas because of confusion about what it is and how it contributes to business success.

Public relations is about forming relationship with clients and possible clients. Its way of improving the performance of a company and luring more clients is by raising its credibility and reputation. This is separate from marketing, which is all about being seen by potential clients. Advertising is a common style of marketing.

How public relations and marketing professionals each deal with newspapers highlights the variation between them. A marketing manager may take out an advertisement in a well known newspaper that is read by his target market. He can say whatever he wishes in the newspaper space he has paid cash for. This is done to reveal the business's goods or services to prospective clients or customers.

A public relations advisor would have a different focus. He would be interested in the news information the newspaper contains. This would include everything that is not a paid advertisement. He would then search for a way to get his company featured in these areas of the newspaper.

This focus would be used to maximise the reputation and credibility of the business, because sources used by the media are automatically seen as professionals among potential clients. This also raises profits as people prefer to do business with those they perceive as experts.

Direct marketing is another area where the difference between marketing and PR can be seen. A local builder could have a marketing professional send regular fliers to local letterboxes promoting his services. This is obviously designed to get additional work for the builder.

In contrast, the public relations manager for the builder might write an informative regular newsletter with pointers for potential clients such as how to find the correct builder, or the things you should look for while hiring a builder. This would demonstrate that the builder knew what he was talking about, raising his reputation and credibility. This would also be designed to bring in more work immediately and in the future.

These points demonstrate that both PR and marketing are valuable. Marketing is needed to promote goods and services. But to maximise the success of a business, entrepreneurs also need to exhibit their expertise and prove they are a credible company. That's where public relations is crucial. This becomes even more imperative in a tough economic market where prospects and present clients put their service providers through more examination.

Regrettably, most marketing and PR companies make all this seem highly confusing. But what I have just explained is the difference in a nutshell. Marketing is for exposure and PR is for credibility, although PR also creates exposure.

PR is often believed to be expensive. This usually sees it overlooked among small business marketing ideas. Major PR companies who have large corporate clients are the ones who bill the huge dollars.